Taxi Dancers of DateYou

Wes Boudville
9 min readApr 19, 2020

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A taxi dancer is a woman who works at a nightclub. A man goes to the club looking for women. Dance music is playing. She sidles up to him and offers to dance with him if he pays her. This is legal in many places. It’s not what you think, but … it certainly could segue to that.

Recently I spent time on a dating website, DateYou.com, looking for a girl for … ahem … companionship. There were many photos of pretty girls. On the site, if you want to send a message, you have to pay about $1 US. If you know anything about tech, this is really expensive. Over 20 years ago, hotmail became the first free emailer. Ever since, email has been essentially free. Likewise if you make phone calls, either on landline or mobile, by now you can send a text message that is very cheap or free. So DateYou is expensive.

What happens if you are a bloke is that pretty girls message you first, saying you are handsome. They make the first move. Not bad eh? So if you haven’t bought any “coins” yet, you do so, to reply to them.

What happens is that they are very willing to chat in text with you. Often their messages are short. Like they are reading from a script. But when I gave my phone number or email address, and often both, and suggested they call me via those, they never did so. They would give reasons like how they wanted to get to know me first on the site. I argued that they could make a special free email account on any big email provider, and use that to chat with guys on this site, if they did not want to use their regular email accounts. This is easy to do. None did.

Figure 1

I started probing. One girl was Brenda2258. Oh, the girls often did that, giving a first name and then some digits. Brenda’s profile said she was from the suburb of La Canada Flintridge in Los Angeles. So I wrote -

inventor
11.4.2020. 8:36:
You’re from LaCanada. Maybe you can help me with this question. I’ve been to La Canada a few times. Once a few years ago I was walking on a street in the afternoon. I heard what sounded like a woman screaming. I looked around, but there was no woman in view. I looked more around and saw nothing. I thought of contacting the police but eventually did not. Then a year later I was in a different part of La Canada. Also in the afternoon. I heard a similar scream from a woman. Again I did not see her or anyone else in earshot. These events were weird. Can you suggest anything?

In the above, my username is Inventor. The timestamp says 11 April 2020 at 8:36. Her reply was —

11.4.2020. 8:36:
Wow are you serious and I am really going to love to be that woman for you.

Notice it was written within a minute of my message. Her reply had nothing to do with my question. Anyone who lives in or knows that suburb can immediately answer the question. In case you are wondering, there is a harmless explanation. (Curious? Ask around.)

I waited a few days and wrote —

inventor
16.4.2020, 14:02:
You are a fake, Brenda or whatever your name is. You don’t live in La Canada. My question to you on 11 April would have been obvious to you otherwise. Anyone in that suburb would well likely know the answer immediately.

Brenda2258
16.4.2020 14:05:
Oh, yeah? Do you know everything? Wow, I am so amazed at you, indeed! I do not want to argue with you at this time. It is up to you to believe me or nor, I am tired of proving myself to any man.

Brenda2258
17.4.2020 11:10:
hey dear is everything okay you seem not to want to talk to me these days i wonder what is it that I did wrong

Notice that her affectedly indignant reply on 16 April was done just 3 minutes after mine. Even though 5 days had passed in silence from me, she just happened to be active enough to reply quickly. This is typical of her and others. As though they had nothing else to do.

Something else. See her next message on the next day, 17 April. Amnesia. She pretends not to understand. I saw this with others.

Figure 2 — Checking licensees

Then there was Allie. She said she was a Registered Nurse at UCLA. At the time she told me this, I believed her. And this was when and still as I write this, in the age of Covid. UCLA Medical Center was under heavy pressure. So I commiserated. Eventually she told me her name was Allie McKenzie. I went to the California webpage where you can search for people licensed in CA for many fields, including nurses. I entered her name, inputting just “al” for her first name. The result was that there was no RN or any other nursing-related person at UCLA under her name. The search was robust enough to give people like Allison McKenzie or Alison McKenzie or Alan McKenzie. But they weren’t RNs at UCLA.

inventor
12.4.2020. 14:42:
Link See this page. It has all those licensed in CA. Doctors, nurses, engineers, therapists. When I enter “al” in the first name box and “mckenzie” in the last name box, and press enter, I get a bunch of results for all professions. There is Alicia Consuelo McKenzie RN in Long Beach. And Alysha Riean McKenzie RN in Texas. These are the only female RNs with a name close to yours.

Allie99
12.4.2020. 14:48:
I don’t seem to uunderstand your long message honey Please can you break down?

inventor
12.4.2020. 14:49:
California says you are not a Registered Nurse.

Allie99
12.4.2020. 14:51:
In my Mawry’s voice, I would say now that is a lie. I can’t convince you any other way, that I don’t know how?

I no ken “my Mawry’s voice”. That’s a new one. Over the next few days, she wrote -

13.4.2020. 14:19:
Hey Wesley what are you up to right now? I’ve had happened to receive any messages from you.

14.4.2020. 14:51:
Hello, darling. I will never pretend that I have forgotten you, okay? Do you want that?

Allie99
15.4.2020. 12:19:
Hey there, Wesley, so, are you really going to make me wait this long, hun?

Notice the same pattern like with Brenda. After the tell, she feigns ignorance and tries to re-establish contact.

And there are patterns of the girls’ behaviour that I alluded to earlier. If you (a bloke) send a message to a girl, you often get a reply in minutes. As though she were taught that the easiest way to keep you online and writing messages (=spending money) is to reply as soon as possible after you send your message. The site wants to maximise revenue from you. If the girl takes a day to reply, the chances are that you might go offline as soon as you had sent your message. That day gap is lost revenue.

Another notable feature is that if you (a bloke) send a message that you have erotic thoughts about a girl, she will ask you to be explicit. She never gets offended! They are encouraged to forment the sex fantasies of the men.

Third Parties

Something ironic happened. The site misleads and exploits unwary visitors. But there is something else. Visitors can make their own pages with profiles of themselves for free. Anyone can do this. The site wants unaffiliated women to sign up, simply because like a nightclub, more women might attract more men. What arose was that some of these independent women signed up. But they did not want to pay to message men. Whereas the women working for the site get to message for free. Instead the unaffiliated women wrote their phone numbers as their names! Figure 3 shows a page of Likes. Of the 9 women, 5 do this. 2 in the top row. 1 in the second row. 2 in the bottom row.

Figure 3 — Likes page

The names are clickable. If you click the first woman in the top row, you get this page -

Figure 4

A priori I cannot tell if these women who give out their phone numbers are legit. But surely they are independent of the site. The irony of course is that the site is getting exploited by other women.

Figure 3 can be contrasted with Figure 5 which is a page of Visitors. All the women in this page have names that are a first name followed by digits. Yes, I am only showing 1 page. But all the pages of Visitors are this way. None of the Visitors use phone numbers as their names. And none of the Visitors use blank images like 2 of the entries in Figure 3. The site has programmed the Visitors pages to be their women. It is not a coincidence that the Visitors in the top line comes before Likes. A person reading the line will likely click Visitors first.

Figure 5 — Visitors page

There is another tell. In Figures 3–5, a red dot by a woman’s name means she was offline when I made a screen capture of the page. A green dot means she is online. So the woman in Figure 4, with a phone number in Reston VA is offline. Figure 3 shows that some are offline, which makes sense because not everyone would be expected to be online at the site at the same time. We can even see this with the bottom rightmost woman in Figure 3. She is using a 213 area code, which is Los Angeles, where I am. But though I took the screen capture in the daytime in LA, it says she is offline.

Now look at Figure 5. All the women are online??? For emphasis, Figure 6 shows another Visitors page, taken a few minutes after Figure 5. All of these women are online. When I checked, the site had 42 pages of Visitors. Each page having 18 women. Again, all were online. What are the chances of this?Especially when the Likes page shows women offline, even for a woman in LA.

Figure 6 -Another Visitors page

It also suggests something else. The Visitors pages have about 800 women logged in at the same time. Are these really 800 different women? Maybe they are (much) fewer women that assume multiple personas when men write to these personas. Suppose each photo was a unique woman. If she is online continuously for several hours, and only a few men message her, each message is $1 revenue to the site, which would give her some commission on that. But unless she is really popular, she would likely not even make minimum wage in the US or Europe. If she was in a developing country, and this might be true of some, she might eke out a decent income.

More likely is the simpler assumption that each real woman working for the site is manning (so to speak) several personas. Occam’s Razor. It also explains some things I noticed when messaging them. A few times she (whoever I was chatting with) would just say something irrelevant, if the conversation was over several hours or days real time. Maybe she’d forgotten the thread because she could not remember it amongst the different conversations with others, and she did not want to read our earlier messages.

Conclusion

Dateyou is mostly fakes.

If you search online for reviews of DateYou, you can find many complaints. Above, I tried to give a detailed account of my experiences. Maybe you will have better luck.

I am still looking for a date. And still working on my startup that sells linkets like [Flowers], [Boat] for $US15 each.

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Wes Boudville

Inventor. 23 granted US patents on AR/VR/Metaverse . Founded linket.info for mobile brands for users. Linket competes against Twitch and YouTube. PhD physics.