One more dating scam trick to avoid

Melissa Edwards
2 min readSep 26, 2021

Who knew about unallocated phones?

Woman looking down at cell phone with slightly irked expression
Photo by Monstera from Pexels

I went off the dating market for a few years, because I thought I might have found someone sweet. But, alas, it turned out to be sour, and after some months of recovery, I started looking online again.

Aack! It gets worse every time I come back to the dating apps. So, I decided to try a new dating app: Iris. Iris promises that its algorithm is more attuned to your desires than other apps. Yeah, okay.

I used it solely for six months, and my yield of people that I talked to outside of the app was very low: a new Words with Friends partner for a few weeks, a dude from New York who mostly talked about himself, and an unallocated phone user. Right?

When the phone number did not work and the phone service provider said to me that the number was “unallocated”…

I was like, What the hell? What the heck is an unallocated phone number?Who purposely gives an unallocated phone number to a dating prospect?

My short answer is: the phone company gives unallocated numbers to persons it expects to be scammers or to businesses who need lots of numbers—basically, for a different kind of scam. Let’s consider what Google has to say on this topic: AmazeInvent indicates that spam spoofing, unpaid bills, and network issues are the most likely…

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Melissa Edwards

Educator. Mother. Memory keeper. Dog mom. Friend. @melissamedia #WEOC