Member-only story
One more dating scam trick to avoid
Who knew about unallocated phones?
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 culprit when a caller encounters an unallocated number and tekpip.com writes that “the more technical reason why you get the ‘the number you have dialed is unallocated’ call intercept message is that the number you are calling hasn’t been assigned to a provider by the number administrator, or the number hasn’t been assigned to an end-user by the provider [tekpip’s italics].”
Oh, and since I started this article, one man who I unmatched with during the winter signed back onto Iris with a new account and found me again 😑
So, if I decide to talk to this guy, I guess this development will mean that my return on time invested in the Iris dating app is three and a half, maybe four.
Anyway, I just cannot… with the endless “hello” with nothing else to say “conversations.” So, onto a new season of life! Goodbye to online dating again. Hello, autumn!
