Sugar Daddy Scam on Instagram

The Sugar Daddy in your Instagram DMs may not be as wealthy as you think…

Author’s Disclosure: I have no problem with consensual arrangements, but I do believe people should educate themselves and self-reflect to make sure they are physically and emotionally prepared to move forward with a sugar arrangement. Anyone entering an unregulated industry should take all safety precautions.

Internet scammers are flooding social media and gaming apps through the direct message feature. Many scammers target lonely, tech-ignorant, and overly trusting elders, but now they have managed to trick young adults by offering them “sugar.”

The Power of Falsehoods

The power behind these scams comes from how loose the term ‘sugar daddy’ is to the younger generations. Many assume platonic meetups with “lonely old men” are the usual expectation within these sugar arrangements, but that is not true. Most arrangements include kissing, sex, and/or fetish play. A sugar baby is an escort with blurry boundaries.

What further drives these scammers into bank accounts is that the internet has glamourized the Sugar Baby occupation with flex culture — posting luxurious vacations, sports cars, and designer bags. The sugar advice videos and blogs you come across may not be entirely truthful. Wanting to entice viewers, these sugar babies love to show off their gifts and lifestyle. They claim that a healthy, safe, and consensual sugar daddy relationship is possible.

Most times these sugar babies preach on monetized platforms or sell tickets to their online sugar baby webinars, so it pays to overhype their lavish lifestyle…and also bend the truth. Most of these sugar babies are having sexual relations with their daddy, but they will never admit to that on the internet.

Now, there are real working sugar daddy to sugar baby relationships out there. Not all babies are having sex for money. So, I’m not saying that these relationships aren’t possible, but they aren’t probable.

There are a lot of mean, abusive, powerful men in this unregulated “industry.” Some are looking to assault, physically hurt, or kill young women. (I mean, just watch an episode of Dateline.) Others are financially poor men wanting a power trip. And then you have the scammers.

A Scammer in Disguise

An online scammer can be anyone from anywhere. I’m unsure about this particular scam, but I believe they act alone since no one is physically transporting cash. They have good English, but they repeat words and phrases.

On Instagram, they build a profile by stealing pictures of older men and fancy venues off Google Images. They don’t have a built-out feed, many post likes, or a decent amount of followers; the only impressive number is their following list which is primarily young women.

The Scam

The purpose of this scam is to trick you into:

• giving the scammer your banking information, or
• laundering money for the scammer.

At the beginning of both scams, the scammer will follow you on Instagram and send you a private message with their intentions of spoiling you with money. Free money for being attractive is a great way to pique someone’s interest! But, they “want to get to know you first” to make sure you two are a good match, which is a normal process of sugar matching.

They ask about you and your hobbies, pretending to be interested in your personality. If you ask about them, they give vague responses or turn the question around onto you. The only question I can get them to answer is what they do for work, and they all respond with the same thing: overseas contractor for home remodeling.

The grooming process lasts 1–3 days as they know patience is key to winning a person’s trust. Finally, the scammer exclaims you are a “perfect sugar baby” and wants to send you a huge allowance of ~$5,000.

Stealing Your Life Savings

If the scammer wants to wipe you clean, they will ask “who do you bank with?” [again and again] to add you to their company’s “payroll” and set you up for direct deposit.

There are no monetary ramifications that come with revealing the name of your bank (unless you give a specific location which then reveals the neighborhood you live in.) However, signing up for direct deposit requires your account and routing numbers. Anyone with this information can access and drain your bank account.

Furthermore, being added to an official payroll means you were given a fraudulent job title, which is a crime, and that you will be paying taxes on this amount.

Should you request having the money transferred via PayPal or Venmo, the scammer will deny your request by giving the false reason(s): 1) he cannot send money overseas, or 2) he needs to make it official by adding you to a payroll. The real reason the scammer avoids these money transfer platforms is that there is no way for the scammer to access your bank account and withdraw money. Nonetheless, the scammer responds with sweetness and patience to hide his deviance.

Once the scammer gets access to your account, he’s going to withdraw MORE than what you have. You will be in the negatives with overdraft fees.

Turning You Into a Money-Laundering Mule

Should the scammer actually send you money (through Venmo or your bank account) to pass on to another stranger, we have a more serious problem: You have become a “mule” in a money-laundering operation.

According to Wikipedia, money laundering is the “illegal process of concealing the origins of money obtained illegally by passing it through a complex sequence of banking transfers and commercial transactions.”

Scammers often turn innocent individuals into “mules” by paying them for a service while leaving them in the dark with details. Often desperate for cash, mules accept the shaky deal, not always realizing that they have committed a felony.

The reason a mule accepts this job is that they are allowed to keep some of the money and the task itself seems easy. Doing a 2-minute digital money transfer while keeping $200 is a seemingly great job.

Depending on the situation, mules are either victims or guilty of a crime. Should you get in legal trouble, the ramifications would be lighter than the bigger players in this operation. Usually, the mule gets caught and the scammer gets away with the crime simply because the legal system has great difficulty with the abundance of cybercrimes that happen daily.

Although legal and regulated, Venmo has looser terms and conditions, and weaker paper trails, so scammers often like to do business on those platforms. The police hardly go after Venmo scammers.

Should you move money through bank accounts, a bank usually catches the issue and withdraws the money. Bank transfers leave a more prominent money trail that law enforcement can better track down, but it takes years to build up a case against these scammers.

The biggest thing I want to emphasize is that the bank will the illegal funds from your account, so do NOT spend that money. Don’t be shady and instead tell your bank right away. You won’t get to keep any of the money as a reward, but you do not want to be involved and waste time with reports and conversations with law enforcement.

After I made a YouTube video [embedded below] about these scams, a young woman reached out to me to say she is now $9,000 in debt because of the bank removing the sugar money. The bank doesn’t feel sorry for you. They don’t arrange a payment plan or offer advice. That negative account number will keep collecting debt and lowering your credit score until you can pay it all back.

Sadly, I have received a dozen more similar messages of women confused if they have a sugar daddy or not. The money is real, but they don’t get why they have to give some of it away. If they haven’t looked into the details of money laundering, they have no idea that they are being played. The situation is sad.

Too Good To Be True

If something sounds too good to be true in this unfair world, it probably is. People don’t hand out thousands of dollars for fun. Real sugar daddies won’t make their sugar baby jump through hoops to receive their allowance. Wealthy men use PayPal and Venmo.

Everyone gets scammed in different ways all throughout life. The scammers are the issue, and the scammed are the victims. Nonetheless, being tricked makes you feel like a fool. I do not want you to feel stupid. I do think when situations happen, there is an opportunity to self-reflect, grow, and become all the wiser.

Here are some questions to ask yourself. There’s no undertone or judgment. This is about being human, figuring out your mindset, and making future choices that are true to you.

• Were you greedy? Did your ego tell you that you deserved free money for doing nothing? And did this blind you from the reality that a stranger with an undeveloped profile would randomly send you thousands of dollars for fun?
• Or were you lonely and perhaps insecure that having someone reach out to you felt validating? And did this hurt your self-esteem even more? How can you work on yourself to a point that acknowledgment from men and/or money won’t feel like validation?
• Or have you had a real situation in the past that lead you to quickly trust this person? If you’ve been a sugar baby before with good past experiences, you may have become too trusting. I also think content creators and influencers may fall for this scam because they may have already been gifted real money and material goods by everyday people in the past. They may think this person is a fan of their content. What can you do to better vet people in the future?

I remember my first fake sugar daddy request was 5+ years ago over email. I was so excited and went back and forth with this stranger. Then a few years later, I had the same dopamine rush when a scammer entered my Instagram DMs. I was desperate for money and also sad about my personal life. I wanted this conversation to be real so badly. I understand the temptation, the daydream, and the thrill.

Overall, I don’t believe people should go into debt or suffer to learn a lesson. I find these situations heartbreaking. If you fall victim to a sugar daddy scam, please be gentle with yourself and find healthy ways to process the situation. Thousands get scammed every day by all kinds of elaborate schemes. You are not alone.

I did make a funny (but informative!) video on this issue since a fake Sugar Daddy scammer tried to trick me. So, if you enjoy an entertaining storytime video, here you go!