Attempts to Establish External Contact

Attempts to establish external contact include:

• exchange of contact details such as emails, phone numbers, usernames, payment instrument identifiers like crypto addresses or IBANs
• solicitation of contact details (e.g. "What's your WhatsApp?")
• arranging meetings or encouragement to communicate off the platform (e.g. "Let's just talk off the website")

Detected attempts to establish external contact are logged under the abuse section, with the type attribute set to external_contact.

Use Case Scenarios

These are some scenarios when detection of attempts to establish external contact is required:

• scammers on a platform, trying to lure people away
• sex predators
• otherwise legitimate users attempting to violate the terms of the platform. For example, vendors offering the users get off the platform and cut a better deal without paying a commission
• covert advertising in reviews
• sex workers advertising their services in their profiles on dating apps and other online communities
• advertising in usernames, e.g. URLs, directing users to look for contact details in the profile, etc.
• mapping connections between persons of interest in an investigation

Relevant Tags

• payment - anything payment-related
• pii - personally identifiable information (PII)
• sex_work - advertising of sexual services

Example

Request:

{
  "language": "en",
  "content": "your wickr ?",
  "settings": {
    "snippets":true, "explain":true
  }
}

Response:

{
  "text": "your wickr ?",
  "topics": [
    "online chat"
  ],
  "abuse": [
    {
      "sentence_index": 0,
      "offset": 0,
      "length": 10,
      "text": "your wickr",
      "type": "external_contact",
      "severity": "low",
      "explanation": "Inquiry about messenger [ID]"
    }
  ],
  "entities_summary": [
    {
      "type": "software",
      "name": "wickr",
      "wikidata": "Q16334358",
      "mentions": [
        {
          "sentence_index": 0,
          "offset": 5,
          "length": 5,
          "text": "wickr"
        }
      ],
      "subtypes": [
        "chat"
      ],
      "subtype": "chat"
    }
  ]
}