I matched with a verified profile on a dating app and we began chatting via iMessage with our actual phone numbers, not some third party app. It was going to be a casual meet up, but I fell for it because it seemed legit at first — they even shared their live location with me, matching the address they sent me. I arrived and texted them, but they hit me up with the "gaming gift card to distract the kid they were looking over."
Needless to say, I fell for it and bought one. I knew it seemed suspicious once they mentioned gift cards, but the live location honestly made me drop my guard, especially since they sent several ways to "prove" their active location: the live location itself, a screenshot from Google Maps, and a selfie holding a sheet of paper with something I told them to write while showing their face. After they put it in, they kept asking for more to get the game loaded.
I definitely know about people getting scammed on dating apps, but couldn't imagine scammers going through so many steps to spoof their GPS locations and sending handwritten photos, etc.