SOURDOUGH STARTER, Ill. (The Daily Whatever Press)—The Federal Bureau of Investigation would like every immigration agent in America to know that the woman on the dating app who bakes her own bread, wants a quiverful of kids, and thinks you should be the head of the household might not be real.
I’ve been back on the dating apps long enough to know that every profile is a costume. Men hold fish. Men lie about their age, their height, their marital status. Men stand next to a boat that belongs to somebody named Gary. Men are “looking for my partner in crime,” which, given this week’s news, the FBI should maybe look into, too. So when I read that the Bureau circulated a memo warning federal agents that women were wearing a costume to catch them, my first reaction was: welcome to the apps, fellas.
In February, the FBI’s Chicago field office sent law enforcement agencies around the country a short memo—pried loose through a public records request by the transparency nonprofit Property of the People, then reported by The Guardian—warning that a “small group of women allegedly” was building fake dating profiles to lure and dox agents working in immigration enforcement. According to the memo, the profiles leaned on a “traditional wife” aesthetic and listed “specific interests” chosen to appeal to law enforcement. The goal, per the Bureau, was to get agents into an online or in-person date and then expose them, generating “public embarrassment” and deterring immigration enforcement.
Specific interests. I need to see that list so badly. The FBI didn’t release one, so I wrote my own: homeschooling, canning, blue-line flags, “a man who leads,” "all the “alphas,” and season one of Yellowstone, but only season one. The Bureau declined to share its bait, which may be the most discretion it has shown all year.
Follow the premise one step further and it gets worse, in the best way. The entire tradwife fantasy is a woman who never asks questions. And that’s not weird until you remember that the job these men do runs on nobody asking questions—no names, no badges, no faces—which only matters because the thing that made them easy to catch was wanting a woman who would never ask them anything, which—oh. Oh no.
The honeytrap works because the honey had no follow-ups.
The Stepford Wives came out in 1975 as a horror movie. Fifty years later, half of America looked at a pretty woman who bakes, agrees with everything, and has no inner life, and thought, dream girl. The other half looked at the exact same woman and thought, that’s a trap. The FBI, to its credit, has officially sided with Katharine Ross.
Now for the receipts that make the memo wobble. It doesn’t name a single dating app. It doesn’t say whether a single agent was actually doxxed. It landed shortly after Chaya Raichik—the horrid Libs of TikTok lady—posted a warning about TikTokers organizing to lure federal agents onto dates, a post that never mentioned tradwives and whose claims nobody has confirmed. Ryan Shapiro, who runs Property of the People, publicly ripped the Bureau for sending the thing at all and for spending resources on it.
This means the premier law enforcement agency in the United States may have issued a nationwide bulletin about a small group of women who allegedly wore gingham on the internet. So, yay?
Somewhere at Quantico, I like to imagine, there’s now a mandatory training slide titled “Red Flags,” and the first red flag is “She seems into you.” I made that up. But I’d bet my well-seasoned cast-iron that nobody at the Bureau is surprised the slide would be necessary.
I’m raising two daughters who have had “people online lie about who they are” drilled into them since they could hold an iPad. My kids have better stranger-danger instincts than the grown men we’ve handed tactical vests and federal authority. And the kicker—the thing I cannot stop laughing about—is who this warning is for. These are men who basically pull on balaclavas to go to work specifically so nobody can figure out who they are. The FBI had to sit them down and explain that sometimes people online hide their identities.
Yes. Sometimes they do. Imagine how fucking unsettling it must be when someone won’t show you their real face.
Now, ladies—and I say this with love and a very loud lawyer voice in my head—doxxing federal agents gets you federal charges, and prosecutors are already bringing them. I admire the craft. I do not recommend the felony. Put your talents into something legal, like being terrifyingly good at spotting a fake profile, which every woman over 40 already is.
Women have been warning each other about fake dating profiles for as long as there have been dating profiles. We’ve got group chats. We’ve got reverse image search. We’ve got Are We Dating the Same Dude Facebook groups for every city that’s basically a neighborhood watch for men named Kyle.
Nobody at the FBI ever sent us a memo.
Welcome to the apps, fellas. Check the photos.
Thanks for reading!
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