Editorial standards
The Field Guide gives advice about dating, manipulation patterns, personal safety and romance fraud. That is subject matter where you deserve to know who is talking and on what basis, so this page says so plainly — including the parts that are limitations rather than credentials.
Who writes this
The guides are written and maintained by Cosmin, the independent developer behind Red Flag Run. This is a one-person project: the game, the code, the art direction and the writing. There is no newsroom and no content team, and the byline says one name because one person is accountable for it.
Two things inform the writing. The first is the source material: consumer-protection and law-enforcement reporting on scam mechanics — the US Federal Trade Commission’s fraud data, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center — alongside published relationship research such as the Gottman lab’s work on conflict behaviour and the adult-attachment literature. The second is ordinary personal experience of modern dating apps and the patterns they produce. That combination is why the guides read the way they do: the mechanics come from the research, the texture comes from having been there.
Building the game itself produced a third input worth naming. The run contains around a hundred labelled behaviour patterns, each with a written field note, and the Daily Quiz draws on a bank of a hundred questions. Researching, sourcing and rewriting that corpus is the work these articles are expanded from — it is the one thing this site has that a general dating blog does not.
What this is not
Not therapy, not legal advice, and not a safety guarantee. Cosmin is not a psychologist, counsellor, lawyer or law-enforcement officer, and nothing here is a substitute for any of them. The guides describe patterns and give you language and scripts for handling them; they cannot assess your specific situation, and they are not a diagnosis of anyone in it.
If you are in immediate danger, contact your local emergency number. If money has already moved, your bank and your national fraud reporting body are the right first calls, and both work better the sooner you make them. The individual guides carry the specific reporting routes for the scam they cover.
The rules the copy follows
- Name behaviours, never people. Every pattern here is described as a behaviour or a script — never a gender, an age, a nationality or a group. Time-wasters and scammers come in every flavour, and a guide that implies otherwise makes its readers worse at spotting the real thing.
- Say where a claim comes from. When something rests on agency data or published research, it is attributed and linked to the primary source, with the year attached — fraud numbers in particular go stale fast. When something is judgement or opinion, it is written as judgement, not dressed up as a finding.
- No invented statistics.If a number cannot be traced to a named source, it does not appear. “Studies show” without a study is not sourcing.
- Advice has to be actionable. Every pattern gets a counter-move: the sentence to send, the check to run, the thing to stop doing. Describing a problem without a next step is not help.
- Never shame the reader. These patterns are engineered to work, and they work on careful people. Nothing here treats being taken in as a character flaw.
Sourcing and updates
Every article carries a published date and, where it applies, an updated date; both are real and both come from a single registry so they cannot drift from the article they describe. Scam tactics and the numbers attached to them change, so the fraud and safety guides get re-checked against current agency reporting rather than left to age quietly. Where a figure is tied to a reporting period, the period is stated in the text.
The Field Guide currently comprises 14 deep-dive articles plus the guide hub itself. They are free, uncredentialed, and available without playing the game.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, out of date, or reads as though it is blaming the person it is meant to help, please say so — corrections genuinely get made. Email hello@playredflagrun.com or use the contact page. Substantive corrections update the article’s modified date.
Independence
The site is free to play and supported by advertising. Advertising is sold as inventory, never as coverage: nobody pays to appear in a guide, no article contains a sponsored mention or an affiliate link, and no advertiser sees, reviews or influences anything on this page or in the Field Guide. Details of what is collected are in the privacy policy.