Pour Some Sugar on Me

Story by Caroline Gillen

Fellow Ohio University sugar babies’ share their experience on making money and staying safe.

Disclaimer: Jane Smith is a fake name to protect the identity of a student.

According to NBC 4i, an outlet station of NBC News in Columbus, Ohio, the number of sugar relationships has grown significantly over the past few years. A sugar relationship is when an older man or woman, also known as sugar daddies and mommies, has a relationship with a younger person where the sugar daddies and mommies gift the young partner financially.

Jane Smith, a junior at Ohio University studying accounting analytics and management, is one example of a sugar baby at OU Smith had just turned 18 when she found her sugar daddy on a sugar relationship website called Seeking Arrangements.

Seeking Arrangements has 20 million members worldwide and 2.5 million of them are college students. According to their website, Seeking Arrangements will give premium access to a user who has an email ending in “.edu.” As of 2019, 552 OU students were signed up on Seeking Arrangements.

Sugar relationships comes in all shapes and sizes. The interaction can be purely online, or they can meet in person. Sex can be an option but doesn’t have to be the main goal in a sugar relationship. The dynamic depends on what the sugar daddy and sugar baby agree on.

“My relationship was both online and in person. I told him straight up that there was no sex involved whatsoever,” Smith says. “I had like an ‘Only Fans’ (an internet content subscription site) effectively for my sugar daddy. So, I would send him stuff and he would send me money. But we would go on dates and stuff if he wanted an in-person interaction.

”Sometimes, online scammers may pose as a legitimate sugar daddy and try to get money out of potential sugar babies. According to the Andrews Federal Credit Union website, online dating is a commonplace for scammers. Catfish, people who pretend to be someone else online, try to create relationships where they can trick the other participant into sharing personal information so they can try and scam money from them.

Corey Bullock, a sophomore at OU studying business, recently got scammed by a fake sugar daddy online.

“I found my sugar daddy on Seeking Arrangements, I never met my sugar daddy in person, for the most part we only texted about our day, and he would send me money,” Bullock says.

But the relationship didn’t end there for Bullock.

“Eventually, he wanted to meet in-person, and he sent me money through Venmo for gas money. I made up excuses as to why I couldn’t get to him such as not having a car on campus,” he says. The scammer was insistent on seeing Bullock.

“He sent me more money to borrow a friend’s car and then I told him it broke down. He then got frustrated and said he wanted to meet and help buy me a car so that I could meet up with him. He sent me a check with a couple thousand dollars through email and I was dumb enough to deposit it. Now I am currently dealing with fraud with my bank account because he scammed me.”

Smith has never been scammed and has some advice on how to prevent getting scammed and staying safe.

“I never give out my real name. I always go by a fake name,” Smith says. “To stay safe, In ever give them my actual bank account information—I feel like that should be a life advice—so always use something like PayPalor Venmo; no CashApp ‘cause that can be a little sketchy.”

Smith recommends those apps because they usually have ways to fix a scam.

“Then just in general, always have your guard up,” Smith says. “I’ve never gone out somewhere, even when I first met this man, without pepper spray or a taser —just something small but effective.”

Many college students hold part-time jobs on campus. For college-age sugar babies, their relationships may seem just like another part-time job to them. However, there can be a negative stigma around being a sugar daddy.

“I don’t even know why there is a stigma to be honest,” Smith says. “There are some sugar babies who like to go out and have sex with people and more power to them, I just think that it’s not even a real relationship and sugar daddies know that it’s basically like an ‘Only Fans’ at this point. I think most of the people hating on it are guys who are jealous that they aren’t making as much money that sugar babies can make.”

According to Smith, not all sugar baby relationships have to be sexual. Sometimes, a sugar daddy or momma are mainly in search of companionship or some other type of relationship that favors both parties.

“If you want to be a sugar baby, my first tip would be to be very interactive. People always say act mature for your age, but I’ve never really agreed with that because there’s something about them wanting someone young anyways,” Smith says. “But definitely dress to the nines. Be ready to go out and have table etiquette. But overall, just be open to different ideas and be ready to chat and interact with somebody because even though it’s not a relationship, I’d still consider them friends in a weird way.”