In June, Amir Pleasants, a 21-year-old resident of Montclair, N.J., matched with someone new on T inder. But after he and the woman, Natasha Aponte, sent a few messages back and forth, she abruptly cut off the exchange.

She told him that a work project was going to be taking up a lot of her time and that she would get back to him in a couple of weeks. He didn’t expect to hear from her again.

Then, last week, she contacted him, and told him to meet her for a first date in Union Square in Manhattan on Sunday. A friend of hers was D.J.-ing a set, and she wanted to get drinks in the area afterward. He was thrilled, texting her “I’m so excited, this seems too good to be true lol. You are absolutely stunning.” He punctuated the message with the heart eyes emoji.

The following evening, he drove into the city, arriving around 6:15 p.m.

“I get there and there’s probably 150 to 200 guys outside,” he said in an interview Monday. “All kind of looking at each other trying to figure out the situation. That’s when we know we kind of got set up.”