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Clues to Spotting that Fake Online
Profile
Online dating is becoming more and more popular. Already about
half of American adult singles are using online dating services
to find their perfect match. Online dating is easy, accessible
for everyone and also the ideal tool to find the perfect match.
Despite all the advantages of online dating, there are still
risks involved.
Some of the risks come from the Internet itself, such as
viruses, hackers and identity theft. Therefore a good
protection against any virtual attacks is always a good idea.
After all of this in order, there are more things that can be
problematic when Internet dating. For example, there is the
issue of fake profiles and of course, the way to spot them to
avoid being scammed through online dating.
Several things in a person’s online profile can help to detect
fake profiles. There is no guarantee that keeping an eye out
for those profile tell-tales will keep the scammers from still
contacting other people and it also does not mean that everyone
that has these flaws in their profile is actually a scammer.
Therefore when looking for the following clues, it has to
always be done using common sense to judge the profile in
general.
One clue that might make a profile a fake profile is if a
person asks in his or her profile or in the e-mail to check out
one of his or her other web pages. This does not automatically
mean it is a fake, but in some of the fake cases this is an
invitation to an adult entertainment web page or to a small
fake online dating web page that tries to use the information
and sell it.
Similar to the first clue are e-mail responses to ones profile
that go into detail and are getting right to it, while the user
never had contact with this person before. This could be
someone looking to lure people to their own site or to other
related services. This is especially true, if the profile of
the user is not even uploaded, but rather only started.
Therefore the person would not even know if the user is going
to be a match or not.
On some of the online dating pages, foreigners from poor
countries such as Eastern Europe, Asia or Africa try to find
someone to fall in love with them to get a ticket to the US and
to a US citizenship. Their poor written English, full of
spelling or grammar errors will help you spot these profile or
e-mail contacts. Of course, a foreigner could be the perfect
match, one never knows, but in general they are only trying to
find a way to become an American rather than trying to find
true love.
E-mails and contacts that respond to the profile and ask for
personal information, such as Address, name, phone numbers and
especially social security numbers are fore sure fakes. These
people either try to scam the online dating users or to collect
data for some sort of agency. It is especially important o
never give too much personal information out over the Internet
and this counts particularly for social security numbers.
One last clue that could mean fake profile or fake user is a
profile or e-mail response that sounds almost perfect. When
does it happen that some guy or girl out there exactly likes
the things that are requested in another persons profile and
additionally looks great or is super charming?
Generally when using one of the bigger sites that have been
around for a while, fake profiles are very rare. Most of these
sites do attempt to weed through the vast amount of dating
profiles when they are submitted to spot the fakes and take
them out of commission before anyone ever can fall for
it.
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