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.

Filed under: Dating Online • Dating Profile Tips

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