DATING TO RELATING FOR MEN – WEEKLY COLUMN– 12/13/10
Dating To Relating For Men- Advice By Mr. L. Rx
Released by AssociatedNews.US
Mr. L. Rx is the author of the popular DatingToRelating.com website and the author of the popular book “Dating To Relating – From A To Z”. Have a question? Send it to Column@DatingToRelating.com and it may be selected for answer in this column. (Sorry all questions cannot be answered.)
Question: Mr. L. Rx, I am having a terrible time meeting women on online dating sites. I am forty years old and it seems that most of the good looking women are liars or scam artist. Is there any way to tell up front if a profile is a scam?
Answer: Unfortunately, there are a lot of liars and scam artists who try to take advantage of both men and women on legitimate dating sites. There are, however, ways to spot the scams before you get taken.
Let’s just start with the liars. Now this is a generalization, but women over thirty five start to lie about their age. One of the ways they do that is by posting pictures that may be five or even ten years old.
So if you see a woman who says she is forty but looks like she is twenty-eight, be a little suspicious. What I have found is that most women put up more than one picture on a site and the lead profile picture may be as much as ten years old. But somewhere in the stack of four or five pictures she has on her profile will be one that is current. That way she can’t be accused of being a liar.
So make sure you look at all the pictures if you are interested in a woman. If they only post one picture and it is a little suspicious looking, then ask them for some more pictures when you write to them. (By the way, I have even had nineteen and twenty year olds lie similarly by putting up a pictures of themselves when they were eighteen years old and twenty or thirty pounds lighter.)
Now scam artists are numerous on even the best dating sites. They usually devise some sort of scheme that eventually (not right away) will ask you to send them two or three hundred dollars for something or other. Most of them figure it is easier to get a couple of hundred dollars out of a lot of guys then going for tens of thousands of dollars out of one guy, but there are those cases too.
The profiles and emails you get from these people will usually have a number of things about them that don’t quite add up. Here are some:
Emails from these people are usually templates that are long, tell you how much they like you right away, are not formatted very well (as they use automated software to send the emails to thousands of guys), and don’t use your name. Their responses tend to be non-sequitor. So one of the ways you can catch them is by emailing them something that would require a certain response if someone were to actually read the email.
Ask them their name or what city they live in, and if they ignore your question and go into a long laudatory email be very suspicious. Sometimes they will even pay attention to the first email or two and then start to send you the form letters on the third or subsequent email. So just be on the look out for responses that don’t match up with what you said or asked no matter when it occurs.
Scam profiles can be spotted too as they usually have a very pretty woman who says she is from Colorado or New York or somewhere in the US and that she travels on business. If she mentions West Africa or Africa be very suspicious as a lot of the scams originate in Nigeria over there. Usually these girls will write you an email saying that they are traveling right now and are looking forward to meeting you in about a week when they get back in the US.
Of course right before they are supposed to come back some disaster happens (Their hotel gets robbed – they lose their passport) and they need your help (wire them two or three hundred dollars for a ticket, etc.) so they can get back to the states.
Watch out for so called “Americans” who use British terms – “mum” rather than “mother” is a frequent one.
There are also a lot of Russian scams which result in the girl needing you to wire them a few hundred dollars as the ticket price went up at the last minute for the trip they were paying for to come meet you on a vacation in the US.
There are a million variations on these scams. Just be wary of anyone asking you for money who is “out of the country.”
Mr. L. Rx
