Dating Site Reviews with Tips and Tricks
There are a lot of dating sites and dating apps out there, and it's seems like a new one pops up almost every week. With so many to choose from I've decided to put together some reviews, tips, and tricks for the online dater.
First thing you need to know if the difference between the pay sites, free sites, and the free apps. Lets start with the pay sites.
Sites like Match and eHarmony are popular examples of pay sites. You must pay a fee to send and receive emails. Problem with this model is both you AND the person you are sending the message to must be currently paying at the same moment or your email will never be seen. So if your dream person only signed up for a couple of months and you missed it. Sending them an email now is pointless. They will never see it. Even if they become a paying user again later.
I live in an area of 300,000 people. Not huge, but not a tiny town either. I had 1,000's of profiles to choose from, but once I was able to figure out how to tell who was paid and who was not I found that only 12 were currently paying. So I paid $99 to email 12 people. The pay sites just doesn't seem to be worth it. None of them.
Then we come to the free sites. OKCupid and POF are the two tops sites here. I was a big fan of POF for a while, but in 2014 it started deciding who you could and could not contact based on their ideas and beliefs. The owner of the site made it very clear about his personal beliefs on who people should and should not be dating, and suddenly I was unable to contact many of the people in my preferred pier group.
OKCupid on the other hand lets the user decide who they would and would not like to hear from. You can set preferences that the person must be between a set age, distance, religion, etc. The site is also very easy to use and navigate and is probably the only site here I recommend.
Many of the other free site use some questionable tactics like creating fake accounts to make their membership look larger and never deleting old unused female accounts. Some will even have bots reply to your emails to make them look like they are active, so be very careful when signing up for a free site.
There are also many interest specific sites out there. You name a hobby or kink and there probably is a site devoted to it. In the past I have joined sites geared to roller skaters, ren faire goers, and even one for men with long hair. Only problem with these site is unless you live in a large city there will be little or no users in your area, so these sites should be used primarily for chating and pen pals.
If you are a tablet and/or smart phone user you have probably heard about Baboo and Tinder. Both apps have issues, but Baboo is the stand out here. Tinder is the better made app, but their verification process is terrible. I used this app for two months and received approximately 200 matches, but only one turned out to be a real person. The other 199 were people trying to run different scams. Now most of these scams are geared towards men, but I'm sure there are some that go after woman too; so I'm going to go over some of the more popular scams and the red flags to looks for.
There are a lot of little red flags to look for to tell if the profile you are looking at is a real person or created by a scammer in another country looking to scam you.
First are the miss placed carriage returns. In the profile text the first line of text goes to the edge of the text box, but the second line only goes half way then goes to the next line in the middle of a sentence for no reason. This happen because MicroSoft Word used hard carriage returns. So when the scammer copy and pastes his text into 100's of profiles the invisible carriage return carries over.
You should also look out for profile that have only one photo, photos that are overly sexual, photos that where clearing taken in a professional photo studio, or photos that were clearly all taken the same day. This is a common red flag that they were simply downloaded from the internet.
You should also be suspicious if a female is looking to date WAY out of her age range. There are young girls that like older guys, but more often then it's it's just a scammer casting a wide net.
Some of these red flag are subtle, but when they reply is when it get easy. 99% of all scams will have one of three things in the first email massage. A hyper link, a phone number, email, or user name for a different site or program, and/or a message in broken English. I'll go over each one at a time.
Links. There are three types of scams here. They will send you a link for what ever reason. Usually to view more photos. This is the referral link scam. The person will get paid a few cents if you click on it. Doesn't sound like much, but if you are in Africa and you do it a few 1,000 times a day you can make good money. Next is the affiliate link scam. This is where the person will ask you to sign up for a free service on a difference site to do a background check or something of that nature. The person gets paid when you sign up. The third is the Trojan horse scam. This is where they ask you to sign up for a free service, but the site wants a credit card for verification. This is not a real site. The scammer created the site himself and will steal your credit card number as soon as you enter it.
Texting. Most scams can not be done on the dating site. The good dating sites look out for any of the common scams and will delete the profile of the scammer so he or she most move the conversation to another location. Do NOT chat off the site until you get to know the person first.
Broken English. Since the vast majority of scammers are in Africa it's usually pretty easy to spot their emails. I can't tell you how many times I have received a message that reads, "I am Brenda by name. I be very happy to be knowing you."
The next thing you should look out for is the long con. This is where the scammer will begin to chat with you like normal. The biggest red flag here is they will at some point tell you they are out of the state or country for some reason. Vacation, visiting relatives, business, etc. The reason for this is shortly before they are scheduled to return home there will be some sort of problem. Car accident, stolen purse or wallet, etc. and they will ask for money to help them return home so they can go out of that date you have been talking about and of course pay you back. This will never happen.
I have saved the worst of the long cons for last. This is when the person will ask you to mail them some. For what ever reason they will order a product from an online store and have it sent to you and ask that you then send it to them saying the store does not shop to their area. They may even offer to send you the money for the mailing in advance. Seems harmless enough. They are paying for everything. They are not asking you for any money. So what is the harm? The product was purchased with a stolen credit card and you are now in possession of stolen property, and if you mail it on you are now an accessory after the fact. The cops will be coming to your house to arrest you shortly.
The long and the short of it is stay on the well known popular sites, never chat with someone off the site until you get to know them, never click on links, and never chat with someone that is claiming to be out temporarily out of the country and never send or accept money from anyone! If you people would stop falling for these scams they would eventually stop doing them.
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