Don’t Get “Catfished”

Fake Profiles: How To Make Sure You’re Dealing with a Real Person

Dating online is very common practice for many people. There are hundreds of dating websites around the world. The users use these services, looking for romantic partners, affairs, friends and like-minded people.

Although there are many successful cases of online dating that resulted in marriages, statistics on fraud are still sad. There are many fake profiles online. One of the best way to detect a scammer is to offer them a video chat. You can use video chat coomeet to do that. Video chatting is one of the most effective ways to reveal online users who provide fake information about themselves.

 

 

Fake Profiles

Virtually any dating website can have fake profiles, and this is not done purposely by the website itself. There are two main reasons why users make fake profiles for themselves . 

The first reason is they do not want to reveal their identity, because they are actually looking for an affair but are married, or put photos of themselves 20 years younger, still because they want an affair, but are aware they won’t probably fit into the dating pool. The motivation may be different, but the general outcome is that the party being misled will most likely suffer emotional damage.

The second reason for hiding one’s real identity online is the purpose of stealing any valuable data, or even money, from the other party involved, a serious crime in and of itself.

Here are some tips how to double-check the profiles on dating and other websites. Use these tips to avoid trouble with suspicious users:

• The National Fraud Bureau developed two prototypes of how fake profiles most often look like. The average male scammer usually states he is 48 years old, of handsome appearance, with high income. The most frequent female scammer states she is 29, with good education and profitable job. If you see such profiles, you can already doubt them. You can share your doubts with dating website administration.

 

• Study the profiles in full. Scammers usually do not fill in all necessary fields in the profile form. The trick in their business is to find as many potential victims as possible. So, the scammer puts only the basic information about him, to be potentially interesting to larger pool of users.

 

• Invite the person to a video chat. The video conversation is one of the best ways to identify the scammer; obviously, if the real appearance of the user is not the one on the picture, he or she will most probably avoid the chat. On the other hand, the person who agrees to use the chat is still not 100% safe.

 

 

How Dating Websites Can Help You Protect Yourself 

Good dating websites can check a given user on request. They also use Scamalytics, software that was developed specifically to detect fake profiles. It costs money, though, so not all of the dating website use it. Therefore, choose well-developed and reputable websites, to minimize the risk of getting scammed.