There's been plenty of media talk about Australia's man drought, and how it has affected people's dating behaviour. This demographic imbalance is most pronounced in the cities on Australia's eastern seaboard, which cumulatively have the vast majority of the nation's population. But in Western Australia the problem is reversed. The state has too many men.

It's unfortunate. But the fact that the eastern states suffer the man drought and the west has a lack of women suggests a neat solution: a mass exodus of women to Perth!

You always know that a reported social phenomenon is widespread if businesses related to it start to pop up. That's been the case in Australia recently in relation to online dating fraud.

This article states that internet romance scams "have increased tenfold". It mentions an affordable identity checking service called DateScreen that is now available in Australia. This joins other sites which are tailored to the US market such as Date Detectives.

And these are not general identity checking services. They cater specifically to people using online dating sites. That proves just how widespread the problem now is.

Australian researchers seem to have just disproved a long held assumption about men and their testosterone levels. In the past, it was widely thought that these levels dropped inexorably with age, leading to an inevitable lowering of the sex drive. But the latest findings suggest this only happens in men whose general health is getting worse.

The fact that this lowering of the libido is so widespread implies something about society. There must be a lot of older blokes out there whose health is declining for various reasons. Of course men are notorious for not looking after themselves. And they do seem to get worse in this regard as the years wear on. But it can't just be that.

Perhaps it is related to men's career progression. They do tend to do less physical work the older they get. That is understandable, since some jobs are done far better by fit young blokes. But this means that they often end up in office jobs working quite long hours. These hours get longer, and more stressful if they are climbing up the career ladder, too. Subsequently they end up stressed out, sedentary and overweight, with no time to exercise. No wonder their health deteriorates!

One social trend that has been described repeatedly in the media is the increasing number of older people using online dating sites.

There seems to be similar trend when it comes to dating scams. Fraudsters are targeting them because they tend to have accumulated more wealth. They might also be a little easier to fool since they are new to this aspect of the web and don't realize the risks. They also come from a generally more trusting, less cynical age group.

Whatever the reasons for this there's at least one online dating site that has identified this phenomenon and has made preventing scams an integral part of its functionality.