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Australian woman dead after online relationship

3/3/2013

2 Comments

 
Dating scams are a huge problem in this country. Countless people get their hearts broken and their life savings stolen by unscrupulous fraudsters. That's bad enough. But the case of West Australian woman Jette Jacobs is even more tragic.

She was found dead in a guest house in South Africa. It looks very likely that she was murdered. And the prime suspect is the Nigerian man she had been charmed by online, and was in that country to marry.

Mr Omokoh was the last person to see Ms Jacobs alive and told police he found her body. He has since disappeared.

Ms Jacobs, a widow who had six children, struck up an online relationship with Mr Omokoh three years ago and travelled to South Africa to meet him in 2010 before he proposed late last year. Over several years she sent $200,000 to Mr Omokoh and another man she met online, known only as Isaac.


The woman's family knew about the relationship and tried to stop her form travelling to Africa. But she wouldn't be talked around. It shows just how powerful a motivating factor the desire for love can be.
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The online dating concept is not as new as it seems

7/5/2011

1 Comment

 
We now live in a world that is simply awash with digital technology. Among many other things it enables us to make contact with people almost anywhere, anytime. Online dating sites are a popular example of this. And they all seem to have sprung up in the last ten years or so.

But the actual concept of using a computer to meet a potential partner actually goes back half a century. As this article states:

The first-ever computer matchmaking system was designed by New York accountant Lewis Altfest and his friend Robert Ross. The two were inspired by the Parker Pen Pavilion they came across at New York's World Fair in 1964, where a giant computer selected pen pals for anyone who wanted one. All they had to do was "fill out a questionnaire, feed it into the machine, and almost instantly received a card with the name and address of a like-minded participant in some far-flung locale—your ideal match," according to The New Yorker. Sound familiar?

That well worn phrase "everything old is new again" seems to have been confirmed ... yet again.
1 Comment

Existence of DateScreen proves extent of romance fraud in Australia

6/16/2011

1 Comment

 
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.
1 Comment

Oasis Active booming in Australia with successful versions overseas

5/13/2011

1 Comment

 
The free dating site Oasis Active now appears to be pulling ahead of all the others in Australia, with over a million local members. The parent company Oasis has similar sites in other countries that are also hugely successful.

Interestingly, this isn't the only Aussie owned online dating company that is branching out overseas. The Queensland based Cupid Media has been going for over a decade and has 33 niche dating sites, many of them country specific. One of these is for Russian singles and has recently hit the one million member mark.
1 Comment

MrRight.com.au, a new Aussie dating site

2/20/2011

0 Comments

 
Here's a new Australian dating site with an interesting concept. It's called Mr Right and it is designed to let women have more control over the whole process. Basically the women get to choose which men can contact them. And if they don't like how things are going then they can simply end the conversation and not receive any more messages from that person.

There seems to have been quite a bit of thought put into the whole concept. It may well do extremely well. But it will be interesting to see how many guys will be interested. I suspect many of them might feel that it's a bit sexist towards them.  
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Why online dating e-mails should be grammatically correct

2/18/2011

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When people assess each other for romantic potential face to face, they are using a large range of different criteria. What the person actually says is, of course, important. But facial expressions, body language, tone of voice and other factors also have an influence.

When the same thing happens online through a dating site, the interaction is much less multi-faceted. However dating site members still make decisions based on less obvious aspects than just what the person writes in their e-mail. As a Queensland University of Technology study discovered, aspects such as grammar and spelling can be influential.

It seems that some people can be turned off if the person they're communicating with is a sloppy writer, or one who goes overboard with the exclamation marks. So it's probably a good idea to take a bit of care when replying to e-mails on these sites.
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Security checking websites for dating site members

12/23/2010

1 Comment

 
It's interesting how quite often a boom in one industry will result in a similar increase in others that are seemingly unrelated.

Here's an example: The online dating industry is massive now, and members are often getting scammed by unscrupulous people. So new background checking services are now popping up and offering their services to those using these matchmaking websites.
1 Comment

Perth woman bankrupted in dating website scam

12/9/2010

1 Comment

 
Here's yet another depressing story about someone being fleeced over the internet. This time it was a Perth woman, who was deceived by a man who said he lived in America. He managed to con her out of over half a million dollars.

It's bad enough to rip an individual or business off in, say, a real estate or insurance scam. But to actually target someone who is lonely and looking for love, then maintain the deception over a long period of time is cruel beyond words.

Sadly, scams of this kind are happening increasingly often all over the world. The American FTC even issued a warning about them recently.

The locations where these scams are being run from are changing lately, too. For example, it appears that Russian bride scams aren't just run from within that country. It seems that many of them are actually perpetrated by organized criminals in Queensland's Gold Coast.
1 Comment

Diabolical dating scam cruel as well as cold

11/12/2010

1 Comment

 
There are more and more reports about various online dating scams. But most of them are fairly unsophisticated operations. For example the scammer might pretend to be an attractive woman in financial trouble who then asks for an online money transfer from her contacts on various established dating sites.

But sometimes the scheme is elaborate in the extreme. Take the case of Canadian Barrie Turner, who created a series of niche dating sites, along with very detailed fake profiles to bilk lonely people out of large sums of money.

The whole scheme must have taken many, many hours of intricate planning and work. He could easily have made the same amount of money (or more) if he'd put the same amount of effort and expertise into a legitimate operation that genuinely helped people get together. So it seems that it was not merely callous greed that was motivating his actions but cruelty as well.

I think the same can be said of a lot of fraudsters - even those who are not as diabolical as Turner. That's what makes their deceptions not only depressing but disturbing as well.
1 Comment

Fatepod doomed to failure?

9/25/2010

0 Comments

 
There is a new niche dating site with a very unique concept behind it. It's called Fatepod, and it caters to people who have had a chance encounter with someone they found attractive and want to meet again. So they can sign up to the site and see if this person - along with their encounter - is listed.

It's a very intriguing idea, and I can see the appeal. But surely the odds are against it working. It would need huge numbers of people signed up for it to have any kind of success. That's why I suspect it might end up slowly going belly up, like so many odating sites these days.
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    I'm a webmaster, blogger and online marketer in Australia.

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