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Fraud in Internet Dating Prompting Regulation
anaesthetica writes "According to the Washington Post, an increasing tide of fraud in internet dating is prompting lawyers and lawmakers to examine possible regulations and consumer protections. Wire fraud scamming, plane ticket ripoffs, fraud perpetrated to fund trysts, fake "date bait" messages -- these are just a few of the issues the courts are beginning to deal with. Dating websites were immunized from lawsuits over false statements by the recent Communications Decency Act. Other attempts to regulate internet dating, such as the 2005 'mail-order bride' legislation, are already being challenged in court, but an increasing number of states are sponsoring their own legislation."
Reminds me of the proposition 2 crap that happened down here in Texas. While us citizens were busy screaming about adding proposition 2 to the Texas constitution (it would ban gay marraige), despite the fact that gay marriage was already illegal under state law, our loving congress and our wonderful governor Rick Perry slipped by some amendments that allowed them to spend the principle of the education budget (normally legislature can only spend the interest on things other than education) to give Wal-Mart a multi-million dollar loan to build a distribution center in south texas.
And to think there is still no budget for the public school system down here (we've been bickering about it since our supreme court struck down the curring Robin Hood system about... 1, 2 years ago?)
http://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/godsdebris/
This is how legislators keep busy and stay out of trouble. Someone gets burned by an online dating experience, and raises a stink about it in public, and politicians hear that - usually correctly - as a call for someone to Get Out There and Do Something About This. Because we, as a society, have a sort of tacit understanding with our representatives, a shared delusion if you will, whereby they pretend that if only they can pass enough laws, they can build a world where nobody ever gets hurt or offended or upset or inconvenienced or whatever. And we pretend to believe that they can, in fact, actually accomplish such a thing, and reward them by re-electing them, or occasionally promoting them, for their bold attempt at creating what P.J. O'Rourke once called the "Nerf world". I say "pretend", but that's not really true, of course - the reality is that most politicians and the citizens they represent really do believe that an ouchless world is possible. Or if they don't believe it, they sure as fuck act like they do.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
now women are starting to get bit.
That's the fastest way to get Congress to act on something: show that it affects women as well as men.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
So, pray tell, when was exactly that glorious time when common sense did prevail? Did it coincide with the crusades, the Spanish Inquisition or the Salem witch burnings? Or perhaps with slavery?
As mad as the world is right now, the strange fact is that it has never been more sane.
How is a girl who asks for money becuase she wants money a "scam"? If that is what we all shuold be protected from, we are truly doomed...
Yes, it is covered by regular laws already. The problem is one of the internet dating companies has a criminal background screening process and a patent on doing this with online dating. Its backers are conservatives who seem to have mixed with the conservative ownership of the Washington Post. The next part is easy: get an article written to promote the problem your business model markets itself as solving. This sort of thing happens all the time. One particularly easy to spot example is the so-called War on Drugs and the large amount of press promoting certain drugs as problem and not the already-covered-by-existing-laws behavioral problems of some drug users.
I have lots of girl/friends and I have met a number of women from using the Yahoo, Match.com, and eHarmony personals. Generally, what I have found is that the women who are on internet personals (and are legit) are there for a reason.
... with the average women saying they are average and actually being overweight.
... I published a story on my BLOG back in March that all of my friends have been begging me to write down for years. If, after reading it, you don't think there should be regulation of these sites ... well ... let's just say ...Maybe we should have YOU investigated and regulated.
Women most often lie about weight
Men, it seems, most often lie about being married.
If you want to read the worst internet date ever
The Worst Date Ever For An Apple Tech
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Regarding item 2, it must also be translated to the woman's native language and then provided to her. The burden of doing all this is ridiculous. So I stopped serving U.S. residents. I only serve European and Australian clients now. Which is fine since Thai ladies and Eurpoean men really like each other. Norwegians and Thais are really having a love affair these days. After the king of Norway came to thank Thai people for helping Norwegian tourists following the tsunami the number of Thai ladies marrying Norwegian men has jumped.
Ok which senator got scammed by some fat ugly gay man pretending to be a shy 18 year old virgin chick?
You know that's probably the reason this bill is being introduced.
eTrade SUCKS
As mentioned in the summary - the first attempt at legislation along these lines is being challenged in court because it was, well, absolutely idiotic and probably completely unconstitutional.
Here's a little background on why this happened. There was a rather infamous so-called "mail order bride" murder in Washington state in late 2000. An American man living there went to Krygystan to meet an ethnic Russian girl, probably in 1999 I think. He was in his late 30's, fat, balding and extremely unattractive. The girl he met was in her very early 20s and looked like a budding supermodel. In short, there was no way at all she would be interested in him. He had previously married a Russian woman who divorced him and took him to the cleaners. So being an idiot, he decided that he would get a woman much younger and hotter than he deserved and she would be so desperate to leave her country (by the way, Russians are a minority in Krygystan, which is an important fact in the story) that she would marry him. Plus, in his delusional state, he honestly believed that his sparkling personalty would triump and this woman would fall in love with him and they would live together happily ever after.
He went to Krygystan because he knew that since Russians are a minitory there, a girl from there might be pretty willing to leave and overlook his ugliness and this guy was REALLY ugly. What he didn't count on was that she and her parents hatched a plan that she would list herself on the internet with marriage agencies and she would marry the first guy to come along. It was a long shot because only about 5% of the women on these sites ever find a husband this way and the odds of someone in Krygystan are even lower. However, sure enough, the guy wrote to her and came to visit. The plan was that she would come over to America on a K-1 (fiancee) visa, they would get married and if the marriage worked out, great. If not, she would stay in it for 2 years, get her green card, divorce him and then after a few more years apply for American citizenship and then sponsor her parents for immigration. The plan was not ever for her to have a successful marriage. If that happened that was great, but the plan was for her to legally immigrate and then sponsor her parents to immigrate as soon as she became a citizen. So you see already we have a dishonest young woman whose motivation for marriage is to get the hell out of her country.
What she didn't count on was that her future husband was just as dishonest. Instead of having his own house and a good job like he told her, he lived in a rented house and barely got by. His first wife cleaned him out and he had basically almost nothing left as I said earlier. They got married quickly after this young lady arrived in America and when she found out that she had been lied to, she began to sleep around on him and didn't do much to hide it. The marriage went downhill quickly and at some point, he woke up and realized that after she got her green card (it takes at least 2 years of marriage to the person who applied for the K-1 visa before the green card is given), she was going to divorce him. He didn't feel like he could go through that again, so he hired someone to kill her. Her body was found and he was sent away to prison for life.
So if you're still with me, we have a story of two dishonest people who found each other and it ended in the death of one and the imprisonment of the other. To make things worse, the young lady's parents used every excuse in the book to try to exploit her death to be allowed to immigrate to America. They were not successful.
Now you're wondering, how on earth did this tale of 2 dishonest people lead to the IMBRA? Well, some of the Washington press told the truth about the story and mentioned how the young lady was having affairs on her husband. Most did not. It makes a better story to ignore that and paint her as an innocent victim who did nothing wrong and was killed by an American wacko. Now enter some Congresswoman
The largest scale expression of something very close to the Libertariani ideal was Hong Kong and it performed outstandingly under that system, until the return to Chinese control.
So I think there's a reasonable example that libertarianism can work well.
I think it's a good idea for government to handle things that are truly public goods, like roads, because it is just too burdensome to pay every time you drive somewhere.
But I'd love all schools to be private. I think there would be much higher quality education overall if that was the case. Parents who have to pay feel they have some control and "skin in the game", which is not true of today's public schools. Before public schools this was still a very well-educated country, because parents as a general rule are willing to sacrifice for their kids and pay.
D
I'm sorry, but why would you hold the dating services accountable at all?
Would you hold the ISPs that route scams (SPAM) through their routers?
It doesn't make any sense at all. The person responsible is the one committing the fraud. End of story. It doesn't matter what they used to help commit the crime. If you're so stupid as to wire money to someone you never met, thats really your own fault. These people need to get a brain.
To say that the regulations are not needed because the crimes are already illegal is a lot like saying that regulation of financial systems and institutions is irrelevant because tax evasion is already illegal. The point of regulating should be to help enforce what is already law (although I realise there are often other reasons for putting in regulations).
Wow, nice logical fallacy. There's a host of other financial crimes totally unrelated to tax evasion. Yet you attempt to lump all financial regulation together as something that is supposed to fight tax evasion. Come back when you have some kind of valid point, and can properly back it up.
Actually, I find it somewhat interesting and amusing that people take such a negative stance on "Internet dating". The types of fraud this legislation is concerned with are obvious scams, much like the Nigerian email scams circulating the net. Either you've got supposed foreign women looking for a guy in the U.S. (usually someone so new to a dating site that their profile and description hasn't even been approved yet by the moderators), and they immediately "fall in love" with you after 1 or 2 emails -- or you've got cookie-cutter template "dating sites" that mysteriously happen to have hundreds of photos of extremely attractive women in your zip code or city, and you can't email any of them until you pay a $40 or more monthly "subscription fee".
If you exercise a little common sense and caution, you should be able to avoid being taken by any of these schemes. In my opinion, they do practically nothing to invalidate the concept itself of net dating.
Going back to the "common sense" thing again, of course people want to believe they've met the "perfect" person for them online when they start chatting it up with someone new. The sensible people arrange to meet in person as soon as it's reasonably possible, and find out if the photos are old/fake or not, etc. If they're not honest in their personals ad, then you can bet they're not going to be honest and straightforward with other things either. So cut things off right there and move on!
Done sensibly, I don't see why Internet dating should be any less "useful" than any other form of dating. I know one of my "requirements" for a partner is someone intelligent and educated enough to enjoy doing a little bit of reading and writing. The people who can't put together a complete sentence (or who hate reading) don't typically bother with (or fare well at making ads on) Internet personals sites, so voila - some "pre-screening" is done for me!
Here is an experiment you can do in the comfort of your own home. It won't work with any of the established "serious" dating sites liek yahoo, Match.com, eHarmony... but try it with one of the newer, agressively marketted sites, like... i don't know... true.com, basically any place that does not allow you to reply to "winks" with a self-written email unless you pay will work:
1. Create a free profile. Do not accept the offer for a "free trial period", just join, put in your age and city, etc. Fill out as much of the rest of the form as you like, but to get the most out of this experiment, I recommend that you do not upload a photo.
2. Wait.
3. After about a week, you will start getting "winks" or "smiles" or whatever they call them on your chosen website. They will all be from women at or near the minimum age you put in your "who I'm looking for" criteria, they will have cute but not unbelievable pictures, and may or may not have their profile information filled out. Occasionally, despite not having your own picture uploaded, you will get a wink that says, "I liked your photo" or something similar.
In order to reply to these "winks", you have to join the site. Sound fishy?
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn