Slashdot Mirror
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.
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