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."
What's being described here is already covered by existing fraud statutes, isn't it? What's with the call for more regulation?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
existing anti-sexual assault, anti-fraud, anti- laws more than cover this.
this is yet another potential grand stand style red herring politicians can use to distract you from real issues.
I hope I saved you a lot of time you would have spent inquiring further into this.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
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/
Who would want to date when you can play Dungeons and Dragons?
Anyway, doesn't everyone here know that all the cute pictures online are fake and you are talking to somebody who weighs 300 pounds and whose real name is "Bubba"?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
His Qualities
Your Qualities
Back in February, I consulted with a law firm on a dating site fraud case.
3 0813.asp) and the case was dropped. I can see
The client sued a dating site because he saw a profile (faked), joined, chatted for 2 hours,
then "she" gave him a get lost jerk phone number.
In discovery, the email address given by this "woman" was phony.
While the dating site is protected under the CDA (see http://www.techlawjournal.com/topstories/2003/200
a case against a site for failing to do a basic check of the email address and removal of a phony profile. That by not checking, the dating site gets an unfair benefit from the deceptive information posted -- a person being tricked into paying a fee to contact the person in the fake profile.
Fight Spammers!
That way I can be sure that I am corresponding with a virgin who just turned 18.
Wise, benevolent legislator seeks voter to guard and protect. Will keep you safe from all harm. My turnons are exotic travel, tax hikes and campaign contributions. LTR preferred.
Welcome to the Internet, where men are men, women are men, and 16 year old girls are FBI agents.
(Paraphrased)
The International Marriage Broker Regulation Act of 2005 has the following requirements
on websites that bring American men and foreign women together:
Some of those requirements are reasonable - but (1) and (2) are absolutely nuts. Simply chatting with, or even sending a simple note to, a woman means that a guy has to give out way more information than he would ever give out to a woman he just met in a bar or other similar 'dating' situation.
The background information includes things like details of part marriages, names and ages of any children, his current address and full name, etc. The kind of information that fraudsters and identity thieves would just love to get their hands on.
Furthermore, there is no recriprocation - the woman are under no obligation to provide any verifiable information at all to the men.
The law goes so far as to try to impose itself on all 'international' dating websites, even if the ownership is 100% non-American and are hosted outside of the US. The enforcement mechanism is to deny marriage visas to any woman who admits to meeting her American husband or husband-to-be through a website that has not officially adopted the rules and been certified by some sort of quasi-governmental certification authority.
Unfortunately, it really doesn't help all the honest Joes out there that most of the websites that discuss the IMBRA are laden with misogyny, using terms like "feminazi" that are really self-labels for the writers as probably not being fit to marry a woman - American or otherwise.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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
Perhaps the mail order bride legislation should reflect it. In a CBS news article on the subject, Natasha Spivak, founder of Encounters International, a Bethesda, Maryland-based service, said she had "no objection to mandatory background checks", but felt it would not totally prevent abusive from getting a foreign wife. O n the other hand, she contended that, "male clients, not the women, are the most likely to be victimized in mail-order marriages. Some women, she said, enter such marriages solely to gain U.S. citizenship, then falsely complain of physical abuse as a ploy to remain in America despite divorce. Some of these women are sharks". Although the legislation is promoted with the noblest of intentions (to get votes), it's unlikely to make any great impact. Let the buyer beware!
rather than issues like balancing the budget, fixing levees, or fixing the immigration problems we have.
Immigration sticks out as the crossover from your list. Pretty clearly the Repubs were trying to pony up immigration reform as this year's Gay Marriage Amendment: the social wedge issue that would continue to let them play Nixon's "southern strategy" this time around. The "illegal immigration should be a felony" thing was all about that. The grenade went off in their hands a bit, and now they're back to the gay marriage thing as a fallback position.
My Southern Baptist relatives down in Oklahoma would vote for any politician who passed legislation about some sort of "fraud" involving white girls being misled by black men. Seriously. All you have to do is throw them a bone like that, and they're motivated. Politicians know it, just take a look at their Senator Coburn. It's spooky.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I'm sure someone will call you on your bluff sooner or later, so it might as well be me.
As a Hong Kong native, I have enjoyed multitudes of social services, including free health care, free public schools (K-12, although you buy your own cheap textbooks), the best public transportation system in the world, parents with unspeakably generous government pension benefits, you name it.
Here's the grand slam - My Father-in-law got a all-expense-paid 14-day trip to Europe as a 20-year-anniversary present from his employer - the Hong Kong government; Imagine something like that in the States.
All this happened during the colonial administration, and is still going on today without too many drastic changes under Chinese administration (well, except they've actually scaled down the government employee benefits, if you can believe it).
So Hong Kong is hardly a shiny example of a libertarian paradise. It can provide social services despite the low taxes it levies (15% flat tax last I remember) because it is flush with money from being one of the great financial centers in Asia.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
The reason the immigration grenade went off in the collective hands of the Republican party, is because the half of them that thought toughening up the laws would make a good campaign issue, evidently didn't consult the other half, who were all funding their campaigns with dollars donated by the agribusiness or construction lobbies. Oops.
Grenades work better when you can agree which direction you're going to throw it in before you pull the pin.
On the bright side, it made it abundantly clear who was actually listening to their constituency and who was listening to their donors, though. It's good to get an issue every once in a while that clarifies things like that.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Our law is based on the Common Law of old England, which originally came from the church. A judge who respects judicial history and continuity will obviously rule that marriage is defined in the Common Law as the union of one man with one woman. Anything else is legislating from the bench.
And if you actually knew anything about the subject you're spouting insane nonsense about you wouldn't have wasted those electrons.
The fundamental difference that set America apart from England and all other countries is the separation of Church and State. England has a state church, we don't. Out laws are not based in any way whatsoever on any sort of religious beliefs. That's what made us so cool back in the day.
So now, we have these extremist fundamentalist nutjobs shoving this historical revisionism asshattery because they're too cowardly to deal with a free society.
If you want to live in a theocracy, move the Saudi Arabia. That's where they live under your desired system.
If you choose not to do so, think about why exactly that is and quit trying to bring that diseased type of system here.