People who know me will know I'm probably not the best guy to get dating advice. I've never been very successful about actively finding and getting dates. Theres a couple of reason for it, one being I'm not exactly in a good place where I need to be out dating. If someone finds me and wants to see how things go thats fine, but I'm not going to respond to ads and see about getting something going. The other reason being that I take precautions to protect my computer from potential problems and more importantly myself from getting into a bad situation. I'm not writing this to talk about my own experiences but to educate the folks out there posting/replying to ads to protect themselves.
So lets talk about the risks your taking with online dating. The most important problem with online dating is you don't really know who someone really is until you get a chance to meet them face to face. Then again, some people dont show their real personality until they get what they want out of you. This has been the case with the traditional act of dating and not just online dating so most people are pretty familiar with this anyway. The thing with online dating however is that with the advances in technology it is easier to find out who people are, who they interact with and maybe if they've had some interesting history.
The other risks you may face with online dating is internet spam. There are a number of ways you can encounter this spam; there are people out there who create fake ads that try to trick visit their website. People who dont take precautions to watch out for these fake ads open themselves up to unwanted e-mail spam and possibly computer viruses. These fake ads can also come in the form of replies to ads that you post, so dont think your safe because you dont reply to the ads, they can reply to you too. Dont worry though, I'll teach you how to detect some of these fake ads.
When replying to ads, how might you protect yourself? You might ask yourself a few questions about the person your interested in. Do they have a picture? Where are they from, is it a place that actually exists? How do they want to be contacted? What are they actually looking for in a person? Have they posted a link in their ad? Does the ad sound similar to any other ads you've read recently?
Fortunately craigslist does a great job of clearing out fake advertisements from their listings. In most cases, advertisements have been removed from previous previous days of listings so your chances of getting something you dont want are slim. What to watch out for are those posts that are posted the day or sometimes even 1 day prior. If the post in question has a link in it, your best choice is to ignore it and move on to the next listing. If the post has an email address or tells you to go to a website to sign up and verify you are who you say you are, dont respond, they are phishing for your information to send you email spam or in the worst case, steal your identity. In the case of a picture, what kind of picture did they provide? Does the picture seem to be a little adult oriented, skip it, your only asking for trouble.
As for posting your own ads, this is actually a bit easier to figure out and thats part of the reason I only wait for replies rather than do my own responding. So here are a few questions to ask yourself when looking at responses to your ads. Who did the email come from? Does the email look like a real email address? Do they ask you to visit a particular link in their response? Do they ask questions you've already answered in your craigslist post? Have they answered a question or done what you've asked in your ad to filter the fake ads out? (I'll talk about this last one in a little bit when I go into ad posting tips.)
I absolutely love verifying by email because it nails most of the ads right away. I dont know about your email provider but I use gmail and when someone emails me I get both a first name and a last name for who that email came from. Sometimes its just initials which is fine because people dont like that stuff being shared when they email others. Since in most cases I have a name right away I already have something to use to verify a person is who they say they are.
But how do you know the email itself is bad? Take this email for example that I got today in my email inbox. It came from someone named Rose Hernandez from rosiehernandez979@yahoo.com. So how do I know its fake you might be wondering because the name seems to match the email address. Those numbers tipped me off. People do put numbers in their email address but they are usually things that are easy to figure out, a birthday, age, zip code, year. What is 979? It doesn't really make much sense to me, it could be a month and a year but why take the risk sending a reply to it giving the person that sent it knowledge of my email address which they didn't have because craigslist doesn't give that away.
Another way to make sure your not replying to a fake reply is by seeing if they want you to reply to another email address. I'll typically see a couple of these a day saying "This is my friends/sisters/brothers email, please send reply to this other email address." If they were a real person why aren't they using their own email address? How many of you have used someone else's email to send a reply to something as personal as a dating website or anything for that matter? The emails these come from are usually real but belong to people who didn't protect themselves and someone gained access to it to send out spam so it looks like its real.
The whole verify your age trick is something pretty new and is just as bad as those emails people used to get to verify their bank information. Its just someone trying to scam you for your information to either send you spam or steal your identity. Do not fill out these verification forms. Find other ways to prove you are who you are, like you know, meet them in person.
Now I know some people aren't exactly willing to share something as personal as a picture over the internet. But a lot of fake ads will actually say something to like "I'll send you a picture if you send me one." We'll you've already accomplished half of the battle if you've posted a picture in your original ad. And I mean an actual picture, not something stupid like a sunset or some text with nothing visual of you in it. If your in the picture they should already know what you look like and therefor shouldn't need to ask for a picture. Thats 50% of the fake ads right there if you've provided your own picture first.
At this point you may now be looking at a reply that may be from an actual person who wants to meet you. Don't think that your done yet because theres still another step you can take to protect yourself from individuals you may not want to associate with. As I said before most email services will tell you who the name of the person the email belongs to. Theres a couple things you can do with this information. Social networks such as Facebook and Myspace are your friends in this case because a lot of people use these sites, not all do, but theres a good chance. Theres search bars at these sites where you can copy/paste the email address into and see if the person is registered to these sites. If the email didn't come up with anything, use the name your email service provided you with. Then as a last resort go to the google or any other search engine and try both the email and the full name there. If nothing comes up thats fine, but if something does show up, you now have quite a bit more information than you did previously about that person. If you do find something, make sure its actually the person your looking for. I can google my name and find out someone with the same name has also competed in MMA fighting tournaments, its obviously not me. So keep stuff like that in mind.
Going back to what I was talking about for about filtering out the spam, this is what I do and it works in most cases. Create a filter question in your craigslist ad and ask people to answer it in either the subject line or somewhere in their reply. Doing this will allow you to look for a specific answer that 100% of all fake replies will not answer if you ask the right question. A good question to ask is something that gives a specific answer? Show some personality in your questions and you'll get personality right back. Personally I tend to ask a silly question that not only lets the person know I'm a little creative and fun to talk to and in return the people that do respond reveal some personality in their answers. I've had serious answers come back to silly questions and I've had fun answers come back. Real people respond in different ways, fake people wont respond to it at all. Use filter questions and you'll avoid unwanted spam.
Before I let you go let me offer you some last words of advice for once you've finally started talking to some real people over the internet.
1. If your not comfortable talking to them over the internet, do not meet them in person.
2. Do not give away any personal information until you've had a chance to get to know them.
3. When you do decide to meet, do something in a public place. Your safer where other people can see you.
Good luck out there.
