5 Tips for Online Dating Safety
Nowadays, teenagers and young adults around the world date mostly through dating websites or apps. Unless you take a few necessary precautions, including a brief background check of your online date, you may easily find yourself entangled in a web of lies.
You can ask them about a school or university they’ve attended and when they graduated. Then, you can use a free people search engine to try to verify if a person by that name and from that city graduated from the said school that year.
Read on to learn some more tips for online safety, from the first few lines exchanged via chat to your first date in person!
1. When Connecting Online, Always Crosscheck the Info They Share with You
The first thing to find out when you chat up someone with an interesting profile on a dating platform is whether you are chatting with a real person or a bot. Watch out for cliches, corny lines, and illogical repetitions. You can paraphrase an earlier question you asked to check if they will answer in exactly the same words. If so, you may be chatting with a bot.
After a chat, it is a good idea to try to crosscheck the info you’ve received from your online date, be it on Google or a people check website. And because your safety is at stake, you can even go for a premium account. Speaking of premium accounts, it’s good to purchase one on the dating website you are using because they often offer higher security and anti-scam features.
2. Use Different Cover Photos on Your Social Accounts
If you use the same cover photo on all of your social accounts, including the dating website or app you’re using, then your online love interest may easily retrace your steps on the web with a simple reverse image search with Google. At the same time, you can try the above service offered by Google to scrape some extra info about him or her from around the web.
Remember that there are no rules in love and war. For now, the search-by-image option is available to desktop computers and laptops only. If you are using dating sites on your smartphone or tablet, you can use a different website that provides a reverse image search.
3. Learn to Recognize and Avoid Suspicious Profiles
Scammers from around the world create fake profiles on the most popular dating websites. When they find their victim, they start spinning a web of lies around themselves. Once the other person starts getting romantically involved with them, they promptly request financial assistance under some heartbreaking pretext. Such profiles usually have few pictures and scanty personal info.
Most importantly, the person behind them gives vague answers to specific questions while expecting specific answers from you. If you suspect you’ve been communicating with someone with a fake profile, do not hesitate to share your concerns with the dating site’s admins.
4. Before Meeting in Person, Request a Video Chat
It is always a good idea to request a brief video chat before your first meeting in person. This is the ultimate identity check to show that the person on the other side is the same person as on the pictures they’ve shown you. If they refuse to have a video chat with you, you might decide to end your virtual relationship, immediately at that. If they accept, arrange to meet in a busy public place, preferably with company. Remember that the first meeting in person isn’t your first date. Rather, it is a way to see how the other person interacts face-to-face.
5. Drive Yourself to Your First Meeting
When your first meeting is over, it’s very important to drive yourself back home or ask a friend or family member to come and pick you up. I’d like to open a bracket here and mention that you should also tell a friend or family who you’re going to meet and where. If you don’t have a car or you don’t want to drive home, you can arrange to meet close to a subway station or take some extra cash for a taxi home. That way, you’ll be able to excuse yourself and leave as soon as you sense things aren’t going in the right direction.
