The Dangers of Dating in The Digital Age

In times past you meet partners through friends, or workplaces; few of us form lasting relationships based on an encounter on a night out, but its likely option. Bus here in the 21st century the power of the Internet is allowing us to essentially hunt down the perfect partner in ways not dissimilar to genetic cloning.

Love is a powerful thing, its one of the key things that keep us alive, we either need to feel love or believe in love.  And we all want to go home and find someone there for us.

As the Internet invaded our lives in everyway a new way of meeting and forming relationships has appeared, dating websites. Some are free; some are paid for but all essentially are there for the same thing. You can now in the comfort of your own home find the perfect match for you, and then message them. Barely a month goes past now that you wont encounter a couple that has met on the Internet, and while sometimes it works, sometimes it does not.

I met someone on the Internet once, in fairness it was doomed from the start, this was not through a dating website however it was through “net friends”. While it was doomed I don’t regret it, and it opened my eyes to different things. During this relationship however we met someone else from the same group of friends who had a similar occurrence. This couple rather speedily met, fell in love and got married. Before we new it they had started there own computer business all in her name because he was from overseas and not yet a British citizen.  But weeks after it started things went wrong and I smelt a rat from a mile off, when the police became involved he suggested that if he moved to the United States all the problems would end there, she like a fool agreed and packed him up and took him to the airport. Leaving her with criminal charges and a possible prison sentence over her head, I never found out how it ended, but what I did discover was that despite her finding evidence to show he made his way round the planet doing this, it was not accepted by the law courts.

The Internet has essentially created a breeding ground for fraudsters, most of which target wealthy partners and create scenarios in which the partner financially bails them out, one case springs to mind where a European man manipulated a woman into paying seventy two thousand pounds for his daughters medical care, and she had never even met him. These crooks know al the right buttons to push, they know how to target people from chat rooms to dating sites. And for every 100 legitimate people looking for love, there is 1 looking for a quick pay off, but that rate is increasing dramatically by the week, not the month or the year.