Wednesday, Dec. 07, 2011
Online Dating Gets Crazier
In addition to gestating weird new ways to find potential mates, with some sites sounding suspiciously like they were created just to generate news — SeaCaptainDate.com, really? — the Internet has created new places for lonely hearts to be bamboozled out of their cash. A survey by the University of Leicester in England estimated that as many as 200,000 people in Britain had been scammed by, ahem, heartened criminals, who sometimes wooed their victims for months and then asked them for money so they could visit. Other sites lured new members by posting profiles of people who didn't exist, or people whose details had been lifted from other sites. As if figuring out dating wasn't hard enough on its own.