Net Ensnares Cheaters in Tangled Web

By David Koeppel

Adultery was once kept a secret. Not online.

The Internet dating (search) craze is blazing a trail of broken marriages, thanks to dozens of sites inviting participants to identify themselves as "not so happily married," "married but that shouldn't matter" or even the seemingly archaic, "married but we swing."
Studies show some 30 percent of online dating visitors are married - and recent research by the University of Florida (search) reports that what starts out as flirting and cybersex quickly escalates into the real thing.

The Internet became an easy escape for "Beth," a 43-year-old married New Yorker who dated about 60 men in three years until she met Steve, who's also married -- but now sneaking around with Beth.

"We see each other once or twice a week," she says. "We have a lot in common, have a great time together and the sex is phenomenal."

She says a cold husband sent her surfing for more. "There was no warmth or any physical affection," she says glumly.

She tried cajoling her husband into seeing a marriage counselor, but after only one visit, he refused to return. She didn't want a divorce because of their 10-year-old daughter, so she posted an ad online.

"I'm not interested in jeopardizing my marriage or anyone else's," she said. "I just wanted to find someone special I could click with."

Other women interviewed say they've been searching for deeper emotional relationships than their husbands are able to give -- but aren't ready to leave.

"I guess the sex just isn't what it used to be when we first met," says Nicole, 28, a married New Yorker who's listed her profile online. "I miss the feeling of sex being new and exciting. It's addicting."

Addiction is something that Chris Samuels, the co-director of a sexual addiction treatment center, understands all too well. She has treated many married and unmarried patients who've gotten caught up in Internet lust.

"Its power is almost trance-inducing," she says. "You can troll these sites and have a fantasy ready and waiting. Cybersex can provide a quick and powerful high. It's like crack cocaine to sex addicts."

(IT IS TRANCE INDUCING - STAY AWAY!!!!!!)
 

Alfred, 49, is a self-described Internet Lothario who says he's been "swinging" for 23 years.

Before going online, he would post ads in "swinger magazines," sometimes waiting two to four months to set up a first meeting.

Now his desires can be gratified almost instantly by posting ads on the Internet.

"While I'm open to a relationship, I'd prefer someone I can meet for no-strings mutual sexual pleasure on a continuing basis," he says.

Alfred's new online ads generally attract several interested women ("I'm a seller in a buyer's market," he says proudly).

He usually hooks up with married women, but says there are plenty of singles who don't mind that he's already spoken for.

Unfortunately, while these spouses are sowing their wild oats, there's likely to be someone at home who's getting hurt.
John LaSage, 43, from California, could attest to that -- his wife left him and his two teenage daughters to take off with an Internet boyfriend.

The experience led him to create chatcheaters.com -- a Web site designed to help dissuade potential cheaters and to comfort those who've been hurt by them.

"Chatting is OK, cheating is not," says LaSage.

"People should realize how quickly relationships can form online. Flirting can lead to real-world affairs."

If you suspect your spouse of having an online affair, "Bring the issue out into the open," he says.

"Look out for the warning signs" -- like excessive Internet use, new email accounts, turning off the computer when you walk in the room.
Pepper Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington and the relationships expert for online dating site Perfectmatch.com, says married men are much more likely to say they're just looking for sex than married women, but ultimately the search is about loneliness.

"... It's about gratification," she said. "They want someone to find them attractive, someone to want them passionately."

But not every married person who's gone the online route has found the affair of their dreams.

Wayne, a 49-year-old man from New Jersey, complains that his inbox is usually cluttered with undesirable partners and a fair share of transsexuals and cross-dressers.

But that may be just the ticket for 34-year-old "Rockerdude" of New York City, who advertises online that he's hoping to make sweet music with men, women -- and anything in between.

"Yes, I am married, but we have a very liberal, open-minded relationship," he writes.

With additional reporting by Michael Shashoua

BEWARE: THE ROMANTIC PREDATOR!

The Don Juan motif has fascinated artists and thinkers for centuries. As far back as the 17th Century, Tirso de Molina created the archetype of the hero as proto-trickster, promiscuous manipulator, sublime lecher. Mozart's Don Giovanni is an elaboration on the theme, an opera that overwhelms the senses with the sheer vitality of an entity who can only be described as a raw force of nature. Moliere and Lord Byron, among others, bring him to life. Bernard Shaw, in an interlude in his play, Man and Superman, consigns him to an honorable place in Hell. In the modern era, cartoonist Jules Pfeiffer wrote the successful play, Harry, The Rat With Women, depicting the sad/funny shenanigans of an otherwise ordinary guy using women for recreational sex. The film Alfie, dating from the same period, enumerates the many "conquests" of a Cockney truck driver. The seducer remains the hero of song and saga, at least of the pop culture media.

The sexual predator, that dark and mysterious figure, the "stranger", unpredictable, hinting at danger, tinged with violence... what is there that so attracts women to him? Truly, there seems something almost magical about those few men who seem able to mesmerize women at will. What secret do they possess that gives them this power, this intensity, this animal magnetism?

Users and manipulators is the key phrase. Such men have learned to spot and sniff out vulnerable women, the "wounded birds", the ones most susceptible to their particular brand of sorcery. They have mastered the art of "pushing the emotional buttons" of their fellow humans, exploiting the feelings and weaknesses of hurt people (and is not most everyone hurt?), playing women like a musical instrument. In their single-minded pursuit of pleasure, of self-gratification, they leave behind them a string of victims. These are haters of women, exploiters of human weakness, parasites, sociopaths*. (CYBERPATHS)

These . . . fancy-grade hit-and-run drivers leave numerous
victims in their wake . . .
Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge

This little deviation into the dark alleys of the criminal mind and the underside of human nature yields insight into the sad emptiness of the career seducer. There is little to envy in these creatures. They lead meaningless lives, and each successive "conquest" does nothing to fill the screaming, hungry void within. There is little to admire, considering the pain and wreckage they leave behind.

What a chimera, then, is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! A judge of all things, feeble worm of the earth, depositary of the truth, cloaca of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe.
Blaise Pascal: Thoughts, chap. x.

Behold the man, the man of action, the ruthless hero of myth and saga, society's darling. Here is this rugged doer of deeds, the rough-and-ready "go getter", the one who grabs what he wants without pausing to think... the aggressive stranger, the cowboy, the soldier, the gangster. Contemptuously, he shoves past that quiet guy in the corner, the shy one, the one ridiculed by family and friends as a "wimp", a "mouse", a victim, as perhaps something less than a man.

According to the latest sociological dogma, females are genetically wired to be attracted to "alpha" males, those who are most assertive and aggressive. This seems all too true of some women. Aggressive men seem to get women, to attract women, many women, because of their semblance of strength, the swagger of the domineering male. Yet, what type of women are these? Fragile, unsure of themselves, swayed by instinct, emotionally damaged, running on autopilot . . .

Only a nuance, a subtle shade of difference separates aggressiveness from its less respectable cousin, aggression, the use of force to gain one's ends. With this in mind, understand aggressiveness as a sign of immaturity, of fear . . . of weakness, of blind stupidity. It is the crudest mode of social interaction, the blunt instrument, the bludgeon.

It is the "bull in a china shop" syndrome, a behavior pattern that gets its practitioners typed as boors, thugs, and worse. There is an immediacy about them, a brutal spontaneity, for they recognize no tomorrow. Unfeeling, unbridled, unburdened by remorse, they loot, despoil, and ruin. Behind them, they leave poisoned relationships, broken trust, betrayal, and despair.

from: HOW TO MEET WOMEN

Malicious Exes - More Horrible in the Internet Age

by Kashmir Hill

After a break-up, it’s natural to feel hurt and angry. Hopefully you and your ex are able to vent those painful emotions by talking to friends, eating copious amounts of ice cream, taking up new hobbies, spending hours at the gym to negate the ice cream eating, and/or meticulously cutting each other out of one another’s digital lives through de-friending, deletion and detagging. Let’s hope your ex finds a healthy way to deal with his pain and doesn’t decide to go down the dark path taken by Shawn Sayer of Maine. After he and his girlfriend split in 2006, he harassed her for years, notably by crowd-sourcing his revenge. A court order from Judge Brock Hornby describes how he kept up his harassment after his ex moved to a new state in 2009:

[A]fter Sayer’s former girlfriend changed her name and moved from Maine to Louisiana to escape him, the defendant Sayer, still in Maine, created fictitious internet advertisements and social media profiles using [the victim's] name and other identifying information. The fictitious internet postings included [the victim's] address and invited men to come to her home for sexual encounters.

He wasn’t doing this to help her meet new people and start afresh. According to The Courier, these postings were in the “casual encounters” section of Craigslist, and included a photo of Sayer’s ex, “directions to her house and a list of sexual things she would do when interested individuals arrived.” Sayer didn’t stop there. According to the court order, he also “engaged in chats and e-mails with prospective sexual partners, while posing as his ex-girlfriend.” And you thought your ex was bad…

Sayer avoided getting caught, reported the Portland Press Herald in 2010, by “connecting to unsecured wireless networks at different locations… That way, when police issued subpoenas for Internet records after a fake personal ad was posted, the trail dead-ended at the owner of the wireless network.” From the court document:

The Defendant also posted video clips to several adult pornography websites depicting sexual acts [the victim] had consensually performed with him during their relationship. The Defendant edited the clips so they also displayed [the victim's] name and actual address. As a result of the Defendant’s actions, numerous men arrived at [the victim's] Louisiana residence seeking sexual encounters, terrifying her and causing her to fear that she would be raped or assaulted.

Luckily, Sayer’s ex was not assaulted (though she was groped one time). Another woman subject to this sort of treatment by an ex was not so lucky. A spurned former Marine took revenge on his ex-girlfriend by posting a “rape fantasy ad” to Craigslist on her behalf. A 27-year-old Wyoming man answered the ad for “a real aggressive man with no concern for woman.” Thinking he was corresponding with her (rather than her ex), he thought he had her consent when he went to her home and raped her. (Eek!) Both the ex and the fantasy fulfiller were sentenced to 60 years in prison in that case.

Since Sayer’s ex was not ultimately attacked, Sayer got off a little easier. Law enforcement finally tracked him down by getting their hands on surveillance video taken in areas where he connected to wireless networks that didn’t require passwords. In 2010, he was sentenced to 22 months for violating a protective order. But prosecutors also want to go after him for the federal crimes of interstate cyberstalking and identity theft (because he posted social media profiles posing as his ex).

Sayer tried to get the cyberstalking charge dismissed, pointing to a recent case that established our constitutional right to harass people on Twitter, which privileged a cyberstalker William Lawrence Cassidy’s right to free speech over a Buddhist leader Alyce Zeoli’s right to be free from harassment. Cassidy had criticized Zeoli’s looks, criticized Buddhism, described cinematic ways that Zeoli could die, and told her to commit suicide. A judge ruled that Zeoli was a public figure and that she could have avoided harassment by simply not looking at Cassidy’s tweets.

The judge in the Sayer case doesn’t think the cases are comparable, though, because Zeoli was a public figure (while Sayer’s ex is not) and because he was simply harassing his ex, not exercising speech worth protecting.

“What Sayer is alleged to have done involves no political or religious speech or the promotion of ideas of any sort,” writes Judge Hornby. “Instead, everything that Sayer allegedly said was ‘integral to criminal conduct,’ his criminal conduct seeking to injure, harass or cause substantial emotional distress to the victim.”

Thus, Sayer’s federal case will move forward. If convicted, he faces up to 15 years in prison.

My friends, try not to let ‘obsessing’ over your ex enter criminal territory.

H/T Eric Goldman

original article found here

Online Impersonation? Get Arrested.

(Texas, U.S.) A 34-year-old Odessa man was charged with online harassment after reportedly pretending to be his ex-girlfriend and asking for sex.

Kevin Wade Johnson, 12055 W. Edith St., remained in custody Thursday on a $15,000 bond.

According to an arrest warrant affidavit, Johnson’s ex-girlfriend started getting calls from people wanting to meet her to have sex. One of them told her he’d gotten her number off of her profile at the mobile gaming community MocoSpace, and when she searched for her name, the profiles “1hottnurse4u” and “nastynurse4u” came up, which included her personal and work phone numbers, as well as photos of her, the affidavit stated.

The woman suspected that Johnson had been the one to create the profiles because they were ones she knew he had, the affidavit stated.

After making the report Aug. 9, Odessa police got a search warrant Aug. 30 for MocoSpace’s data and found that the phone number connected with the profiles belonged to Johnson, the affidavit stated. Sept. 14, a third profile “hotnurse4u” was created, again with the woman’s information and photos of her, the affidavit stated. Oct. 6, a grand jury subpoena was served to MocoSpace for the third account, and it, too, was connected with Johnson’s number. Sprint-Nextel confirmed Johnson as the account holder for the number Oct. 7, the affidavit stated.

The arrest warrant was signed Oct. 12, and Johnson was arrested Monday on the third-degree felony charge.

original article found here

Jailed for Cyber-Inviting Men to Girl's Home for Anonymous Sex

(Warwickshire, U.K.) A jilted boyfriend has been jailed for using the web to invite men to his ex-girlfriend’s home for sex and “rape fantasies”.

Khalid Hussain created bogus profiles on dating and swinging websites and posed as his victim, asking for no-strings sex.

Over six months last year, the court heard more than 100 men knocked on her door for sessions they thought she had arranged. One thought he had been invited to take part in a rape role play. He hit the victim in the face and began to grab her before ­realising something was wrong.

Hussain, 30, was jailed for two years and nine months after he admitted harassment.

Judge Paul Farrer QC told him: “You carried out a campaign of ­humiliation and terror. Your behaviour was persistent, calculated and sinister.”

Warwick crown court heard Hussain met his victim on a dating website in October 2009. They had a brief relationship but she dumped him soon after. Soon, he posed as another man to get risque photos from her and posted them on Facebook.

He also bombarded her with 500 abusive emails and texts, including one saying: “I’m going to have fun now. Wait and see, you’ll get knocks on your door.”

Prosecutor Robert Hodgkinson said: “She received over 100 visits at night from men who knocked on her door saying they had been conversing with her by email and were responding to invitations by her to visit for sex. One had been led to believe that she wanted to be ‘raped’ and when he arrived, in accordance with instructions, he hit her in the face and went to grab her.

“Clearly he quickly realised everything was not as he had expected and after she remonstrated with him, he drove off."

Hussain also made a hoax call to police claiming his victim was running a drug factory from her Warwickshire home. And he called the RSPCA claiming the woman’s daughter mistreated her pet dog.

In a statement, she said: “It has been a living nightmare for me having strangers knocking at my door and opening it to be greeted by angry men who think it is me who has been setting them up.”

Hussain, of Walsall, was given a restraining order and also made to serve six months of an earlier suspended sentence.

original article here
At least one of our exposed cyberpaths tried to do this to his victim on MySpace.

Let this article warn:
1. Online Dating is NOT safe.
2. Sending 'naughty' pictures to someone, even if you think you can trust them, is NOT a good idea.

- EOPC

HOW TO GET LAID ON THE INTERNET

WARNING: ADULT CONTENT IN THIS POST!!

(found this piece on a longer site that 'teaches' you how to pick up women on the internet. This portion basically tells you to do Adult Chat so you get better at cybersex then move up to Phone Sex for practice! Of course, tell the INNOCENT TARGET you finally find you have "never done this before" and its them that is "making you so aroused." Yeah right... Be informed. And realize with just a few changes here, a female cyberpath could do the same to her targets too. Cyberpaths TRAIN for what they do to people online! And the anonimity they practice with trains them to think of their victims as OBJECTS. This should give some insight into the online sexual cyberpath:)
~~~~~~~~~~~~

Using Adult Chat for Training

"To understand women sexually you need to understand how women think. To understand how women think you need to interact with them. And where do you go to do that? I think a good place is the adult chat rooms. Adult Chat gives you a way to interact with women in a totally anonymous way without many of the complications of meeting in person. And - you'll find that when women are annonymous that they are a lot more open sexually than they are if you know who they are.

"Anonymous chat gives you the opportunity to reinvent yourself. No longer do age, weight, looks, hight, money, race, or planet of origin make a difference. You can be anyone, anything - no limits. It's a world of fantasy and you are whoever you choose to be - interacting with women being who they choose to be. You can be a space alien if you wan. In fact - space aliens are very popular with women. You would be amazed by then number of women who get hot about the idea of being gang raped by space aliens. And with space aliens - there's no limit to what kind of appendages they have or what they can do with them.

"In adult chat rooms you can find someone and then do one on one chat. Usually the title of the room sets the mood for what you are looking for. And - you might create multiple profiles depending on what room you want to go into. This is where you can have cybersex where you and her exchange mutual sexual thoughts and masturbate.

"You may be thinking - "I'm not interested in cyber sex - I want the real thing." And - I understand that. But, cyber is something you should consider for several reasons. It may not be as good as real - but it's better than just masturbating. It also eliminates the need to be physically local allowing you to interact with women all over the world. It eliminates a lot of complications relating to being physically attracted to each other. In fact - often it is better not to exchange pictures because the imagination is often hotter than the reality of what you both look like. If it's cyber - what does it matter what the other person looks like?

"But - the most important think you get from cyber is that you are interacting with a real woman (or a gay guy pretending to be a woman - watch out for that). And you are interacting with an uninhibited woman who is uninhibited by virtue of being anonymous. A woman will get hotter and nastier a lot faster if she knows that you will never find out who she is. This will give you a rare insight into the sexual mind of women. You will be able to interact with them on a very basic primitive sexual level and get to understand how the aroused female mind works. And this is the key to getting laid. What you learn about women in cyber often applies to the real world too. I think the knowledge and experience of cyber will make you a lot more likely to find real because the same things that get women hot online get women hot in real life. "

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Couple accused of using MySpace to seduce two underage girls into orgy

BY NICOLE BODE

A pair of strippers were cooling off in jail Monday night after using MySpace.com to seduce two underage girls and take them to a strip club for an orgy, authorities said.

Husband-and-wife strip team Julio Rojas, 31, and Sophie Soto, 22, set up an elaborate online ruse to ensnare the teens - 13 or 14 years old - into their twisted lifestyle, prosecutors said.

The couple "[lured] two obviously troubled young girls to their apartment where they were plied with liquor before being used to satisfy the defendants' own illicit carnal cravings," Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said.

The hard-bodied duo were arraigned in Queens Criminal Court Saturday on a 56-count criminal complaint including statutory rape, sexual abuse, promoting an obscene sexual performance by a child and endangering the welfare of a child.

They face up to 15 years in jail if convicted.

This was Rojas' second arrest for seducing underage girls in his 104th St. Corona crash pad. He is facing charges of hosting weekly three-way orgies with a girl younger than 17 between January and April 2005, according to a criminal complaint. Rojas' lawyer had no comment.

Rojas is being held at Rikers Island in lieu of $500,000 bail, and Soto on $250,000 bail.

The sordid trysts began in November 2006, when Soto contacted one of the teens through the online site and pretended to be a sexually inexperienced teen in need of advice, authorities said.

Over the next three months, Soto and the teen - whose name and age were not released - exchanged sexually explicit online messages, phone calls and photos.

The relationship culminated in a booze-fueled sex romp in Soto's Corona apartment Jan. 20, 2007, a day after the teen decided to run away from home at Soto's encouragement, prosecutors said.

Soto directed the teen and her 13- or 14-year-old friend to the second-floor Corona apartment to take a shower, then gave them drinks and took them into her bedroom, where Rojas joined them, prosecutors said.

Later that night, the group traveled to a Manhattan strip club where Soto and another stripper led the teens in a drunken X-rated show and public orgy, as patrons were invited to participate, prosecutors said.

Soto and Rojas preyed on the teens three additional times through May 2007, the criminal complaint says.

The case came to light when the girls told their parents, prosecutors said.

Rojas - a long-haired bodybuilder whose stage name is Wild Apache, the Savage - was scheduled to perform this Saturday night at a Brooklyn strip club.

Soto, whose Web site includes a photo of her mom, blamed Rojas for her actions.

"When [police] told defendant Soto that she didn't look like she wanted to have sex with young girls, defendant Soto stated that she did it for him," the complaint says.

The couple is due back in court Jan. 28.

SOURCE

Technology and the Fast Food of Sex

Ingenious 'blue' minds have found a way to exploit a most innocuous technology for sexual purposes.

By Alon van Dam

He checks his Rolex irritably as he bustles along through London's Gatwick airport. Clad in an Armani suit, his attache case swinging with every step as he busily sends an SMS message from his mobile phone, bystanders don't give him a second glance: just another yuppie businessman arranging a meeting. Except that Richard's meeting won't take place in a boardroom with executives, but in a public lavatory with a woman he's never met before and will never meet again after their "business" is concluded. For Richard is into toothing, a new sexual trend enabled by mobile phone technology.

Toothing is a form of anonymous sex with strangers that relies on Bluetooth technology, from which it also derives its name. Bluetooth is a system devised by Ericsson that provides a way for devices like computers, cameras, printers and mobile phones to communicate and convey information over short distances. Originally intended for wireless transmission of files between these devices, ingenious "blue" minds have found a way to exploit even this most innocuous of technologies for sexual uses.

The roots of toothing lay in another trend that has been gripping Britain, known as dogging, which involves having sex at a public place, like a park, with the specific intention of being watched. Dogging has become so popular recently that the BBC estimates some 60 percent of Britain's parks see regular dogging action.

Toothing was created by British journalists Ste Curran and Simon Byron. Amused and baffled by the dogging craze, they decided to invent an imaginary trend with a silly name and see if people would believe it. They wrote a fictitious article about a guy called "Jon" who supposedly messaged a random girl by accident while commuting. The flirtatious contact continued until, a couple of days later, the girl suggested squeezing into the local restroom for a quickie - or so the article claimed.

Curran and Byron proceeded to register a forum under the name "Toothy Toothing" where they and their friends enjoyed countless hours of churning out articles that were supposedly written by toothers. The pair of pranksters then sent off the articles to an Internet-based news service and played the waiting game. Byron remembers: "Our point at the time was to highlight how journalists are happy to believe something is true without necessarily checking the facts."

And believe it they did. Within days, the hoax had reached a far larger audience than they had ever expected. "We kept a record at the start of where we were mentioned, but there were soon too many to record in full." They agreed to do an interview with the London-based daily Telegraph and "many papers read that and followed up, broadsheet and tabloid, regional, national, all over the planet. One of us made an appearance on Radio 5 Live, and had a Conservative MP declare his interest in toothing as a way of meeting women. We received a whole host of offers to license official toothing merchandise: sex lines, Web pages, even mobile-phone software."

Saucy invites
Though technologically possible, Curran and Byron never thought their hoax would turn into something so real. "It's like going into a crowded nightclub, throwing a brick at the dance floor with a love letter attached, and hoping that the person it hits will agree to sleep with you." Curran and Byron reassured the world that toothing was nothing more than a practical joke gone way too far. Curran's last words on the matter were:

"Despite all the made-up ramblings on Web sites across the globe, despite the forums and the fan-fiction, the tabloids and the broadsheets, the perverts and the simply curious, no one has ever ever, ever toothed."

How wrong he was. How very wrong. Within months of the original post, hundreds of toothing forums sprang up like mushrooms throughout Europe, Southeast Asia and America. They were soon populated by all sorts of people seeking out the best locations in their area to tooth, sharing their adventure stories and posting saucy invitations, such as Mister LongDongShlong wants to meet King's Cross Station, 7th of October at 9 A.M. P.S. Women only.

Now, this so-called Mister LongDongShlong may be a broad-shouldered Johnny Depp look-alike or he could be a greasy, fat, 50-year-old pervert, who can tell? Need to know? Hop on a flight to London on the 7th and find out for yourself. Curious? For anyone who owns a mobile phone with Bluetooth-capabilities an exciting sex-adventure need only be a few presses of the button away. When activated, they have the ability to sense other Bluetooth-phones in a 40-meter radius.

One simply assumes a pseudonym and sends the message "Toothing?" - the most common opening move. Anyone interested in a quick sexual escapade will reply to arrange a time and place - usually very soon in a nearby bathroom or other semi-secluded space. "If the shoe fits, wear it right now. Why waste time?" is Richard's opinion. There's a very high level of privacy, as the messages are sent via Bluetooth technology without as much as disclosing the author's phone number.

"It's simple, doesn't take a lot of guts and rejection is nowhere as personal. Of course it's popular," says Shanna Petersen, a sexologist who strongly rejects skeptics who still claim that no one has ever toothed. Having spoken to many toothers herself, she explains: "Show people a new way through which they have a chance to have more sex and they'll do it. No matter how much effort goes into it or how meager the results." When asked about a perceived gender bias, she answered: "One would think toothing would appeal only to men, but plenty of curious women are trying it out. A lot more than you'd think."

Albert Benschop, a sociologist with the University of Amsterdam, researched the trend. According to him, toothing is the next logical step in dating. "The old game is just adapting to new times. It seems that being single and messing around is 'in.' Pair that with our faster lives, our shortened attention span and our technology and you arrive at toothing."

He explains that toothing is "just like picking up people in bars but without the silly time-consuming conventions of decorum that people are obliged to keep to these days. This is much more direct. You both know what you want." He also sees it serving an important purpose: "People can use it to satisfy their need for intimacy. As long as it helps people out of loneliness and gives them more to enjoy in life, I think it's a very good development."

Embarrassing moments
There's a high level of anonymity to toothing, but the flipside to all this privacy is that you have no way of knowing who's responding to your messages. However, according to Laura, a 26-year-old interior decorator, that's the point: "That's what makes it exciting - going to a bathroom stall or supply closet and waiting for someone who could be anyone, having uninhibited sex with them knowing you'll never see them again."

According to Paul, a 30-year-old executive for a Forbes 500 firm, the thrill lies in the sexual liberty toothing gives you. "You can finally be yourself and act out your wildest sexual fantasies without regard to anyone else's feelings. You don't have to live up to any standards." He does agree, though, that "the fact that it's with complete strangers and so different every time is a nice bonus, of course."

But it's not just the sex itself that's appealing. "For many people, the chase is where the thrill is. An important part of the game's charm lies in locating the source of a message: who in your direct vicinity just came on to you digitally?" says an Italian toother who prefers to remain anonymous. Seeing as the reach on Bluetooth is very limited, the person has to be close by. The opportunity for a tryst is around the corner, behind a tree or across the street. Toothers are generally quite young enough to have the level of technological savvy to operate a Bluetooth-phone, -but that doesn't usually narrow the field quite enough. And what if you, in anonymity, message someone you know?

"That actually happened to me once," says Paul, a blush rising on his cheeks. "It's hard to believe but one day I made an appointment in a lavatory near my office only to find that the woman I was meeting was one of the cleaning ladies. I beat a hasty retreat and pretended like it was a coincidence, but I haven't been able to look at her in quite the same way since." Paul therefore strongly advises any wannabe toothers to try it out somewhere far from home and work to avoid unpleasant surprises.

What are good places to go toothing, then? Well, the obvious answer is any place that is teeming with people that will increase the chances of a fellow toother being on the prowl. Public transportation seems to be the center of activity: airports, train stations, metro lines. Besides that, malls and busy shopping streets see a lot of action, too. "Where there are people, there are horny people," sexologist Petersen reminds us.

Because the phenomenon happens in crowded areas, it stands to reason that only the bigger cities have thriving toothing communities. "It's very hot in Munich, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, New York, Florence, Delhi. All over the world!" says forum Web master Mischa Schreuder. "But London and Rome are toothers' heaven. Try it out in the London Underground and I promise you won't be disappointed."

Meanwhile, the original creators - who still get up to much mischief, as is evidenced on their blog at thetriforce.com - are still having a hard time believing their little prank spawned such a massive sensation. They thought of it when the technology was just nascent and hard to use. In reflection, Byron says: "As we were doing toothing, we had a few offers from people wanting to develop software, which would make it practical. We knew it would be just a matter of time before someone did. We should have become rich from it. But we were happy to do it for fun." And many people around the world are thankful for it.

People call toothing a fad and say that its practitioners are nothing but immoral perverts. The toothers themselves don't care much. They watch benignly as more and more people of all ages, genders, races, creeds and nationalities join their community.

"It's the fast food of sex," says Richard the yuppie. "Cheap and fast, without making too much effort." Then he checks his phone again and smiles. "Sorry, got to go."