How NOT to Apologize When You Have Seriously Messed Up

FOR ANY CYBERPATHS & PREDATORS READING THIS SITE - THIS ARTICLE IS FOR YOU. (Everyone else, enjoy seeing how yours fits the profile!) - EOPC


Cyberpaths/Online Predators - RARELY, if ever, apologize once they are caught and the entire truth is out. Its always the 'fault' of the person who turns them in, exposes them. Some Predators have even turned to law enforcement to take out restraining orders on those who are exposing them - in order to make the PREDATOR look like the victim and turn attention away from themselves & their misdeeds. They have been 'set up' and the person who told the truth about them is called 'a liar.' It's already happened a couple times with this board - and its a fact of life on exposure sites. If you expose one & have told the truth, don't feel you need to defend yourself against their smear campaign.

Here is a great essay on how to NOT apologize - we think you will find it amusing & truthful - EOPC
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by Annesthesia

1.) Apologize in email.
Hey, why should you actually have to FACE the person you harmed and DEAL with the real consequences of your actions - like the fact that they might still be hurt and upset? It's so much easier to do it from a distance - that way you can go around telling everyone how you made all this EFFORT to rectify things. If questioned on this, you can fall back on your old excuses about how the other person is just too scary to face in person. (People you have betrayed aren't usually very compliant).

Ignore the fact that this avoidance is completely contradicting any statements you might make about "taking responsibility" for your behavior (Ed Hicks and Beckstead did this one. YidwithLid even used the excuse that he had "been advised to stay away from" his victims until he "was stronger & could deal with them." As well, that communicating with his victims would 'hurt his wife & family' more. It was merely a ploy to run away)


2.) Make sure the "confession", er, apology comes MONTHS or years after the incident.
It's just too much work to actually own up immediately afterwards. Let's face it, you're not after any real resolution, and you are not offering any kind of restitution - you are looking to assuage your guilty conscience and buy absolution, and, if you play your cards right, you can get attention for your act of "bravery" in coming forward. If it's absolution you are looking for, why not join the Catholic church instead?

"Powerful and sneaky people use apologies as 'end runs' around repentance. They betray a trust; and, when they have been found out, they say they are sorry for "mistakes in judgement". They smile through their oily apologies when their crime calls for quakes of repentance. They get by only because we have lost our sense of the difference between repentance for wrong and apologies for bungling.... We should not let each other get away with it. A deep and unfair hurt is more than a mere faux pas. We cannot put up with everything from everyone; some things are intolerable. When someone hurts us deeply and unfairly [deliberately], an apology will not do the job; it only trivializes a wrong that should not be trifled with."
-- Lewis B. Smedes, "Forgive and Forget"

3.) Use generic sweeping statements, so that you don't have to own up to, or deal with any specifics.
This is a great way to avoid any REAL acknowledgement for the stunts you have pulled, while giving the appearance of sincerity. As Dr. Phil (C. McGraw) says:

"Acknowledgement is a no-kidding, unvarnished, bottom-line, truthful confrontation with yourself about what you are doing or not doing, or what you are putting up with in your life that is destructive. It's not some pious, phoney-baloney, half-hearted rendition of what you think they want to hear. Nor is it a watered-down, politically correct 'confession' that you think will buy you closure at the expense of truth. I mean brutal reality: slapping yourself in the face and admitting what you are doing to screw up your life. This also means admitting that you are getting payoffs for what you're doing, however sick or subtle those payoffs are."

And God knows, real acknowledgement and acceptance of responsibility is not what you were after or you wouldn't have apologized in email in the first place.


4.) Try to evoke sympathy for yourself as part of the apology.
Use worn-out lines like "It may not mean much to you now...". Thank the person for their past "support" of you in your (largely self-inflicted) trials and tribulations as a not-so-subtle reminder of how "rough" things have been for you.

You can also use this as a way to look magnanimous and introspective while avoiding taking any real action. Whine about how you are finally working on your issues" (never mind that you have been saying the same thing for years), as if that is supposed to mean something real. Avoid any discussion about what you are doing *specifically* to work on those issues.

After all, (despite your previous litany of lies) the person you are apologizing to should trust that you really mean what you say this time, right? Talk about how you are finally accepting responsibility for the consequences of your behavior, and then avoid making any effort to talk to the other person face to face. Talk about how you miss the fun you had with the other person (carefully avoiding any mention of the fun you had at that person's expense at the same time). See if there is still a chain left to be yanked.

Remember, this is all about assuaging your conscience and repairing your damaged image - not about doing real work or genuine caring for the other person, but nobody else needs to know that. With a little careful manipulation, you can use this apology to get sympathy and attention from other people as well. (Beckstead, Ed Hicks and even Julia Bish-whatever-her-name-is-now have tried this one)


5.) Don't give any reasons about why you have suddenly decided to extend this tremendous effort (writing an email) after so much time has passed.
It is equally important that you avoid replying to any questions they might ask about specifics. Remember, this isn't really about making amends, it's about making yourself feel better.


6.) Expect instant redemption and forgiveness.
Remember, no matter what you have done, a few words are supposed to magically wipe away all the pain of the past with no further work required by you. Now that you have made a token gesture, the other person should just "forgive and forget" so that you find it easier to sleep at night. (Brad Dorsky, Ed Hicks, YidwithLid, Beckstead, Gareth Rodger and Nathan E.B. Thomas, Jr - ALL expected their victims to be as emotionless as they are - and just move on. No respect for the trauma they caused or the pain they inflicted.
Except for their immediate families [wives, girlfriends, children, parents] - because these predators have to LIVE with [and leech off] those people, right?)


7.) Get upset when your trite "olive branch" isn't received with warmth and acceptance.
Go whining to whomever will listen, about how you made all this *EFFORT*, and how *HARD* it was for you to take that step (what with all your issues, and all), and how it was REJECTED because that awful person actually expected you to DO SOMETHING REAL. After all, you have ISSUES and such, and that means you should be exempted from behaving in a manner congruent to your words,and everyone should coddle you and praise even the smallest effort on your part.

(as we say - DO NOT LISTEN TO THEIR WORDS - WATCH THEIR ACTIONS!! Words are meaningless to an online predator - merely a means to an end. Their ACTIONS however or lack of them are everything!)

8.) Take no further action.
Use pat phrases like, "I'm doing my best to take responsiblity for the consequences of my behaviour", but don't actually DO anything beyond sending the email. It plays well, and you can always use that "doing my best" as your cop-out when you don't actually follow-through - it wasn't a REAL commitment to change, it was a "best-effort", and your emailed apology was a fine demonstration of how good THAT is.

I can't stress enough how important it is that you don't reply to any questions the other person might have about your email, especially ones that ask "why now?", "what specifically do you acknowledge was inappropriate?" and "what specifically you are doing to take responsibility?". After all, you don't owe them any explanation. Like I said, this isn't about doing anything for *them*, it's all about YOU. Indicate in your original apology that you still have some of the other person's belongings, but don't actually make any effort to RETURN them, or contact the other person in any way.

After all, once you've made your apology, you can wash your hands of the whole messy affair and wipe your conscience clean without having to dirty yourself with uncomfortable things like integrity, sincerity, action or actually facing the person you harmed.


ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE

EVERYTHING AT HEARTLESS BITCHES IS WELL WORTH A READ!!

Crackdown on Facebook "Burn" Pages

By Pamela Owen

(U.K.) Schoolchildren have been setting up special Facebook 'burn' pages to post vile and abusive messages about their peers.

Police have now said they are cracking down on the phenomenon and have warned pupils to start removing their names and comments - many of them sexual - off the pages.

Officers estimate as many as 700 students are involved in the sites - which are inspired by the cult film Mean Girls - in which students write hurtful and often fabricated gossip in a 'burn book'. So far eight of the pages in the Portsmouth area of Hampshire have been shut down after police and schools contacted Facebook.

However many, including Portsmouth Burn which has 712 friends, are still being used.

Police have warned pupils who continue to post messages on the pages that they could face investigation and prosecution.

At Park Community School in Leigh Park, near Havant, Hampshire, 50 students were members of a 'Hampshire burn' page.

Three students - a former male pupil, a year 11 boy and a year 10 girl - were victims of particularly depraved sexual comments.

Sue Walker, deputy head, said: 'Last week it came to my attention there were a number of 'burn' sites - 'Hampshire Burn', 'Leigh Park Burn' and others. I had 178 pages of the Hampshire Burn site downloaded and it was deeply unpleasant stuff. I knew immediately this was something that could get out of control and that we had to act quickly.'

Miss Walker called on schools officer PC Justine Lewis, who has since been talking to pupils about the consequences of being involved in such sites.

In particular, students could face charges of harassment and assault that could result in up to two years' imprisonment. PC Lewis said students had been given a short amnesty over the weekend to withdraw their names and comments.

'We don't want to criminalise children but if they don't take themselves off we will be calling them in individually, talking to their parents and considering criminal charges,' she said. 'This is a very difficult area to police but I'm really pleased schools have taken positive action and safer neighbourhood teams are working closely with them.'

A 'Purbrook Burn' site was taken down after the headteacher of Purbrook Park School, in Waterlooville, Hampshire, called a meeting with all 40 pupils who were members of the group.

Paul Foxley said a year 11 girl admitted to creating the page and took it down the same day. 'I made it very clear to the students that their online safety was extremely important to me - I will not tolerate any rude comments online or in person,' he said. 'As a result, a girl owned up to setting it up and it was gone in a day. She was very remorseful but we did give her a five-day internal exclusion as it was a very serious mistake on her part.'

A Facebook spokeswoman said anyone concerned about online bullying should contact the site immediately so their dedicated team can investigate and take down any offending sites immediately.

original article found here

Irish Student Crucified on the Internet

By Warren Swords and Debbie Mccann



(U.K.) An innocent student who had his name blackened on the internet has comprehensively cleared his name – thanks to the Irish Mail on Sunday.

Dublin student Eoin McKeogh, accused of dodging a €50 taxi fare, has laid bare how the internet can destroy a blameless person's reputation in seconds and put people in the horrifying position of either leaving vile allegations in the public domain or pursuing a difficult and costly legal battle through the courts that will attract more attention from the media.

The entire episode has proven how social media such as Facebook and Twitter constitute something of a Wild West when it comes to laws of defamation, where anonymous users can accuse innocent people of crimes without any proof, in a spiralling nightmare of libel and slander.

Mr McKeogh's ordeal began in December when a taxi driver posted a video taken inside his cab on YouTube of a young man running from his taxi without paying the fare.

The video – dated November 13 – clearly shows the man's face and a friend can be heard calling him 'Eoin'.

Within hours, the video had spread to Facebook, Twitter and other internet forums. One anonymous viewer commented on YouTube – wrongly – that the culprit was Eoin McKeogh.

Soon, his name spread across the internet and social media sites and people began sending vitriolic messages to Mr McKeogh's Facebook page calling him a 'scumbag', a 'thief' and worse.

In January, he went to the gardaí twice to see what could be done, before taking legal advice. The matter came before the courts for the first time on January 10. During that hearing, Mr McKeogh provided the judge with his passport, which showed he had entered Japan on November 11 and left the Far East on November 22.

The video was filmed on November 13, while Mr McKeogh was studying in Japan.

'I was not and could not have been the person in the video,' he said in his affidavit to the court, where he is seeking an injunction to have the video permanently removed from the web.

Since the case was reported and he was named in certain newspapers, he is now also seeking an injunction to stop them naming him again.

His senior counsel, Pauline Whalley, told the court that on January 13, the taxi driver appeared in court and gave evidence that the taxi fare evader was not Eoin McKeogh and that he didn't even look like the culprit.

The driver apologised to Mr McKeogh for the trouble the video had caused, saying it was a 'terrible thing' to happen to him. 'He shook my hand and apologised,' said Mr McKeogh in his affidavit. The High Court granted him a temporary injunction on Tuesday against Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo and Google from hosting the video online for a week. A subsequent full hearing into his effort to gain injunctions against six newspapers began yesterday but was adjourned last night until today.

Mr McKeogh said he thought his nightmare was over but that he was still being accused online following court reports of the case.

'I was shocked to see all the postings [on the internet]. They all presumed I was guilty… and attempting to gag the media. I also had a fake Facebook page created.'

In a desperate attempt to clear his name, he even replied to tormentors online, sending them a photograph of himself and his boarding pass from his flight from Tokyo with his travel dates clearly visible.

One website, Broadsheet.ie, reproduced the photograph and a link to the video and told readers: 'You decide.'

According to his legal team, internet commentators continued to accuse Mr McKeogh and posted: 'Why the f*** do injunctions exist? I hope the f*** it blights his career.'

Yesterday afternoon in Court 45, Mr McKeogh asked for an injunction against several newspapers to stop them from printing his name in relation to the case and the video.

Barrister Miss Whalley was critical of the media for not reporting his innocence in the stories and argued against newspapers naming him again due to the public perception that there is no smoke without fire.

She said: 'People believe on a massive scale that he's guilty.'

In response, Mr Justice Michael Peart said: 'The smoke will remain thick – perhaps diluted, as it could not be and was not him.'

Mr Justice Peart said he would consider his decision overnight and make a ruling today at 2.30pm.

Despite offering incontrovertible proof in court that it wasn't him and successfully getting an injunction against YouTube showing the video, the footage was back on the website last night with users identifying him as the culprit, calling him a 'scumbag' and other highly derogatory comments.

The 22-year-old told the packed court yesterday how malicious allegations has ruined his life and could irreversibly damage his promising academic prospects.

Following the successful injunction, 95 per cent of the material posted online about Mr McKeogh was removed.

However, the following day, media organisations reported the court case and according to Miss Whalley 'it went viral again' with people 'saying he was guilty, he can pay high wages of lawyers but not a taxi fare.'

She said her client was not a Seán Quinn or a Seán FitzPatrick but 'an ordinary kid going through college and getting on with his life.

'With a few key strokes, you can destroy a person's reputation,' the barrister said.

Judge Peart described it as 'strange' that newspaper did not include the proof of his innocence in their reports.

original article here

The Shadow of Fear

The shadow of fear that stalkers leave on their victims

by Grace Hammond

Jennifer Aniston recently had a restraining order issued against 24-year-old Jayson Peyton, who staked out her home for eight days and was found to have duct tape, dvds of her films and a sharp object in his car.

The story made the headlines and saw the former Friends star join the likes of Halle Berry, Mel Gibson and Gwyneth Paltrow, who have all been victims of stalkers.

But it is not just Hollywood A-listers who suffer what can be a terrifying experience. More than 1.2 million women and 900,000 men are stalked in the UK every year and in the worst instances, stalking can lead to violence, criminal damage, rape or even murder.

One of the most chilling cases in recent years involved German office worker David Heiss who murdered British student Matthew Pyke in a sustained and savage stabbing attack after becoming obsessed with his Yorkshire girlfriend, who he had met in the chatroom of a war game website.

Thankfully, such horrific cases are rare but for anyone who has been the victim of stalking it can be a traumatic ordeal. "People think stalkers are strangers lurking in the bushes, but research shows 50 per cent of stalking cases involve ex-partners," says Jane Harvey, from the charity Network for Surviving Stalking. "Anybody who deals with the public is more at risk – I was speaking to a teacher recently who was being stalked by the mother of a pupil."

Ms Harvey says stalking can have a huge impact on lives – making people feel panicked, depressed and lonely.

"It affects your relationships, your ability to trust people and to function as a normal human being."

At present, the only law against stalking is The Protection from Harassment Act 1997 and although the law in the UK doesn't define what stalking is, Harvey says it "could be someone phoning you repeatedly, emailing you, following you, sending you presents or other 'gifts'."

Experts believe the rise in reported stalking incidents over the last decade is, in part, down to the development of the internet and mobile phones which have made it easier for stalkers to prey on their victims. But while celebrity figures like Jennifer Aniston are quick to contact the police, research in the UK has shown that 77 per cent of victims didn't report they were being stalked until more than 100 incidents had happened.

The story of Jemma, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, makes for unsettling reading. She met a man on a dating website who shared her interests. She was excited but wary. "He was my first internet date and I'd arranged to meet him in a public place – just as you're supposed to do," she says.

After a couple of dates, she decided to end their relationship which is when the emails started. "They pleaded for another chance, saying we'd both regret it if we didn't try again, but the emails continued, becoming stranger and darker. It frightened me."

He kept phoning in the middle of the night and threatened to come round if she wouldn't meet him. It left her feeling vulnerable and frightened. "I was finding it impossible to concentrate on work."

She called the police and her stalker was finally arrested and given a restraining order. But the stalker posted a fake profile on the same dating site and got in touch with Jemma asking to meet. "I was horrified he'd invented a new identity to harass me again."

He was finally caught by police again and they fitted a panic alarm in her home. But the experience has left her shaken. "How many more people are out there, creating false identities and stalking their victims under the cover of websites?"

Jane Harvey says if someone is making you feel uncomfortable then you should trust your instincts and go to the police. "Victims themselves don't take stalking seriously. If someone walked up to you and punched you in the face, you'd go to the police. But stalking can happen more slowly, a few texts one day, a few the next week."

There are basic precautions that anyone can follow, such as limiting the amount of personal information they put on the internet and social network sites like Facebook.

But the advice is simple – never confront a stalker, and keep a record of any text messages, emails and letters as evidence to help the police.

For more advice and information in the U.K., visit the Network for Surviving Stalking, http://www.nss.org.uk

original article here

Jailed for Facebook Threats

A Fort Myers man is accused of cyberstalking two former co-workers using Facebook – and threatening their lives. Lee County deputies say the suspect created several fake Facebook accounts to make the threats. One of the victims said she feared for her life.

Jacobe Swanson was arrested and charged with threatening to kill or injure two women. The written threats were made on a popular social networking site Facebook.

"He had been threatening me for a long time," said one of the victims.

She said Swanson began stalking her two years ago.

"We were coworkers and nothing more. He showed interest in me and I rejected him and he decided he would start harassing me because I wouldn't give him the time of day," the victim said.

Swanson allegedly left threatening notes on her car.

Then he allegedly began stalking her and another former female coworker online.

"There were pretty horrific threats made against them like they were going to die. They were afraid to go to work and now he's going to face the consequences for that," said Sergeant Stephanie Eller of the Lee County Sheriff's Office.

According to the arrest report, Swanson threatened to chop off the head of one of the victims with a machete, then kill everyone in her house.

Swanson allegedly threatened the other woman saying "She was going to die either at home or at her job" and that she would die soon.

Detectives subpoenaed Facebook for the I.P. address associated with the threatening messages.

That address came back to the Fort Myers home where Swanson lives with his mom.

No one answered the door at Swanson's home.

Swanson is still in jail, where his victims hope he will stay for a long time.

"I hope he gets time for it and I hope he gets some psychiatric help because I believe he needs it," the victim said.

Swanson has been charged with aggravated stalking, intimidation (write, send threat to kill or injure) and contempt of court (violation injunction).


original article here

SOPA / PIPA Information

For our U.S. readers:

Must read: SOPA/PIPA READING LIST

by Brian Barrett

If you hadn't heard of SOPA before, you probably have by now: Some of the internet's most influential sites—Reddit and Wikipedia among them—are going dark to protest the much-maligned anti-piracy bill. But other than being a very bad thing, what is SOPA? And what will it mean for you if it passes?

SOPA is an anti-piracy bill working its way through Congress...

House Judiciary Committee Chair and Texas Republican Lamar Smith, along with 12 co-sponsors, introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act on October 26th of last year. Debate on H.R. 3261, as it's formally known, has consisted of one hearing on November 16th and a "mark-up period" on December 15th, which was designed to make the bill more agreeable to both parties. Its counterpart in the Senate is the Protect IP Act (S. 968). Also known by its cuter-but-still-deadly name: PIPA. There will likely be a vote on PIPA next Wednesday; SOPA discussions had been placed on hold but will resume in February of this year.

...that would grant content creators extraordinary power over the internet...

The beating heart of SOPA is the ability of intellectual property owners (read: movie studios and record labels) to effectively pull the plug on foreign sites against whom they have a copyright claim. If Warner Bros., for example, says that a site in Italy is torrenting a copy of The Dark Knight, the studio could demand that Google remove that site from its search results, that PayPal no longer accept payments to or from that site, that ad services pull all ads and finances from it, and—most dangerously—that the site's ISP prevent people from even going there.

...which would go almost comedically unchecked...

Perhaps the most galling thing about SOPA in its original construction is that it let IP owners take these actions without a single court appearance or judicial sign-off. All it required was a single letter claiming a "good faith belief" that the target site has infringed on its content. Once Google or PayPal or whoever received the quarantine notice, they would have five days to either abide or to challenge the claim in court. Rights holders still have the power to request that kind of blockade, but in the most recent version of the bill the five day window has softened, and companies now would need the court's permission.

The language in SOPA implies that it's aimed squarely at foreign offenders; that's why it focuses on cutting off sources of funding and traffic (generally US-based) rather than directly attacking a targeted site (which is outside of US legal jurisdiction) directly. But that's just part of it.

...to the point of potentially creating an "Internet Blacklist"...

Here's the other thing: Payment processors or content providers like Visa or YouTube don't even need a letter shut off a site's resources. The bill's "vigilante" provision gives broad immunity to any provider who proactively shutters sites it considers to be infringers. Which means the MPAA just needs to publicize one list of infringing sites to get those sites blacklisted from the internet.

Potential for abuse is rampant. As Public Knowledge points out, Google could easily take it upon itself to delist every viral video site on the internet with a "good faith belief" that they're hosting copyrighted material. Leaving YouTube as the only major video portal. Comcast (an ISP) owns NBC (a content provider). Think they might have an interest in shuttering some rival domains? Under SOPA, they can do it without even asking for permission.

...while exacting a huge cost from nearly every site you use daily...

SOPA also includes an "anti-circumvention" clause, which holds that telling people how to work around SOPA is nearly as bad as violating its main provisions. In other words: if your status update links to The Pirate Bay, Facebook would be legally obligated to remove it. Ditto tweets, YouTube videos, Tumblr or WordPress posts, or sites indexed by Google. And if Google, Twitter, Wordpress, Facebook, etc. let it stand? They face a government "enjoinment." They could and would be shut down.

The resources it would take to self-police are monumental for established companies, and unattainable for start-ups. SOPA would censor every online social outlet you have, and prevent new ones from emerging.

...and potentially disappearing your entire digital life...

The party line on SOPA is that it only affects seedy off-shore torrent sites. That's false. As the big legal brains at Bricoleur point out, the potential collateral damage is huge. And it's you. Because while Facebook and Twitter have the financial wherewithal to stave off anti-circumvention shut down notices, the smaller sites you use to store your photos, your videos, and your thoughts may not. If the government decides any part of that site infringes on copyright and proves it in court? Poof. Your digital life is gone, and you can't get it back.

...while still managing to be both unnecessary and ineffective...

What's saddest about SOPA is that it's pointless on two fronts. In the US, the MPAA, and RIAA already have the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to request that infringing material be taken down. We've all seen enough "video removed" messages to know that it works just fine.

As for the foreign operators, you might as well be throwing darts at a tse-tse fly. The poster child of overseas torrenting, Pirate Bay, has made it perfectly clear that they're not frightened in the least. And why should they be? Its proprietors have successfully evaded any technological attempt to shut them down so far. Its advertising partners aren't US-based, so they can't be choked out. But more important than Pirate Bay itself is the idea of Pirate Bay, and the hundreds or thousands of sites like it, as populous and resilient as mushrooms in a marsh. Forget the question of should SOPA succeed. It's incredibly unlikely that it could. At least at its stated goals.

...but stands a shockingly good chance of passing...

SOPA is, objectively, an unfeasible trainwreck of a bill, one that willfully misunderstands the nature of the internet and portends huge financial and cultural losses. The White House has come out strongly against it. As have hundreds of venture capitalists and dozens of the men and women who helped build the internet in the first place. In spite of all this, companies have already spent a lot of money pushing SOPA, and it remains popular in the House of Representatives.

That mark-up period on December 15th, the one that was supposed to transform the bill into something more manageable? Useless. Twenty sanity-fueled amendments were flat-out rejected. And while the bill's most controversial provision—mandatory DNS filtering—was thankfully taken off the table recently, in practice internet providers would almost certainly still use DNS as a tool to shut an accused site down.
...unless we do something about it.

The momentum behind the anti-SOPA movement has been slow to build, but we're finally at a saturation point. Wikipedia, BoingBoing, WordPress, TwitPic: they'll all be dark on January 18th. An anti-SOPA rally has been planned for tomorrow afternoon in New York. The list of companies supporting SOPA is long but shrinking, thanks in no small part to the emails and phone calls they've received in the last few months.

So keep calling. Keep emailing. Most of all, keep making it known that the internet was built on the same principles of freedom that this country was. It should be afforded to the same rights.

original article found here

Over 400 Online Bullying Incidents in Wales in 2011

(U.K.) Almost 400 incidents of cyber harassment and bullying were investigated by police in Wales last year, we can reveal.

Victims of abusive, threatening or harassing messages sent via social networks included teenagers as young as 14.

The problem has increasingly hit the headlines in recent months with celebrity victims Katherine Jenkins and former Miss Wales Imogen Thomas complaining publicly about being subjected to vitriolic online attacks.

Away from such high profile cases, in the South Wales Police force area alone 331 harassment-related incidents classed as “e-crime” were investigated, but resulted in just three arrests.

A Freedom of Information request identified 46 cyber crimes in the Dyfed-Powys Police area, resulting in 12 arrests. Offences included 10 hate crimes, one kidnapping and one threat to kill. Eight victims were under the age of 20. In North Wales, where 18 crimes on social networks were recorded, police investigated one offender for harassment while using a false identity.

Two cases were referred to the High Tech Crime Unit in Gwent, involving harassment messages, and e-mails sent to trustees of an organisation alleging homophobic harassment and bullying. However no further action was taken.

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) Centre is currently running a programme called Thinkuknow to educate children and young people about the dangers of “trolling” they face online.

A spokesman said: “Trolling is a description given to someone’s online actions that are deliberately inflammatory or abusive. It ranges from posting a nasty comment on a social networking profile, or a football forum to extreme and persistent abuse.

“It could include harassment, bullying or anything that causes distress to another. The effects can be devastating. Too few people realise that in acting this way online you can quickly break the law. People may think they can remain anonymous when they are online, that they can say and do things they wouldn’t dream of doing in real life without consequences.”

A spokesman for eCrime Wales said: “The e-Crime Partnership, which includes the four Welsh police forces, works to raise awareness of e-crimes of all kinds. The fact that these incidents are now being reported by the public reflects the fact that people in Wales are becoming more aware of the issue generally and of the importance of passing details of such attacks to the police.”

Jonathan Bishop, a South Wales-based internet expert who recently ran a Trolling Academy tutorial, said that as the numbers of arrests were low, fixed penalties and Asbos should be used against cyberbullies for less severe offences. It would be more appropriate then if local authorities, particularly where vulnerable persons are affected, used their powers under New Labour’s anti-social behaviour legislation to issue fixed-penalties to those who harass others, he said. “Local authorities also have the powers to apply for Asbos against persons, which could tell the cyberbullies that they can go to jail for up to two years if they continue their abuse.”

Criminal cases involving the malicious use of false identities on social networks are becoming increasingly common.

In August James Edward Dunn, 28, from Middlesbrough, was jailed for seven years for raping a 15-year-old girl he had lured into meeting by lying about his age on Facebook.

At the time the investigating officer, Detective Constable Jolene Morrison, had urged teenagers who use Facebook to “only speak to people that they know” and to be aware that the person they think they are talking to may not actually be that person.

In September Sean Duffy, 25, from Reading, was jailed for 18 weeks for taunting the families of four dead teenagers on online tribute sites.

And in November, police in Mid Wales vowed to crack down on “trolls” after a 14-year-old sex abuse victim was subjected to an online smear campaign after her attackers were brought to justice.

Mr Bishop, a town councillor for Treforest, said the use of false identities – by “Snerts” who post messages to harm others, and “E-Vengers” who are driven to harm others they feel have wronged them – is a serious problem.

original article found here

CYBER AFFAIRS

Cyber affairs are the ‘flavor of the day’ when it comes to infidelity and extramarital affairs. The internet now ties with the workplace as the leading place for cheaters of both sexes to find willing partners with whom to have extramarital affairs. It has removed most of the risks associated with cheating on your mate.

Gone are the days when a would-be-cheater had to physically leave home to seek out someone with whom to have an affair. Now it can all be done in cyberspace without the risk of running into family members, nosy neighbors, or inquisitive friends and workmates. With a few clicks of the mouse, a potential cheater has instant access to an endless array of willing partners. A cyber affair can be easily initiated and conducted from the privacy of your home, with your unsuspecting spouse or significant other in the same room, oblivious to what is going on.

Is a Cyber Affair Cheating?
Cyber affairs are actually a form of emotional infidelity. Although in the early stages, there’s no sex involved, most emotional infidelity eventually leads to sexual infidelity if left unchecked . But men and women view cyber affairs very differently.

Most men don’t consider cyber affairs as cheating. However women view them quite differently. A survey in Divorce Magazine found that only 46 percent of men considered intense internet relationships to be infidelity, compared to 72 percent of women.


Are Cyber Affairs Serious?
Many people question whether or not cyber affairs should be taken seriously -- especially, if there’s no sex involved. A cyber affair is a VERY serious threat. A cyber affair should be treated as seriously as a sexual affair, because left unchecked, that’s where it will eventually end up.

In the past 10 years, divorce attorneys have reported seeing an increase in divorces and separations resulting from cyber infidelity. According to the Fortino Group, one-third of divorce litigation is caused by online affairs.

It doesn’t take much for a cyber affair to make the transition from cyberspace to the real world. Several studies have found close connections between cyber affairs and subsequent sexual affairs.

• According to statistics, 50% of people who engage in internet chats have made phone contact with someone they chatted with online.

• One study found that 30 % of cyber-affairs escalate from e-mail to telephone calls to personal contact.

• Another study found that 31% of people had an online conversation which eventually led to real-time sex.

So don’t make the mistake of underestimating a cyber affair.

Signs of a Cyber Affair
How can you tell if your partner is having a cyber affair? Telltale signs of a cyber affair include sitting at the computer into the wee hours of the night, heading for the computer first thing in the morning, insisting on privacy when surfing the Net, moving the computer into a a locked office or more private area of the home, constantly changing passwords, and other suspicious behavior.

Regardless of the term you use -- cyber cheating, cyber affairs, online affairs or internet affairs, it’s a variation of emotional infidelity and should never be taken lightly.

A Fool Proof Test
People will often try to justify a cyber affair by calling it a harmless online friendship. If your partner tries to make light of your concern, or accuses you of making a big deal about nothing, there’s one way to find out for sure.

If the internet friendship is as harmless, or as innocent as your partner claims it to be, then he should have no problem with you sitting beside him, observing the exchange of correspondence back and forth. If he’s unwilling to do that, then you have your answer as to whether or not his online friendship is as harmless as he would have you believe. Safeguard your relationship by taking positive action before it’s too late.


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"Find Your Perfect NIGHTMARE Online"

"Find Your Perfect Date at Match.com", reads this online dating service's current banner ad. "Find a Nightmare", reads the banner ad attached to the inside of my skull. Because online dating, at least in my experience, is one of the unfunniest jokes around.

What am I ranting about? Well, the six months that I spent on Match.com, and the 120 dollars I coughed up were complete wastes of time and money.

I first joined Match.com because it seemed to have the biggest database, and its friendly, photo-driven database let me actually look at the people I was sending e-mail to. Unfortunately, the database underwent a complete restructuring shortly after I joined, destoying several evening's worth of work creating an an earnest, heartfelt personal profile. So I had to painstakingly re-enter all this information.

After re-building my personal information, reconstructing my personal search criteria, and uploading a new picture of myself, I waited patiently for some incoming e-mail to arrive. After two weeks had gone by, with nary a response, I went on the offensive, and started to actively search for women matching my criteria (heavy-smoking divorced caucasion atheists).

I quickly found that there were forty-one of these people within a 50 mile radius of my location. Because I don't believe that love is blind, I narrowed my search criteria to the twenty-five who had actually uploaded pictures of themselves, and immediately screened out another seven for being butt-ugly. That left me with eighteen, so I composed one heartfelt, sincere, earnest e-mail, and sent the same message to the group using a "blind copy BCC".
Five women of the eighteen replied, and over the next several weeks, I began trading e-mails with three of them. Here is a brief summary of the resulting encounters.

Date 1: A Candle-Lit Dinner
J*** seemed to have everything going for her. A cute face, a paying job at a prominent New York film institute, a wry way of expressing herself in e-mail, and realistic expectations about the prospects of meeting Mr. Right through an online dating service. She wrote: "I really don't think we'll know if there's a real connection between us until we actually sit down together and make eye contact". She suggested we meet at an intimate Italian restaurant near her workplace on the West Side, and I hung out at the bar until she showed up.

I remember sitting there with a Diet Coke, with my back to the entrance and my mind swirling with fantasies about what we'd talk about - the arts, Giuliani, the Yankees - whatever seemed most conducive to romance. But then, my reverie was broken when an extremely large woman tapped me on the shoulder, I turned around, and it was J*** - about 80 pounds heavier than her picture had indicated. I could hardly even see her eyes peering out from within the folds of fat, much less make contact with them.

Because I consider myself a gentleman, I bought her dinner (Lasagna), and talked exclusively about Giuliani, which seemed to please her to no end. But as soon as I could dump her in the subway, I ran screaming back to the East side, and never sent her e-mail again.
Date 2: Romantic Phone Sex
With the J*** experience safely behind me, I began to more carefully analyze the pictures that my six "hot" prospects had uploaded of themselves, to look for obvious signs of retouching or Loch Ness monster-style fakery. Using software originally developed by the CIA Global Maps Division, I began blowing up and enhancing some of these grainy JPEGs, and sure enough, several contained dead giveways that they were taken many years ago, when the subject was in much better (or at least much younger) shape. These background clues included biplanes flying in the distance, cars with tailfins, and an old Nixon: Now More Than Ever poster.

I was left with two prospects whose pictures seemed honest. One was an exotic belly-dancer, and I had made all the arrangements to meet her when she requested that we talk on the phone first.

There was scratchy Middle Eastern music playing in the background when I called, and what seemed to be a couple of hungry kids screaming. This is in itself wasn't a turnoff - in fact it was almost a turn-on. But when this poor woman began talking, I knew that there was no way on earth that we could ever communicate earnestly and heartfeltly about anything, at least in any extant language. She sounded like just like Brezhnev did after a hard night of drinking, so I told her I was feeling ill (which I was), and I moved our date into the far-distant future (2006).
Date 3: Sexy E-Mail
Older, wiser, but still horny as hell, I was now down to just one prospect, so I sent her another piece of earnest e-mail. By this time, I was becoming increasingly desperate to meet someone under 800 lbs. who actually spoke the English language, but I was also getting gunshy.

So I began asking a few personal questions about her - what kind of food she liked eating, whether she liked music from the Middle East, or had a thing for vodka - innocuous things like that. I had become accustomed to this kind of probing behavior - (one of my correspondents had actually asked for my Social Security Number, and I stupidly complied, and of course never heard from her again).

To this day, I don't think I was being overly intrusive, but my correspondent clearly thought differently. Maybe she got my e-mail at the end of a long day, or her real boyfriend had dumped her - I'll never know. But here's the reply I got back after sending her a simple "request for clarification of one of your earlier points" message:

WHAT THE HELL IS THE MATTER WITH YOU. DO YOU WANT TO MEET ME OR NOT? ARE YOU ONE OF THOSE AMBIVALENT SONS OF B*TCHES WHO CANT MAKE UP THEIR MIND - ARE YOU SRIOUS ABOUT MEETING ME OR JUST WANT TO TORTURE ME AND F*CK WITH MY HEAD? DON'T BOTHER REPONDING - IM UP TO HERE WTH YOUR DUMB QUESTIONS. N**
Epilogue:
I cancelled my Match.com subscription, spent the money I saved on two reasonably good subscription porn services, and tried to forget the whole thing. But I can't really forget, because every day, I receive junk mail about some wretched new Match.com event - a wine tasting, or a boat cruise, or a getaway weekend.

Someday, I'm sure I'll meet someone, and maybe, God willing, we'll wind up having grandchildren together. But I'm 100% sure that I'd be better off taking my chances with a random, in-your-face encounter than by flying blind in a world of illusion. And I'll certainly never date online again, until such time as they can screen out the imposters, the losers, the psychos, and the women who sound like Brezhnev.

I actually do know people who have met compatible mates online, but I believe these success stories are vastly outnumbered by the number of empty, unhappy, soul-searing experiences that nobody publicizes - the victims are too ashamed, and the service doesn't want to know either. Match.com and its brethren are, in my opinion, seamy lonely-hearts clubs where deception, trickery, and paranoia run rampant, scarring the gullible and the guileless.

But then again, I guess I'm one of those "ambivalent sons-of-b*tches who can't make up their mind" - at least about throwing myself blindly into the arms of these cyber-weirdos.

ORIGINAL POST 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

In Just One Hour Online...

It took just one hour for internet experts to find out almost every private detail of one woman's life

Steve Boggan challenged web experts to see how much they could discover about his partner. The results were chilling...

As I sit writing this, I am feeling vaguely grubby — guilty even — in the way a neurotic husband might after hiring a gumshoe to go trawling through his wife’s secrets.

There is a 15-page report in front of me chronicling virtually every aspect of my girlfriend’s life: past and present. That includes her friends, education, embarrassing pictures, former boyfriends and long-forgotten relatives.

Much of the information is new to me. And the uses to which it could be put — uses I hadn’t dreamt of until this week — are chilling.

Armed with this information, criminals could use her identity to commit fraud or resurrect minute details of her past, her movements and friendships to lure her into scams or even dangerous liaisons.

It could be used to con her into revealing her bank details and credit card numbers.

My internet snooping began because the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt — a man not known for worrying about internet surfers’ privacy — suggested recently that young people might want to change their identities in the future in order to separate themselves from a past lived too openly on the internet.

We all know Facebook pictures of you dancing at a party with a traffic cone on your head might come back to haunt you. But change your identity completely?

Surely, I wondered, there isn’t enough out there to warrant that.

So I decided to find out how much I could discover about my partner of 12 years, Suzanne, just by using the internet.

Before you think I’m a rat, I should point out that Suzanne, a 39-year-old with a soft furnishings business, agreed to it.

I began in the way lots of identity thieves do: with her name and address. Of course, I knew these details, but identity thieves often discover them by ‘dumpster diving’: looking through dustbins for a discarded piece of mail.

I passed Suzanne’s name and address — but no other details — to Adam Laurie, a 48-year-old computer security and internet privacy advocate.

He shared the information with Chris Sumner, 39, another security expert, who works for a multi-national corporation.

Or at least, that is Sumner’s day job; by night, he analyses vast amounts of information publicly available on the internet to see what it can tell him about criminal activity — in this case, how fraudsters are using social networking sites to choose their victims.

Using sophisticated and completely legal computer techniques, he looks for patterns in the behaviour of internet users to uncover otherwise hidden links.

In the case of social networking sites, he can see just how close two people, or groups of people, really are to each other.

He had met neither me nor Suzanne and knew nothing of her existence until given her name and address.

A day later, his findings dropped into my email inbox.

Picking Suzanne’s life apart, he told me, had taken him just over an hour.

This is because, in common with millions of people in Britain, Suzanne uses the social networking sites Facebook and Friends Reunited, and has signed up to the business networking site LinkedIn and Flickr, the photo-sharing website.

By also using the genealogy website ancestry.co.uk, Sumner was able to piece together the names of all but one of Suzanne’s relatives, including cousins.

Using electoral rolls on 192.com and by searching on Google, he found the addresses of her parents and lots of her friends and colleagues.

From her LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, he found the names of Suzanne’s primary and secondary schools, and a college she had attended in Derby. He also discovered she had studied fine art at Central St Martin’s College of Art & Design in London.

He also had details of Suzanne’s qualifications and pictures of her from her days at school. The snaps weren’t hers — an old schoolfriend had put them on Facebook.

There were some naff hairstyles, but that was as deep as the embarrassment went. Only you know whether a trawl of pictures of you would be more damaging.

But Sumner didn’t stop there. He was able to tell me that Suzanne had travelled extensively in Europe, Asia, the Caribbean and the South Pacific.

This was because she had used an application on Facebook that linked to the travel website TripAdvisor. You fill in where in the world you have been to keep your relatives up to date. But anyone can see it.

He was not only able to list all 41 countries she had visited, but also the 162 towns and islands to which she had been.

Sumner was able to tell me Suzanne’s exact movements by cross-referencing her TripAdvisor entries with photographs she had posted on Flickr.

When you click on a picture on Flickr, a small box gives you access to detailed information that is entered not by you, but by your camera. So, the date and time of the shot are included.

Now that phones and cameras have GPS, there are even concerns that the location of where you uploaded the picture — normally where you live — might be visible.

From a mixture of all of these websites, Sumner listed Suzanne’s likes, dislikes, hobbies, the 34 towns and cities she had visited in Britain, the places where she used to socialise in her youth and details of her former jobs in the newspaper industry.

In fact, it’s fair to say that after just one hour’s trawling he knew more about many aspects of my girlfriend’s past than I did.

Shocking? Perhaps. Yet also astonishingly easy. Suzanne had voluntarily signed up to these websites and, bit by bit, put most of this information out there herself — and forgotten much of it.

However, what I found even more disturbing is that much of what Sumner found was supposed to have been visible only to people whom Suzanne had accepted into her inner circle of ‘friends’ on each networking website. This turned out to be dangerously naive.

Over the years, standard privacy settings— notably for Facebook — have changed, so what you once thought was private has become public.

You are notified about these changes, but if you forget to adjust your individual settings to return to the old level of privacy (which can be fiendishly complicated) then some of your private information becomes available for everyone to see.

‘There are some weird, strange quirks that let you into places you aren’t supposed
to go,’ says Sumner.

‘For example, on Facebook you may not be allowed to see someone’s photographs because they’re private. But if they post a message with one of their photos attached, you are given the option of seeing their whole album. And as you can imagine, that can be embarrassing.’

According to Sumner and Laurie, organised criminals are using this information
in increasingly sophisticated ways to target victims.

‘Criminal gangs are carefully fishing for victims,’ says Laurie. ‘In the past, they would have sent out thousands and thousands of spam emails in a scattergun fashion — and many still do.

‘These are called phishing scams and involve fake requests from banks asking
people to confirm their account details, passwords and so on. The hope is that, once in a while, someone would be silly enough to reply.

‘Today, they are much more targeted. For example, with the information we got about Suzanne from Flickr, you would be able to see where she visited, when, and, if there were captions on the pictures, with whom.

‘After that, the criminals (or romance scammers) would tailor a scam. If they noticed that, say, she was a regular visitor to Malawi, they would make an introduction online, claiming they were a friend — for example, called Dave — of someone she visited there with five years ago.

‘Surely she remembers them? From that beach — her friend was there, too ... yes?

‘Usually people are too embarrassed to say they don’t remember. Then ‘‘Dave’’ claims he is setting up an orphanage — would she like to make a contribution towards it?

‘Or they might simply say they’re a friend of a person you were with and say he’s gone back there, broken his leg and they’re having a fund-raising collection to airlift him home. It’s crude, but effective.’

Sumner says it can get even more complex, with software tools that can work out who is friends with whom among your online groups of contacts.

‘Once you have established a person’s inner network, you go back into their history to find someone they knew at school who isn’t in that network of close friends and who hasn’t signed up to networking sites,’ he says.

‘Then you join those sites in their name, establish yourself with their online identity and ask your original target to accept you as a friend on, say, Facebook.

‘Before you know it, you are inside their life as a trusted person they think they used to know.

‘Once you are in, you can read about what your target and their friends are up to, such as when they are going on holiday. With that information, you can burgle their homes.

‘You can even ask to be Facebook friends with their children. This is a particularly frightening way for someone to stalk you or your family. They can introduce themselves as a Facebook friend of Mum or Dad. And then it’s only a couple of steps away from something awful happening.

‘Teenagers, in particular, are very indiscreet and post hundreds of pictures of themselves, sometimes drunk with their friends in the living room in front of the plasma screen TV or home cinema.

‘Not only are these the sort of pictures that will come back to haunt them in the future — potential employers aren’t supposed to look at these, but they do — but it’s also a dumb way to show burglars what property you have and where it is.

‘Especially after your children have told all their “friends” when the house is going to be empty.’

Sumner described how some of the information he gained from Suzanne would have helped him to get hold of her bank and credit card details. I won’t reveal exactly how he did it, but it involved using some of her social networking information to gain her confidence, then posing as a friend and asking if her business would make some curtains for him with a sample of material he’d seen on another website.

The catch would be that he had set up that other website himself and when she visited it some rudimentary programming he had installed would help him acquire her credit card details.

I ask Suzanne if she would have fallen for the scam. ‘It’s hard to know, but based on what he said, why wouldn’t I have gone along with the requests of a potential customer?’ she says.

There are other ways, too, that criminals can use personal information harvested from the internet. For example, people often use the names of their children or
pets as passwords for online shopping sites.

If criminals can find these names, by gaining access to your social networking circle, they can try to hack into your accounts on popular shopping sites such as Amazon and view your shopping history, or even order expensive goods to be sent to a pick-up address. (I did not ask Laurie or Sumner to attempt this because it would be in breach of data protection law.)

What can we do about all this? Well, not a lot, other than to be aware your information can be used in more sinister ways than you can possibly imagine, and to be on your guard.

As for your children, they can be warned to modify their behaviour and to think twice about what they write and post online and whom they accept as ‘friends’.

According to Linda Weatherhead, principal policy advocate for the campaign group Consumer Focus, social networking sites bear much responsibility for this explosion of potentially useful information.

‘It is a complex problem, but one simple way of making things safer would be to have all our information kept private as the default setting,’ she says. ‘Then it would be up to you how much you want to relax them as you decide to share more of your private
information.

‘Beyond that, we just have to be careful what we put out there — you can advise children about what they are doing, but you can’t wrap them in cotton wool. You can never make anything completely safe.’

But if Adam Laurie and Chris Sumner are right, then the risks of social networking extend far beyond a few embarrassing photos.

In particular, be careful who your ‘friends’ are; they could turn out to be your worst enemies.

original article here

'Maze of Online Dating'

EOPC is publishing this to point on the chronic lying implicit in online dating. We believe the author minimizes the danger inherent here.

EOPC NEVER recommends or approves of Online Dating to meet people. Under ANY circumstances. Join a volunteer organization but NEVER Online Dating.

His online profile -- dark hair, 5'6", athletic build -- caught her attention and the e-mail exchange went well, so Carla Riemersma agreed to meet the 58-year-old Wisconsin man in person.

But the nonathletic, 5-foot-2, 64-year-old, bald man who greeted her on the date didn't exactly match his cyber persona.

"I'm looking for this stud-muffin, and it didn't quite turn out that way," Riemersma said.

Frustrating dates such as this inspired Riemersma, a 65-year-old college professor from the Hudsonville area, to start taking notes.

The result is her book, "What are the Odds? The Likelihood of Finding Love and Romance in Cyberspace." In it, Riemersma, shares her personal adventure and documents the pitfalls of looking for love online. She takes an academic approach to the topic with statistical research.

Riemersma, who teaches at Baker College and the University of Phoenix, spent about $500 for 15 months of online dating services, including Match.com, Yahoo.com, Sexy Ads, American Singles, Senior Friend Finders and eHarmony. She met more then 200 men, sometimes fitting as many as three dates into a single day.

To research the book, she spent four years reviewing 4,000 active profiles randomly chosen from several well-known Internet dating sites and conducted interviews with nearly 300 Internet daters. About a third of those participants were women.

She often would arrive at a meeting with her date's profile in hand to compare reality to what was advertised online. When people lied, she made a note of it. She found 97.5 percent of the online daters she interviewed were dishonest about their profile, with women most likely to fib about age and weight while men often fudged their age and marital status.

White lies
Riemersma calls it "cyber-truth" when people post a false age, weight or marital status in an effort to get a date.

... Now, she strongly advises people to be honest from the beginning if they're serious about finding a person to love them as they are.

TIPS
Dating detective work

Online dating tips from Carla Riemersma, author of "What are the Odds? The Likelihood of Finding Love and Romance in Cyberspace":

• Do not lie or exaggerate when writing your profile.

• Use a current photo.

• Avoid confusion -- list your ground rules for the first date in your profile.

• Do not give out personal information via the Internet.

• Use a cell phone instead of home phone if you decide to call your date.

• Once you know your date's name, do a Google or Yahoo search. Read ALL the pages.

• Always meet in a public place for the first date.

• Never consume alcohol on your first few dates, and monitor alcohol consumption of the person you are dating.

• Always tell someone where you will be during the first date, and make sure your date knows you're going to call that person during the date to say you're OK.

• Make sure you have your own transportation to and from the date.

"Eventually, you have to meet, and how do you explain the extra 20 pounds if you listed yourself as slim or athletic?" she writes.

She said about 60 percent of the men who stated they were single, separated or divorced still were married. So, she quickly developed a radar for men with tan lines on their ring fingers and indentations where a wedding band usually goes.

"It was so obvious," she said.

One guy showed up to a date with a bandage wrapped around his ring finger. She asked if he'd had a mishap with a saber saw. It turned out the man's finger was fine, but he was married.

Throwing in the towel
Terri Timmer, 52, of Grand Rapids, tried cyberdating for a few months, but gave up in frustration about a month ago.

In contrast, Ken Cote, 47, of Lake Odessa, has had pretty good luck meeting women online. ... It helps that he is a private investigator. He says he does background checks on his dates -- and he checks on the people his friends are dating, too...

Falsehoods
While Riemersma was researching her book, there were an estimated 40 million people dating online in the United States and more than 1,200 online dating sites. Those numbers continue to grow.

Original article here

Perfect Prey: Surviving a Cyber Shark's Romantic Fraud

Liz Cole was victimized by an online career con artist - but she turned the tables to expose the con man on national television. Much of this book is written as a real time journal, taking readers inside the world of Liz Cole and her suitor, convict and predator John Melvin Hill.


Recently divorced, with low self-esteem, Liz Cole turned to online dating and met a charming Irishman - in reality, a Quebec con artist - who preyed on her and vanished. She then found him and set up a televised sting operation and has great advice.

Millions use Internet-dating sites to look for love. Some find their mates, some find disappointment. And some fine something far more dangerous - con artists and sex predators lurking in the shadows of cyberspace. -- CTV's W-Five

What do you do when your charming knight on a white horse turns out to be Satan in a tuxedo? (this is the true story of how one woman fought back) -- Canadian Living Magazine

buy the book here