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April 23, 2003
Virtual Kisses - Protecting members’ privacy and right to choose
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Members of LoveCompass Network happen to ask why they can't buy membership which would give them an access to all other members’ personal contacts. We do not make this information available unless a member decided to become a Gold Member and make his contacts available for free. In all other cases, members have to pay for contacts. This shows their serious intentions about initiating real dating contact. Spammers wouldn't pay per e-mail – they just don't value e-mails that much. But there are some other cases of fraudulent use of our system which we are trying to evaluate, but the best we can do is to inform our members about possible offence.
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The main problem left is SCAM. All sorts of it: Russian brides scam, “African/Nigerian/Columbian letters” scam, fake credit cards scam, etc. Unfortunately there is a whole bunch of “people” trying to play with feelings of singles looking for soulmates. Most of our members are potential victims and we can do little about that. We are also victims as we are having great financial losses because of these phenomena. Vast majority of singles posting their ads consists of not Internet savvy people and it becomes easy to cheat them with a begging letter written “with a fear of God”. But, believe us; scammers do not know what God is. God is their tool for money-making and nothing but that.
Our Dating Scam article already informed about the main types of scam, but I would like to repeat once again that there are two simple pointers that should make you VERY suspicious: IF the letter is from Nigeria/Africa/Cote Divoire/Columbia and has fancy looking story about bazillions US dollars you could earn for helping the poor sender, this is SCAM; and IF the letter is from former USSR country and the lady wants you to transfer her a few hundreds dollars for visa arrangements, ticket or mother’s surgery, this is SCAM.
Internet community tries to fight scammers, but all they can do is reporting and publishing of the cases and informing people about scam patterns. What LoveCompass does is keeping members’ privacy by establishing Virtual Kisses system which leaves the right of choice for everyone. Once you got a Virtual Kiss, go and see the member’s profile, be VERY SUSPICIOUS, and if and only if you feel that this member is a safe bet, buy the contacts or grab e-mail (if he’s a Gold Member). This decision was not just from the top of the head, but we understand that it is not a panacea and there is still a lot of things that might be implemented in order to make the whole Network operation more secure and accurate.
Partners and members of the entire LoveCompass Online Personals and Dating Services Network are welcome to comment and suggest new ways of protecting members’ privacy and broadening variety of our services along with keeping them secure.
Posted by LC at April 23, 2003 11:14 PM
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