Hi there, and welcome to my blog – or back to my blog as the case may be. This is only my second blog entry, so I am going to guess that there are probably a lot of you who missed my first posting a couple of weeks ago. As I said, I am a guy with a not-so-great American story which, when you boil it down, goes something like this: Boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy and girl have a couple of kids and a dog; girl gets bored, girl dumps boy for ‘something else’, boy gets to visit his kids, dog, and money every other weekend. Yeah, I know – you can hear the violins from there. If you want any more details you can go back and read my first blog entry, but that’s pretty much all I am going to say about that.
A couple of weeks ago, I started checking out an online dating/marriage service called Dream-marriage.com. Hey, after a couple of years more or less alone, I was pretty much ready to try anything. Now Dream-marriage specializes in getting guys like me together with Russian women; and I’ll be up front with you, at the start I didn’t think too much of that idea. I mean, I’m from Philadelphia! What the hell am I going to have in common with a girl in Russia? Well, as it turns out, more than you might guess – but I am still new to the site, so I’ll let you know about the girls in a later blog. One thing I will say, however, is that they are friendly, they speak English ... and, man, they are HOT!
Anyway, Dream-marriage has a three day free-trial which, I’ll admit, is probably the real reason why I tried it out. Between mortgage, rent and alimony, I need to watch my money. Most other sites I’ve looked at want about two month’s pay and a year commitment before they’ll even start explaining what they’re all about. Not these folks – the free trial was FREE – as in gratis, no charge, leave your money at home. And it gave me access to the whole site: ladies’ profiles, FAQ’s, even a couple of hundred articles on everything from how to strike up a conversation with a Russian woman to how to guard against scams. I mean, there is a LOT of information (not to mention a LOT of hot girls) on this site, and in future blogs I’ll be telling you about some of it (unless you decide to go and check it out for yourself). But today, I wanted to talk about security, because that’s part of my business.
I’m an IT guy – you know, the one at work who moves you out of your office or cube when your computer “just crashes” (sorry, but they never just crash) and finds that the email you opened from LeggyLinda254 actually carried the KissOfDeath virus. I am real hyper about security, because every day I deal with some bonehead who crashed their system because they didn’t pay attention to basics. So, as you might imagine, before my three day free trial at Dream-marriage ended, I decided to do a little poking around on the site, to see just how safe I was going to be using their service.
From a computer standpoint, it is obvious that these folks take security VERY seriously. All financial transactions are secured via VeriSign, which is pretty standard for any legitimate online business, but the site itself is verified secure by both GoDaddy Secure, and McAfee Secure Daily Testing – both of which are a couple of the best services in the business, neither of which screws around and, as a side note, neither of which is inexpensive. Whether you are interested in Dream-marriage or not, if you check them out, you don’t need to worry about any worms or tracking programs planting themselves on your PC.
The next thing that impressed me – and this is a real rarity (at least in my experience) in the online dating world – is that there aren’t any downloads anywhere on the site. Everything they have to offer (and it’s a lot) is a click away, and comes to you via the site’s servers as opposed to you having to download any programs directly onto your computer. I can’t begin to tell you how many times in the last 20 years I’ve had to scrap a computer’s hard drive because somebody downloaded something from a site they “trusted” onto their computer. What a lot of people don’t realize is that it is cheaper for a company to make their customers download applications and functionality programs onto their PCs so that, in effect, it is the personal PC and not the company’s servers that have to do most of the work. Well, at Dream-marriage.com, everything happens through the site; nothing, including their email, live chat, video introductions or streaming video services requires a download. Speaking as a geek, I like that. A lot.
Of course, as any IT guy will tell you, while that kind of security is VERY important, most of the things that either destroy computers or lead to identity theft problems come from people not being careful. The more the internet works its way into all areas of life, the more scumbags there are going to be who try and take advantage of honest folks. I read an article in one of the IT journals I get at work which said that over $1 billion is lost by people every year due to internet fraud and scamming. It didn’t mention the online dating industry, but I have GOT to imagine that a lot of that money is lost there, and that most of it is stolen by people who pretend to be someone they aren’t. A lot of sites that I have been to either completely ignore the problem, or have little warnings that say something like “Never give your personal information to someone you don’t know”. Well, no kidding! The problem is, especially on sites where romance is involved, people think that they know someone who turns out to be someone else altogether, and then disappears after they have robbed them blind.
This is where I think Dream-Marriage really stands out. Not only do they have dozens of articles on how to identify scammers and avoid scams (all free, by the way, whether you are a member or not), but they also have a zero-tolerance policy for scammers on their site that allows users to report any suspicious behaviour. While that’s better than most of the sites out there, these guys take it all a step further – they actually have their representatives physically verify that the women on their site are not only who they claim to be, but also look like the pictures they post on their profile pages. When you go to a woman’s profile page, there is a red check-mark on the top right corner of the page which confirms that a representative of Dream-marriage has actually confirmed the woman is who she says she is. I haven’t looked at every profile (there are thousands of them!) but I haven’t seen one yet that hasn’t been confirmed. I have even heard that they are going to start confirming passport information, as an additional layer of security. Bottom line here, guys, is that while you still need to use your common sense, Dream-marriage is doing everything they can to make sure that when you are using their service, you are getting what you pay for, and not getting taken.
Okay, that’s it for today. Time for me to switch from IT guy to Single guy, and see how many of the ladies I emailed last night through Dream-marriage.com wrote back. Feel free to post any comments or give any feedback -- ‘til next time!
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