Health News Archive

Be careful when Online Dating

More and more, the search for love and companionship has millions of people turning to the internet.

There are a wide variety of social networks, community and online dating services to choose from.

Some are free like: http://www.plentyoffish.com/ or http://www.hotornot.com/

or for pay like http://www.true.com and http://www.eharmony.com/

Online dating can be risky.

More and more companies are taking steps to keep their clients as safe as possible, but even the companies that say ‘safety comes first’ may be promising more than they can deliver.

True.com is an online dating company based in Las Colinas. It's one of the only dating websites that perform criminal background checks on potential clients.

Herb Vest, CEO od true.com says:

"If we find you have a felony conviction, we're going to turn you in for wire fraud. We’re going to turn you in to the parole board... We're not friends with the criminals, and we let them know that."

True.com uses a criminal screening company called Rapsheets. Website officials say the company has information on about 94% of the felony convictions in the United States.

As an online dater you should worry about that missing 6% of information. It represents a small gap that could let trouble into your life.

Criminals may know that they can move to certain disctricts and territories that do not provide criminal history information.

Vest says the American National sex offender registry isn't commercially feasible for them to use. "We'd have to sit there and go through ten million members manually, and that just doesn't work," he said. There are just too many clients to do that, he says.

The background checking process would have to be fully automated with 100% accurate data for there to be no margin of error.

True.com uses a service that can perform thousands of background checks instantaneously, even though that service can't capture everyone's criminal past.

"There's no database, there's nothing I could do to possibly get all of the convicted felons," Vest said.

Website officials say a new, more thorough data provider will debut early next year and should nab about 96% of criminals - for a 2% improvement.

You should never rely completely on a background check promised by any company and there are databases available to help you perform your own check. So please be careful dating online.

Back 22.10.2006.