Monday, August 31st, 2009
Running an online dating or a social networking site is a very specific kind of business with its own ‘highs and lows’. One of the pitfalls both site owners and members have to be aware of is online dating scam.
Briefly speaking, scamming is swindling someone for financial gain. When it comes to online dating sites – ’someone’ is usually a single man (almost never a woman) searching for his destiny in the World Wide Web. He is usually trusting and unsuspecting, which makes him almost a 100% confirmed candidate to fall for online Internet fraud.
Since scam is not something new in the world of online dating industry, there are tons of articles on the Internet describing ‘red light’ symptoms indicating that you are being fooled, and suggesting solutions on how to avoid such traps. People read them, become more educated and careful… and they stop trusting online community sites.
In order to make your website a secure place for acquaintance and entertainment, you should know how scammers typically act, what tricks they use to swindle dating site members, and obviously how to ‘catch’ such impostors before they cause any harm.
Below you fill find some common scammers’ fraud schemes description. As they say, ‘forewarned is forearmed’.
There are three generally known online dating scam types: a ‘Telephone scam’, a so-called ‘Russian Bride scam’ and a ‘419 Nigerian scam’.
Telephone scam ‘works’ pretty easy. A scammer gives you his/her phone number and asks you to call. You do so, which seems pretty logical if you are unprepared for a negative result. You hear an automatic voice machine (sometimes even a live person). You hang up. You get a phone bill that makes you stiffen in surprise. What is the trick? Scammers use so-called ‘premium rate’ phone and fax-back numbers usually starting with 190. The cost of a call to such number can be about $5 per minute or even higer. One more telephone fraud scheme involves a scammer asking you to dial 90# and hang up the conversation (he/she will definitely provide you with a trustworthy reason why you should do that). As soon as you follow the instructions, the cheat will get access to making long-distance calls using your telephone balance. This 90# scamming technique is no longer popular these days (since telephone communications have become more advanced and difficult to hack), and initially it was targeted for business and governmental numbers (requiring to dial 9 or 9-0 to access an outside line). But still, you should keep it in mind.
‘Russian Bride scam’ is very typical for online dating sites, so give it proper attention. Here is how it usually works. Imagine that you are registered on a dating site or a social network. You are lonely and dreaming to find a soul-mate, who is beautiful, young and naive. And one day you receive a message from a profile that looks very similar to your dream. The only drawback is that the girl who sent it lives in Russia (Ukraine, or one of the other former USSR countries). The message would usually be written in broken English, but have vague content anyone would like. Such letters typically start with a brief description of a potential
bride’s personal qualities (such as being honest, loving, not mercenary etc), and of how much she was impressed with your profile. She will promise to send her photos in case you are interested. And most likely you will receive pictures of a model looking just too good to be a real person. In some cases there will be a real girl on those pictures (and they will look more natural). The only problem is that she has nothing to do with the love messages you receive. No doubts that her photo was stolen from the Internet. But let’s get back to your correspondence. Once you start taking serious interest in your new friend, ’she’ will let you know about her feelings for you. Of course, she is in love. You’ve been chatting for only a week or so? You have never met or even talked to each other on the phone? Well, there are no barriers for true love, and you were definitely meant for each other – this is what she will tell you. Then the most interesting part starts. This girl from a country where there is no job, and winters are too cold will want to come and see you, because her love for you is so strong. But she will need some money to get her visa done (maybe about $300). Once you send it – she will definitely need more…. There can be hundreds of reasons: booking tickets, sick relatives, telephone and Internet connection bills (she can’t imagine even a day without communicating with you!) and so on, and so forth… She will never reveal her bank account details, and will ask you to send funds via some money transfer system. Finally (better sooner than later), you will understand that you are being fooled. But by that time you might become broken-hearted and a few hundred dollars poorer.
‘419 Nigerian scam’ named after the section of the Nigerian law pertaining to fraud unifies several methods of advanced fee fraud. It includes lottery scam, bank loan scam, romance scam and many other kinds of scam (if you are interested, you may check them here http://www.419hell.com/Nigerian_Scam_Baiting/Types_of_419_Scams.html). I will tell you about the specific dating or romance scam. As a rule, you will receive a letter from a profile with an attractive picture. She or he will not be so pushy at first. Following one of the fraud schemes, a scammer will tell you that he/she actually lives in the US, but is currently working abroad… say, in Nigeria. Your communication with such scammer may last for a couple of months or even up to a year before a standard process of sucking out your budget starts. A fraudster will become your friend and make you believe you can trust him. But one day something will definitely happen – your ‘friend’ will completely run out of finance just a week before the salary, or he will get to a hospital (or even to jail), he will need to buy a ticket, cash the money order or save a dying aunty who needs an urgent operation…. By the time the cheat asks you for money, your vigilance will most likely be completely lulled, as scammers are very good at psychology, and they know tons of ‘it-sounds-like-truth’ stories. Once you send the money
– you can forget about it. Most likely, the scammer will disappear too… unless he feels that he can ‘milk’ your wallet for a bit longer.
These were the typical Internet fraud schemes applied on online dating sites by scammers, and earning millions yearly to the ones using them. As an online community site owner, you can add your share to the hard work of fighting against Internet criminals by making your site free from scam and thus, safe and reputable.
In my next article I will introduce a few easy ways to prevent (or get rid of) scamming on your site using tools provided by SkaDate dating software.
For now, feel free to leave your comments and share scam stories you’ve been into or ever heard of. Your experience is very important.
Best wishes,
Irene
Image sources: http://i197.photobucket.com , http://onlinedatinginuk.com , http://www.russian-women-info.com
Posted in Miscellaneous | Tags: 419 Nigerian scam · advanced fee fraud · dating scam · dating software · online community site · online dating · Russian Bride scam · SkaDate · social networking
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
We are glad to announce that SkaDate dating and social networking software has made one more grade on its way of constant improvement. We have released a 7.1295 build that introduces a set of new features for making your online community even more entertaining for members. The new update also features a few significant improvements for site administrators.
Check the list of features now available in the new SkaDate software revision:
- Groups
- Photo albums
- 123FlashChat
- Possibility to disable base profile fields
- SMTP protocol support
- New online Admin Panel Manual
Now let me provide a more detailed description of each feature.
Groups
This feature allows member to create and join sub-networks (Groups) on your site to share their interests and affiliations. Group members can hold discussions on a private Group Forum inaccessible for non-members, post comments, add or remove the ‘Groups’ component on their profile view page. The Group administration interface allows to set them private or public, and available for joining to anybody or by invitation only. A sub-network creator can also assign moderators and upload a Group image.
Photo Albums
This feature allows your site members to organize their photos in Albums according to their preferences. Photos can be easily moved from one album to another. The number of photos allowed per album is set up by the Site Administrator via Admin Panel. The members will be able to enable or disable the ‘Photo Albums’ component on their profile page.
123FlashChat
In order to entertain multiple requests of our customers we have integrated a new popular audio/video chat into SkaDate software – 123FlashChat, which is a high-quality one-time fee add-on featuring custom skins and logo.
Possibility to disable base profile fields
SkaDate software with its impressing number of features doesn’t lock you down with just creating a dating site. It provides you with all the opportunities for developing a social network featuring blogs, photo and video sharing, albums (new!), groups (new!) and latest activity. Today we are glad to introduce one more option for your members to feel even more comfortable in your online community. It’s a possibility for a Site Administrator to disable such base profile fields as ‘I am’ and ‘Looking for’ which served mainly for dating purposes. Now there is nothing in the way to making your social network even more professional.
SMTP protocol support
Now you can improve your site performance by discharging the server you host on. This feature allows you to choose any server supporting SMTP for the purpose of sending mail from your site. It has become possible to send site e-mails even from your Gmail account!
Online Admin Panel Manual
And here comes good news for Site Administrators – an online version of the Admin Panel Manual is available. Each Admin Panel page now has a ‘Help’ link in an upright corner to a corresponding Online Manual section, thus, making it a lot easier for you to find answers to major questions on adjusting the Admin Panel settings instantly. And no need to worry about the Manual format compatibility with your computer operating system. The latest version of the Manual can be easily accessed through any browser, so you just need an Internet connection.
New build also includes bug fixes, security and performance enhancements for you to get the best of your online venture and make your business more secure. This is why we strongly recommend you to go for this update.
That was a brief description of major innovations of the new SkaDate 7.1295 build. But as they say, ‘one look is worth a thousand words’, so take some time to check the Live Demo and experience all features of our online dating software.
We will be glad to read your comments, impressions and suggestions for the new SkaDate revision.
Best wishes,
Irene
Update: We have integrated a new site template into 7.1295 software build. Now you have even more choices for making your site look attractive and professional.
Posted in Miscellaneous | Tags: community software · dating software · site template · SkaDate · social networking · update
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
Now that you have done a great job on selecting the relevant keywords for your site, it’s time to talk about using them on your site efficiently. Well, the word ‘efficiency’ in the given context is something that cannot stand apart from using meta tags.
Basically, meta tags are HTML or XHTML elements used to help search engines list your site accurately in their indexes by providing structured data about your webpage content. Other than the Title tag, meta tags are not 
visible to the users and serve exclusively to allow search engines and browsers to ‘deal’ with your site more easily and effectively.
Below you fill find a few tips on how to use the meta tags efficiently to make search engines (and users!) like your site.
The title tag– should contain brief information about your site; the total summary of keywords for this tag should not exceed 60 characters, but still try to make it as descriptive as you can since search engines will use it as a title for your listing.
Example: <title> Free matchmaking, online dating service for pet lovers singles and their pets </title>
The meta tag – Keywords attribute – this is actually the place for ’storing’ all your keywords. You can add about 1000 characters into this section (commas and spaces count as characters too). Avoid repeating same keywords often (not more than 4-7 times).
Example: <META content=”online dating, dating, matchmaking, pet lovers, pets, cat owner dating, dog owner dating, singles, animal lovers, pet dating, pet health”>
The meta tag – Description attribute – allows you to write the description of what your site is about, which is going to be recognized by some search engines. About 150 characters should be enough for your description to express the site conception, but some search engines allow you for about 400.
Example: <META content=”A dating site for single pet lovers, looking for friendship and love with like-minded personals”>
It is advised that you use meta tags on each page of your site (they should be inserted inside the <HEAD> section of the page). This helps better indexation by search engines and thus, increases your chances for good ranking.
The good question is how to add meta tags to your site. Normally, this can be done through one of the HTML-editors, like Nvu or Dreamweaver. But SkaDate community software developers simplified the process of adding meta information to your dating or social networking site by bringing it to inserting codes to all the site pages right from the Admin Panel/SEO section. You can also add a unique meta title and description to each page via Admin Panel/Languages.
Now let me give you a few pieces of advice on how to get the most out of your relationship with a search engine.
- Make sure that your website textual content includes all the relevant keywords you selected for search engines. And remember that the keywords density should not exceed 5-10%.
- Check all the links on your site. There shouldn’t be any broken or irrelevant links.
- For some important site content (names, links, information) use text rather than images, since Google bots do not recognize text in images. Or at least always use alt=”keyword” tag for your images.
- Each page of your site has to be reachable from a at least one static text link.
- Make sure your site is displayed correctly in all browsers.
- Be attentive when it comes to affiliate programs – try to avoid using the textual content on your site identical to content on the other web sources. This may bring you to something opposite to success.
- Be careful using other business’ trademarks among your keywords as this may lead to legal issues in regards to possible misleading the potential users.
And here come a few ‘DON’Ts’ that may not only fail to help you in SEO, but at worst will lead to search engines terminating all kinds of interaction with your site by banning it out from the search results.
- Don’t go for Black Hat SEO (Spamdexing), which includes keyword stuffing (loading pages with keywords irrelevant to the site content) and link farms (a group of websites containing hyperlinks to each-other).
- Don’t use programs sending automated queries to Google, say, for checking the site rank status in search results for various queries.
- Don’t place hidden text or links on your site pages. Here I mean text invisible to site visitors, but available to Google crawlers.
- Don’t allow duplicate content.
- Don’t use cloaking (which is displaying different page content to users and to Google bots)
- Don’t create ‘doorway’ pages intended for crawlers rather than for site users.
These simple rules for managing your site content will help you avoid common mistakes causing unwanted consequences and establish friendly and long-term relationship with search engines.
If you have something to say on this subject – don’t hesitate to leave the article comments expressing your opinion!
Best wishes,
Irene
Posted in Marketing, Products, SkaDate | Tags: community software · keywords · search engine optimization · SEO · SkaDate · social networking
