Equally Matched Dating site

I was reading one of the postings on here involving someone's mother being a potential victim for a love scammer. An email from him was included and the wording of it struck a nerve in me. While the scammer I fell prey to was indeed American and not of the same "breed" as this guy mentioned in the one I was reading, it does bring up something I think needs mentioning on here. I do still have a profile on the Equally Matched dating site (don't ask me why....I am being EXTREMELY careful!) and I've noticed something quite alarming about that site. 90% of the messages I get seem to be from foreign men. They all state their awe at my beauty (oh, gag me with a spoon! I'm just your average gal!) and proclaim their desire to be my everlasting love....blah, blah, blah. They ALL are widowers with children. The English is poor and sentences are put together badly and words mispelled. There are all kinds of discrepencies in their profiles. Almost everyone will either give me an email address to write him at or ask for mine in the first message. They give some excuse as to why they need to do this ("I don't come on this site very often"). It's free! So why wouldn't you check it? Now, the real topper happened this past week. I got a message that seemed very familiar, yet I knew I had never talked to the guy before. I went down thru my list of previous messages and there it was! Another guy from a different area of the country (both of them middle eastern looking) with a message worded almost exactly the same!!!! I was dumbfounded! Then I laughed! Then I wrote the second guy and said "you need to get someone new to write your script. I already got this one." Hmmmm, I wonder why he hasn't written back?

biirrd, glad to see you've learned how to spot the scammers.

Sad to say, most dating sites are awash with scammers. There are a few that try very hard to keep the scammers away, but most dating sites - free or not - leave the scammers on for several reasons.

1 - It's too much trouble to screen every single person who signs up.

2 - The more people who've signed up, the bigger the "community" looks, and the more people will sign up, hoping that "The One" is in there somewhere.

3 - Scammers frequently sign up with photos of models, which makes the innocent, honest seeker believe that the site abounds with "beautiful people," another incentive to join.

I have suggested that the administrators of the site check the IP of new members (they have the capability to do that) to see if it corresponds with the location claimed in the profile. Takes a little work and a little time lag between when the person signs up and when the site is available to them, and it's not 100% fool-proof, but it would go a long way toward keeping the site clear of undesirable elements. Of course, there was no response, and the scammers are all still there.

Yes, someone may say that they're temporarily out of their "home IP," but the admins could advise them to wait until they're home to sign up for a dating site.