My younger daughter (early 30s) and her fiance are staying with us for a week. Yesterday, D’s good friend from college called her. I was in the same room and could hear her friend sobbing as she was speaking to my D. D’s friend is newly single and was dating a guy she met on a dating app. They’d been dating for 4 months. D’s friend had never been to the boyfriend’s apartment. Apparently, she called him and said she’d made soup and suggested bringing it for dinner at his apartment. He said he’d call her right back that he had to take a phone call. He never called back and when she tried to call him, he blocked her.
Friend tried calling the next day and again couldn’t get through. She then started doing some internet searching and found out that the boyfriend didn’t work where he said he worked. She tried searching his name and found nothing. She eventually went to a site called–Are You Dating my Boyfriend NYC? There she learned the guy had dated 3 or 4 other women and that the name he gave her wasn’t his real name.
There was a similar story - some guy was suing women for posting about his - being a bad date - whatever that means.
So perhaps yes - at least for some.
But if it took you four months to find out, I’d call foul on the person dumped - I mean they’d at least have asked to connect to his facebook and linkedin.
Although obviously there are all sorts of horror stories, of which this is a prime example.
And, I gotta agree with @tsbna44 in this one. Not that I’m a big fan of cyber sleuthing, but the fact that the young lady didn’t ask a few more questions over the course of 4 months (and never been to his place) is a bit passive.
D2 is marrying someone she met online. As soon as she told me his name, I was able to verify where he worked, went to school and where his parents lived.
It is also very easy to find out if someone is or was married online, with any criminal records, etc.
This didn’t happen to me. It happened to a friend of my daughter’s. I don’t know how much the friend had learned about the guy. I only heard about it second hand after her call to my daughter ended.
It actually is quite common these days, unfortunately. Women need to be vigilant and run a background check immediately after starting to date someone. There’s a reason these “Are we dating” sites are prevalent. And most of the men that get posted are sorry good for nothings who are often married, living with someone else, or in a relationship with someone else. I think the men that are on dating sites use it to stroke their egos and are not good relationship material.
When I said if you - I was making a general statement…like if anyone…
It’s one thing to read stuff like this on line - like the two stories I posted - but you always wonder, is it real or just people seeking fame - like reality shows.
But given you noted it happened, it’s obviously reall!!!
I think it has been forever thus. Early in my career, I had a very elderly patient (now deceased) who when I asked about what ran in the family laughed and replied “In my regular family, or in my dad’s other family?” As a middle aged man, he had discovered that his father had an entire second family about 20 miles away. His father claimed he worked as a “traveling salesman.” Both families were huge, and dirt poor. The wives never knew about each other.
This IS dating in 2024. You have to be careful. My sister, in her 60s, communicated with a guy for months. When she finally pushed him to meet for lunch, he came up with all kinds of excuses. This led to a Google search. She found out he didn’t live anywhere near her, was married, and a politician in his small Indiana town. What a waste of time! I know a 68 year old guy who lost $100k to someone he met online, so I guess it could be worse. On the other hand, my daughter did just get engaged to a guy she met on a dating app. He’s 100% legit.
I can’t imagine anyone meeting someone on line and not doing an internet search to make sure the person is who they say. So, I can see where it may initially happen since people do fake profiles but I can’t imagine it going on for that long.
Someone I know found out the person she’d been dating was married by seeing him wearing his wedding ring on national (or at least wide-local) TV. She was becoming suspicious already, bc of oddities, but that confirmed it. I know of a couple of great success stories, but there also some “bad people” on online sites.
I think today it is common to Google a person you start dating even if you don’t meet online. I know that D2 is doing that when she starts to date someone just to make sure they are who they say they are.
My daughter usually did. But she did not with her current boyfriend because of the following funny circumstances.
Daughter meets boy on dating app. They go out for one date and she likes him quite a bit and he texts the next day to set up a date while she is at work. Minutes later, boys father happens to tell him he wants to fix him up with someone. Boy tells dad he recently met someone (he didn’t mention only one date) and he really liked her and wanted to see if it would pan out. Dad asks if the girl is Jewish like them and son says something like "Dad her name is “Rachel SuperJewishlastname (think Goldfarb etc…)” And the Dad says "Wait is that my friend “Dave Superjewishlastname’s niece.” And son was like yeah, I think so after he confirms on her FB. So his dad who is sweet but a little clueless about these things texts my brother in law to tell him his son is “dating” his niece. And my brother in law then calls me to ask if his is true since he had been with our daughter two weeks before and she had mentioned she was not seeing anyone.
When I called my daughter to tell her she had been “outed” she (luckily) laughed and said only “well I’d like to be dating him but we have only gone on one date” And apparently when the boy find out he chastised his dad mildly saying “OMG dad, we went on one date but I really like her and want to be dating but Im scared you ruined my chances.”
But they are still together almost a year later and daughter never had to scope him out on the internet since he was such a known quantity to her extended family (turns out her cousins were friends with him too.)
I don’t think this is indicative of anything really new. Scammers gonna scam.
FWIW, my D met her current BF through a dating app. Before him, she dated a number of other guys. Some were just plain old flaky. There have always been flakes and scammers. Apps just make it easier to meet a lot of them in an easier way.
I didn’t meet my husband on-line, but similar kind of thing. We started dating, and I googled him, and there were pictures of him in his work environment with my neighbor. Neighbor said something like… “of course, I should have thought to introduce the 2 of you.” They’d been on vacation together, and he was a “known quantity.” That definitely made me relax some of my “spidy senses” (worries about whether he was “legit” or not).
I remember plenty of stories of women meeting men the old fashioned way (in bars or at clubs) and finding out much later that the guy was married. Actually, it almost happened to me - I worked on an assembly line the summer after high school, and a guy on the line hit on me (he was in his mid-late 20’s). I was flattered, and I thought about having a drink with him after work … until I overheard something about his wife. Hard no on that!