Is it true that the best things in life are free? Not when it comes to dating sites. Here I am not going to opine on the better known sites such as Eharmony. No, let's talk about a few sites nearly no one has ever heard of. Here I'll share some thoughts on four sites I'm on that are run by the same business and a fifth one that operates somewhere out in China.
The first four, the ones run by the same business, are named Friendfinder.com , Asiafriendfinder.com, Bigchurch.com and Amigos.com. You can have a free membership on here or a paid membership. If you are looking for someone, post a profile on one of these just for fun. Go on it and look around and you'll understand why I am not a paid member on any of these. Why am I on so many of these sites? Well, because I'm 56 and it's high time I guess I got married. Honestly, I'm desperate, but that's another story.
Back to why I wont pay for a membership on any of these sites. In a word, scammers. These sites are overrun with them. In case you don't know what I mean by scammers, I'm talking about people who are looking to scam you, or rather con you, cheat you out of your money or even your ID. Now you're safe enough as a free member who has not submitted credit card info into the system. Still, as you go browsing through profiles you may still feel like you are navigating somewhat dangerous waters on a jungle safari. Lions, tigers and bears oh my! And scammers!
There are a couple of signs I've discovered help to identify a scammer on these sites. One, they are often not honest about their ages. The average age listed is 32, but few of them look it. You look at these photos (and as a man, of course I am speaking primarily about women's profiles and their photos. I'm guessing the tell-tale signs are about the same on the male scammer side), and you will see that these ladies look either way too young to be 32 or are looking a little bit long on the tooth. That number 32 is so prevalent among them that I refer to these ladies as the 32 Scammer Club.
The second sign is photos where the face of the lady is not well framed in the photo. Oh the number of photos I constantly see where the top of the woman's head is cut off! Often you can see just half the woman's face in the photo. Sometimes all you will see is a pair of lips, an eye, or even just a pair of FEET. Seriously, no joke. It's ok to include a photo like that if it is one in a series of photos that you have uploaded to your profile, but often it is the profile photo and the ONLY photo of the lady. I think I figured out why they do this. There is now a site, or several, that specialize in scammer detection. You just submit the photo in question and the site will do a search on it and inform you as to who exactly the lady is and whether you has a history of pulling off scams.
These four sites I have mentioned enable one to put someone on a "hotlist" or to "flirt" with someone. I have been put on a number of hotlists and received a handful of flirts but honestly I would have nothing to do with most of those women who have ever done so. Although I gotta admit that some of them are damn hot! Still, by now I can smell a scammer from clear across the country by now. A couple of them have hotlisted me or flirted with me more than once, but something about them beyond the points I have mentioned gives me the creeps.
To be certain the site has its share of honest ladies, or so they seem. I have become skeptical of some ladies on these sites who probably don't even deserve the skepticism. Poor girls, often in other countries, some without the money to pay for a membership, which means they cannot write you. Nonetheless, there they are viewing you again and again, hoping you get the message: write me damn it! But if you don't have the paid membership all you can do is stare longingly at each other's profile photos. Just to be able to write someone a quick note if you aren't a paying member you have to load up on points by uploading several photos or writing a comment on someone's blog, etc. And then most of the ladies who have "gold memberships" on one of these sites still look like scammers.
Let me give some quick takes on these first four sites I have listed. The original version of these sites is FriendFinder, probably the scariest of the four. Hard to explain why; it is probably that everyone that has viewed me on there so far I have looked at with a doubtful eye. Something about them. The second one is BigChurch. Really, I don't know what is so "church" about this site. You get all kinds on here, on just good, wholesome choirgirls. If the mothers of some of these women on this site could see these photos of their darlings, they would take them in a hurry for a good talk with the local church pastor.
Then there is Amigos.com. This site is supposedly for Latinos looking for Latinos, or for non-latinos, and for non-latins looking for Latinos. Really, you get all kinds here, looking for whatever. To the credit of this site, several years ago I did meet a lovely Colombian woman on it. I eventually flew to Colombia a couple of times and almost married her. In the end it did not work out, but it was a wonderful experience. The last of these four is AsiaFriendFinder. Now this one makes me laugh a little for this reason. You would think there are three kinds of people on here: 1. Asians looking for other Asians 2.Asians who would like to open themselves up for relationships with non-Asians and 3.Non-Asians looking for a possible relationship with Asians. Nevertheless here comes a fourth group: non-Asians looking for relationships with non-Asians. Think about that one for a moment. This begs the question, why would a non-Asian go looking for other non-Asians on a site called AsiaFriendFinder? Now like I said with Amigos, you can get all kinds here. The short answer takes you back to one word though, yes, scammers.
These sites are so rife with people looking to pull con jobs on the naïve and ignorant that it begs the question, "Why won't the moderators of these sites do something about this?" Where are the stricter controls? I'll tell you where they are. On AsiaFriendFinder some weeks ago I tried to upload a bit of a "racy" photo onto my profile. Now by racy in my case, I mean it was just a photo of me with my shirt off, nothing else. I got back a notice saying that they rejected my new photo because it was "inappropriate." Funny, considering almost everything else by any con artist on this site passes right under blind eyes on these sites.
The last site is one called AsiaMe.com, and boy are the women on here hot! It is supposed to be a site where you can meet eligible Asian women looking for American men, but by Asian they mean 99.99 percent Chinese, with a dab of Thai girls and Vietnamese girls thrown in. These ladies come from all walks of life and are of all ages. What is so nice about them is that their photos aren't selfies or taken by their friends. all professional model studio shots, mostly in the loveliest of dresses and outfits. So many of them write you the mostly beautiful and downright sexiest of emails, and really tempt you to pull out the credit card. I still don't. In this case I get the sense that the ladies aren't the scammers, but I'm not so sure about the moderators of the site!
Maybe I'm too untrusting, or really just plain cheap. When I find myself a wife let it not be said that I paid for her. That is not just my style. Maybe I'm a window shopper. Anyway, to answer my question at the start of my article, I too do think that the best things in life are free. That's the bottom line for me.