MARIECLAIRE.CO.UK – Apr 18 – UK people lost £60M in relationship scams last year. Scamalytics, the company with a large anti-fraud database, says it now spots 60K 'romance scams' taking place in the UK every week. "The most common fraud is when people are asked to transfer money via Western Union or Moneygram", said Dan Winchester, founder of Scamalytics. Online fraud is a big and sophisticated industry. People might think they are messaging a person, when they're actually messaging a bot.
Category: Outlets – Marie Claire
Two Thirds Of People ‘Facebook Stalk’ Before A Potential Date
MARIE CLAIRE – Dec 18 – Two thirds of potential dates check out Facebook and Twitter before a first date, with three quarters of these cancelling if they find something that paints their prospective love interest in a bad light, according to a survey by Parship. The top "turn offs" were bad profile pictures, a lack of humour, aggressive online behaviour, flirting with others via profile and over sharing.
Why You’ll Never Find Real Love Online
MARIE CLAIRE – Aug 18 – A former scientist behind Match.com tells all. After spending a decade at Match.com and Yahoo Personals writing compatibility formulas, psychologist Mark Thompson had fallen out of love with his work.
Q: What made you leave e-dating?
A: I hated the way we overpromised and underdelivered. No computer can accurately predict whom you should be with.
Q: But isn't blind dating always hit or miss?
A: Yes, but you don't have to pay $30 a month to be set up by your friend. There's a different set of expectations. When diet companies show someone who lost a bunch of weight in six weeks, they have to say, "Results not typical." eHarmony and other sites should do the same.
Q: Do you think online dating can be fixed?
A: It really depends on people's willingness to come back and tell us why each date didn't work out so the system could get smarter.
Q: Your book is about finding love. Why did you call it Who Should You Have Sex With and not Who Should You Go Out With?
A: Because sex is a huge part of a relationship that people don't always focus on.
Q: But doesn't happiness have more to do with emotional compatibility?
A: Sexual compatibility is a keystone to a relationship's long-term success, and it requires three things: a similar emotional approach; a similar activity level; and a complementary power dynamic.
Q: How can we know if there's chemistry before we have sex?
A: People's public personas often correspond to their sexual personas.
The full article was originally published at Marie Claire, but is no longer available.
Forced To Be Fat
MARIE CLAIRE – Nov 15 – Is skinny really beautiful? Not in Mauritania, in Western Africa, where big is beautiful and stretch marks are sexy, young girls are brutally force-fed a diet of up to 16,000 calories a day–more than four times that of a male bodybuilder–to prepare them for marriage.
Rolling layers of fat are the height of sexiness. Big women are back in vogue. The ultimate sign of beauty, however, is silvery stretch marks on the arms. [Two Mauritanians] inspect a photo of a bikini-clad model in a glossy magazine from neighboring Morocco. "She looks ill," they agree, clicking their tongues at her jutting hips and clavicles. Then they turn to an article about liposuction, and laugh so hard the walls seem to shake."
The full article was originally published at Marie Claire, but is no longer available.