Good Afternoon. My brother had some bad luck with recent online dating sites and he is disappointed and says he is losing interest in pursuing girls. He recently started chatting with an unknown girl / boy from Philippines and he gave his email id. They have been emailing back and forth and I warned him a couple of times to be careful because we know about these unknown chat sites that have people with fake identities to cheat people. I asked him not to lose hope and keep looking to find a nice girl and stop all this online stuff. Literally he doesn't even know whether if that person is a boy / girl or whether if they are over 18. I suggested him not to talk sexual / share any pictures so that they wont blackmail him for money or something in the future. He says that he is in full control and just doing this because he has nothing to do at the moment. How can I tell him how dangerous this could be? I just don't want him to get hurt both emotionally and financially. Please let me know your thoughts. I will have him read this post. Thank you.
Honestly he should just ask to see them from a live webcam to see who they are. And for the age he can only assume.. (Thats if your saying he asked and you think they could be lying)
I agree with the webcam suggestion. Social media accounts could work, but it's easy to set up a fake profile and get a few friends - possibly strangers to this person - to make it look legit. The internet's also full of pictures of people of all ages and races, so this person can easily get a few pictures off the net, or even use pictures of their cousin or sibling or whatever. It's always a gamble with stuff like this. It's important that he trusts his gut. If it doesn't feel right, there's bound to be something fishy going on. I'm not on dating sites because of all the frauds out there. But that's just me, I'm paranoid and don't trust easily. You can be literally anyone you want to be online. Just to test this, I went onto an online international chat site that doesn't require you to register to chat, and I "created" a different persona every time I went online, and people actually buy into it. So yeah, online dating is always a gamble, so if I were him, I'd delete my profile and rather meet people the old-fashion way...
