Are you cheating on your spouse or girlfriend? If you are dating someone while still dating others, or having marital problems and going outside of your marital pact for romance, beware. Girlfriends, boyfriends and spouses alike can find out more information about you than you can possibly imagine online.
Dear Miss, I am writing you from my husband’s account because I noticed that my husband attempted to contact you online from this dating web site. I gained access to his dating account and wanted to let you and other women know he is lying and FYI if he attempts to ask you out he is in fact married, to me
Spokeo
Sites like spokeo, peopledata, peoplefinder and a plethora of others allow you to input an email address or cell phone number and do a search across the Internet for all of your social profiles. Even if you are careful to hide your profiles these sites sweep the entire world wide web and are sure to uncover at least some information about you from available sources on the Internet.
Sites like LinkedIn where you sign up and show where you work, what you do and who you work with are not only goldmines for hackers. Hackers can breach your security by sending you professional looking emails and if you open an email attachment for example from a source that appears trustworthy that’s all they need to install malware or a virus on your computer.
But its not just hackers that benefit. They are also provide daters with a wealth of information on people they meet or come across online. Online daters in particular, are increasingly able to uncover personal information about the people they meet online. As soon as they find out your name and town in which they live they have something to start typing into google. They’ll come across everything from dating profiles to professional profiles to class reunions to anything that duplicates even your dating profile name, id or headline.
Intelius
For just a few dollars a stalker can pay for even more information. For example Intelius gathers data from billing and other public sources that can give an interested party your current home and previous addresses and more. They can do a reverse search from your cell phone number or email address. For a few more dollars they can do a background check or a search of public, legal, divorce and police or arrest records.
Social networking
Even if you make your social profiles only viewable to friends there are ways to get in. Daters make fake profiles all the time and then they friend you as an acquaintance or pose as someone else in order to get inside of your privacy bubble. A person that is close to you can snoop your cell phone messages and calls as well as your private emails to uncover data as to whether you may be cheating on them or looking for action outside of your relationship. A person that barely even knows you is just as scary because your online presense doesn’t just connect you with friends. It provides stalkers with a veritable free toolkit to uncover personal information about you.
The dangers
If you are dabbling in illicit activity or even if you aren’t and have a suspicious mate who is willing to pry, you can be exposing yourself to stalker dangers. I’ve had more than one friend who after being dumped by a girlfriend, created a number of fake dating profiles and then continued to stay in contact with the ex as a fake persona. That one night stand you had can become the next person you are talking to online. He might ask you about your dating experiences and unbeknown-st to you be the person you just meanly abandoned.
I’ve often heard of situations where an ex will create fake facebook profiles to break social networking security. Once they have a friend be-friend you or friend you themselves as a new person, they will be able to see your facebook information and postings. I’ve also known people that look up their dates on sites like Spokeo or Intellius to find out where they live or have lived in the past. I knew of a girl from my work who was so upset over her ex-lovers activities that she parked her car down the block from her ex-lovers house for months watching his activities with a new girlfriend even! Prior to that, she was normal.
At times I’ve even received (and have friends who’ve had the same experience) desperate pleas from women who write to me from their husbands dating accounts informing me that their husband is cheating on them. This could be someone I’ve never met in my life. You go online and some man saves your profile as a favorite. The wife gets onto his account and writes all the women on his favorites list that he’s a married man. So you get emails from them even though you never have even communicated with the man. You can’t control who saves you as a favorite.
The point is that cheaters are online and then their significant others may be chasing their activities as well. Some women even write a declarative in their dating profiles such as, if you have a crazy stalker ex please don’t contact me! Same sex obsession is also a concern. Let’s say a scorned woman finds out through her ex boyfriends facebook who he is dating. She might befriend him on facebook with an alias and peruse all of his friends. When she sees his comments on a new woman’s photograph she becomes obsessed with his new love. If you happen to date a cheater then the person they are cheating on could become obsessed with you without you even knowing it. That’s why it is so important to get to know someone fairly well before becoming involved with them. If they’re still involved in other relationships you could become a target.
Dear so and so, my husband is cheating on me I just found his online account and I wanted to write all the girls he’s contacted to inform them that he is married. I’ve recieved messages from women on facebook who suspect their boyfriend is straying. Dear so and so I see you communicated with my boyfriend and I want to let you know that he is with me. I have friends who get emails on facebook from other women. Dear so and so I’m going out with person x and see that he is your friend can you tell me anything about him?
Lovers who become obsessed or scorned can become stalkers even if they have never been stalkers prior to that particular relationship. It can be certain elements of the relationship or a serious case of unrequited love that can bring out the absolute worse insecurity and behavior in people. Love that is not returned is clearly a major ingredient of obsessive relationships.
When your marriage starts to go sour and you aren’t working hard to repair the relationship is another way station where people may stray out of their relationship and be caught by the other spouse. Let’s say you have a married couple who are having problems and haven’t been intimate in some time. The husband for example may venture onto the online dating networks and post a profile. He might be doing it out of boredom and seeking entertainment but very quickly it could escalate into his communicating with and eventually meeting other women. The wife, suspicious, can snoop his email, cell phone or even the dating profiles looking to catch him in illicit activities.
They say that up to 20% of daters online are actually married or in a serious relationship and dabbling online for illicity activity. Many lie about who they are, their age and other facts. If a wife or husband catches their partner dabbling into online dating it can literaly set off a divorce! Even if you aren’t in a relationship, online spear fishing can give a casual date plenty of information to stalk you.
Precautions
If you are cheating on a spouse you can be assured that eventually they will uncover the facts either by catching you in the act, snooping your personal email or cell phone, or gathering information from online sources. If you don’t want your relationship destroyed you might want to try and fix it before going outside and causing further demise.
If you are playing around online and dating for sports sake its another area of concern. This player mentality may seen fine to you. But, if you become involved with women or men who really like you and then pull a fast one on them, you are setting yourself up for having angry scorned ex’s wanting revenge. The person who you have a fake relationship with for a few weeks or months could become a stalker that you just can’t shake. Obviously you can’t control it if you meet someone who is unstable or gets obsessed with you however there are certain things you might be doing that attract this scenario. Jumping into instant relationships that you have no intention of staying in can put the other person into an unrequited love scenario with you and that breeds stalkers.
Take care when meeting women or men online. Get to know a person well before getting involved. Men often say that the women they meet online are crazy. In fact, they might be getting quickly involved with these women then moving on just as fast, which helps bring out crazy behaviors in them. What a man views as crazy could really be a woman just utterly furious that she was misled and duped by an insensitve cheating cad. Women need to be very careful about where and when they meet someone and with whom they communicate to online. Women can also have trouble with ex boyfriends, dates or lovers who can’t leave leave them alone.
There’s the crazy person and then there’s the crazy person maker. Often two people contribute to creation of a stalker. You can think a person is familiar or trustworthy without really and truly knowing them. This false sense of familiarity can bring people to your doorstep who are emotionally unstable or dangerous. You don’t know what rock they crawled out from under.
Text stalking
Hopefully this article touches on some important issues for cheaters and daters alike. Just know that there is a wealth of information that can be uncovered about you these days using the Internet and with just a few dollars your background information can be purchased. Don’t assume a false sense of trust from online dating sites. The minute you give out your cell phone number you are providing a person with a wealth of information.
It used to be that a person who has access to your phone number could just make phony phone calls that could be screened out. But nowadays such stalker activity can become serious harassment and fast. If you use your cell phone for work purposes and someone constantly texts you or calls you it can disrupt your whole entire life. That cell phone is with you all of the time. Fortunately some cell carriers will let you block a number but odds are that if you need to go to that extreme the person will continue to bother you by calling from another phone source.
Text stalking is more prevalent than ever! Remember to take precautions when giving out your cell phone number and other personal information. Whether its a suspicious spouse or a one time date, people have more information than ever making it all the easier for them to become obsessed with you and able to spear fish personal information about you from online sources.
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