When you belong to Facebook, you may sometimes have the experience of encountering women who appears to be seeking romantic relationships. It's easy to find one's self falling for such a woman, especially if she appears to be open to the possibility of a relationship with you even though there are definite age differences. The tough part is trying to figure out if these overtures of love (or at least intense interest) are genuine or not.
Over the years, I've learned that the Internet has an abundance of what I call "love scams". The first one I encountered was with a woman who called herself Valentina. Naturally, she was from Russia. Naturally, she really wanted to meet me, but could not afford to come to America unless I paid her way to come to meet me here.
I didn't meet Valentina on Facebook, I met her at CraigsList, but the principle was similar.
It was hard to give up on the dream of meeting the attractive young woman pictured in the photos she sent to me in email messages, but fortunately, I actually took the time to "vet" Valentina, actually paying a small fee to a private investigator, to check out her claim that she lived in a particular city in Russia. (She didn't, or at least, there was no evidence that she did. I'd gotten suspicious when she spoke in vague generalities, but never answered my questions about such things as the first names of her parents and relatives.)
On Facebook, I met a woman calling herself Linda Apex. She triggered my instinctual desire to protect myself from love scammers, when she told me that she wanted me to buy an expensive Blackberry cell phone so that we could talk on the phone. (She claimed to be living in Africa at the time.) I looked at her list of Facebook friends, which included Sherman Andrus, former singer for the Christian group The Imperials. I wrote to Sherman, asking if he knew her, and what he knew about her if he did. He was kind enough to write back to me, telling me that he did not know her, and he advised staying away from her.
The second Facebook woman who seemed to show some promise was named Sharon Jameson. She didn't try to scam me out of an expensive cell phone, but there were other problems with her.
The third Facebook woman, with whom I am still dealing, was and is a woman named Sonja Lopez. Even with her, there were problems. She said she was from Florida and living in Seattle, but her Facebook page listed her location as Houston, Texas, not Seattle. She actually gave me her phone number, and she called me once. Her area code was for Houston, not Seattle. I do not like it when women lie to me.
Having said that, I'm still continuing to correspond with her, because I like some of the things she's said to me in email messages. I've made it very clear to her that she's going to have to be willing to travel to Bellingham on her own dime in order to meet me face to face, if the relationship is to ever go anywhere. So I'm cautiously optimistic, with emphasis on the word "cautiously". But I'm not putting all of my eggs in one basket, which is why I'm still trying to develop Get Hitched, and why I could really use the help of my friends in order to do so.
