Dabble in online dating? It turns out that the crippling fear of an awkward first date is the least of your troubles. A fraud is sweeping online dating sites, according to a special report in this month’s issue of Glamour Magazine.

The scam typically works like this: A con artist, usually based in an Internet cafe overseas, will lift a photo from Facebook or another social networking site. They will painstakingly craft a fake profile and begin targeting people that are looking for love.

Once they’ve made contact, they will typically request to move the conversation to a private instant messaging service. He or she will begin the courtship process by sending letters and love poems for a period of weeks and finally offer to fly to meet their victim. Within hours of the expected arrival time, an emergency will strike: A work visa has expired, or their aunt/niece/child is sick and they need a few thousand dollars to be wired over so they can finally meet their intended.

In many cases, scammers will choose to use pictures of military personnel. After discovering that his headshot consistently showed in hoax dating profiles (thanks to a Google alert), Army Master Sgt. C.J. Grisham set up a personal blog for soldiers to report their photo being used on online dating sites.

“Over the past few years, I’ve seen these scammers use all kinds of photos removed from open Facebook pages, blogs, official military websites, and command pages,” he wrote in a blog post last month. “I’ve also seen my own photos and name used.” (The image of Grisham that was used by scammers is pictured, left)

With a few of the largest player like OKCupid, Match, and others, there are precautionary measures in place. However, on smaller or niche dating sites like christiandatingforfree.com and datanta, there is no security system to spot a fraudster.

[Update: the site christiandatingforfree.com contacted us to notify us of the precautions they have in place, including a human editor who responds to complaints and reports, and ThreatMetrix, a cybercrime prevention software.]

“On some dating sites, as many as one out of 10 profiles is a scammer,,” Mark Brooks, editor of Online Personals Watch told Glamour.

The lesson here is that online dating startups will need to step up their game to keep consumers safe. “In the war against online dating scams and security threats, we’ve chosen to do whatever is necessary to always be a few steps ahead of scammers, and not the other way around – which is usually too late for our users,” said Cupid.com’s CEO, Bill Dobbie.

“This decision has its high price tag, but the alternative can be much costlier,” he continued. For this reason, Cupid.com, the online dating network behind Flirt.com and BlackMatch.com, announced a partnership this month with RecSys Ltd, an anti-scammer technology. The goal is to catch them 35 percent faster.

With the new system, any individual identified as a scammer is added to the master database, which other online dating companies can access. To identify rogue behavior, the algorithm factors in the user’s login location, IP address, profile photo, and behavior patterns. Additionally, the system can detect “bots,” often operated by organized crime gangs, which create profiles and engage real members in automated scripted conversations designed to elicit payment.

Already, through its quality assurance methods, the site has identified 20,000 scammers who get permanently blocked from Cupid’s communities each month.

Here are some expert tips on avoiding scams from Cupid.com’s Communications director, Sean Wood:

• Military pictures should turn on your scam radar warning. Some of the biggest scams occur from supposed soldiers in the armed services with a believable sob story and a desperate need to settle down.
• Try and keep the conversation going on the dating site messaging system rather than being dragged off to Skype or MSN, at least initially.
• Employ some basic conversational tests: If the person claims to be local, engage in a local-knowledge conversation (e.g. the weather, some nearby event, sports team, TV, or festival) and watch for mistakes. If the person is not claiming to be local, consider why he or she would want a long-distance relationship. Is there good reason, such as some particularly unusual common ground? If not, why aren’t they restricting themselves to people a bit nearer to their current location?
• Look out for words like “dear” and old-fashioned romantic language, as well as badly formed sentences.
•  Never, ever send money to anyone on a dating site, and especially avoid wiring cash.
• Always be on the lookout for get-rich-quick schemes. If it sounds too good to be true, then it’s probably a scam.

Word of caution: The FBI recently issued a warning about a different kind of online dating scam known as “ransomware.” It’s a virus that will make your computer inoperable until you hand over a payment. Read more about the ransom scam here. 

Have you ever been a victim of an online dating scam? To protect consumers, sites like romancescam.com are being set up for volunteers to post details of the counterfeit dating profiles they come across. Christine Davis, a design student who was duped by a fake profile, set up this particular site and wants to support others who have been targeted. Davis calls it the “Nigerian advance fee scam,” as it is thought that the majority of spammers are based in Western Africa.

Hacker image via Shutterstock

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Alex Mehr.

Romance is a part of all our lives at one point or another – whether you are a casual dater, looking for love, or in a committed relationship. So it’s not surprising that an entire online industry has been created around romance. With the emergence of new technologies and the growing popularity of social networks, the online romance industry is constantly evolving.

While online dating remains a core piece of the online romance puzzle, social networking for couples has recently paved the way for a new business opportunity for entrepreneurs.

Singles versus couples

Traditional dating sites have been around for some time with great success. Recently, my business partner and I noticed a lack of opportunity for couples to interact with one another, and we launched a specifically designed product.

Since then, we have seen a growing trend of couples turning to private social networks to interact with one another. Additionally, we’ve seen a growing popularity around location-based social discovery services that are geared toward helping users find and meet new people in their vicinity. Each of these services plays a key role in the online romance industry as a whole.

The challenge, we realized, is that people’s relationship statuses change, which makes it difficult to keep customers long-term.

Since the early days of our company, Zoosk, customers would send us emails thanking us for helping them find love, sharing photos and the story of their relationship. One of my favorite stories came from a couple who met on Zoosk and then realized they lived down the street from each other. Even though they were neighbors, they never ran into each other before meeting online.

As customers continued to engage with our brand, even when they no longer needed a dating service, we saw an opportunity to overcome the challenge of customer retention, and created a service for people in relationships. This way, they’d have a place to share their stories – not just with us, but with their friends and family.

Companies must now offer different tools to users at every stage of their romantic journey. That way, when a user goes from A to B, it will be possible for them to easily switch gears and use a different set of tools more appropriate for that stage of their life.

Not only does this business model create more brand loyalty, but it helps eliminate the churn that is often experienced in the industry.

Private versus social

We live in a social world, both online and off. Yet, many of the services in the world of online romance are limiting to users because they don’t capitalize on social.

As I mentioned, several new services have popped up that offer private social networking for couples. These social networks are designed specifically for you and your significant other. However, we believe it is much more rewarding for couples to share their relationship memories and milestones with family and friends. With private social networks, the element of “sharing” is lost, and it’s easy to get bored. Isn’t it more entertaining when friends “like” and comment on your pictures?

I believe social networking for couples should be a core part of the online romance industry, but when developing a product, entrepreneurs must think bigger picture and incorporate more social elements.

Furthermore, in the real world, singles and couples are friends. They set each other up on dates and they wish each other “Happy Anniversary.” I’ve found that friends in a relationship often make the best matchmakers. Yet, many traditional online dating sites do not offer a platform that allows for those friends to give dating tips and advice to their single friends.

The evolution of social networking has made it possible for online romance sites to bridge the gap between friends, and even family, both single and in a relationship, by giving them the opportunity to be a part of one another’s romantic journey.

“Hookups” versus long-term engagement

Social networking services focused on location-based social discovery often get dubbed “hookup” sites. Depending on the service, that may or may not be true. Regardless, I like to think of it this way – every city has a bar that would be considered a hookup spot. So, it’s a given that the online romance industry would have its fair share of hookup spots.

This is an element of romance that has become a large part of the industry, especially with the proliferation of smartphones, and it will be around for a long time. But again, these services fill a specific need, and will lose customers as they move onto the next phase of their lives. Consequently, they will always have issues with long-term engagement.

Together, each of the elements of romance that I mentioned above makes up the online romance ecosystem. They represent the various stages of our romantic lives.

As an entrepreneur in the online romance space, I believe it is important to evolve with your users and to offer services that cater to each facet of their romantic journey, providing them with different tools and resources that will be useful every step of the way. While there is no doubt that the online dating industry alone has been incredibly successful, it is really just the beginning.

By expanding our services beyond dating, we’ve been able to create more brand loyalty and have also built stronger relationships with our users.

Alex Mehr (@alexmehr) is the co-founder and co-CEO of Zoosk, the romantic social network. He co-founded Zoosk in 2007 alongside Shayan Zadeh, while attending the MBA program at the University of California, Berkeley. Alex holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Maryland. Prior to starting Zoosk, he worked as an engineer for NASA and collaborated on several manned and unmanned space flights.