Huge advice from our PIs in LA: Be careful who you meet online, ladies!

Is online dating safe? Is it worth it?
Can online dating be dangerous?
I am dating someone online for a while, how can I be sure it’s not a fraud?
I think my online date is a scam, what can I do now?

We have been getting a number of calls about online dating lately. I’m not sure if it is because of the mandatory quarantine or what. We get a few here and there but not so many as lately. Women, usually smarter than men (sorry guys!) but women telling me about men: “He sounds too good to be true”. Depending on the age, he shows pics of his kids, or grandkids. Wife DIED. Wife LEFT HIM WITH THE KIDS. We have heard it all.

We do what is called a reverse Social Media . It is not your typical Intellus or “been verified” type social background. Ours is pretty thorough. If your person does not exist in our system…they do not exist! I get women all the time who want to make sure that this lumber man in Montana is true. Or this retired NY stockbroker in the Cayman Islands is legit…. more often than not, they are not. But they do leave enough legit crumbs that we do find them.

I used it myself to find a lady reporter at the LA Times. I needed to serve her. I could not get to her at work and needed to find her. I guessed she was local, the lawsuit was in Los Angeles. There were 36 people in LA with her name, very generic name. I found her on Twitter. Her picture was there. All I had was her picture, LA times, reporter and twitter handle. My reverse Social Media picked her up, picked up the same twitter pics and other Social Media of the same woman and her address was one that belonged to one of the 36 that I had come up with. I know it works.

We did a reverse Social Media on a guy who was on a dating app and met this wealthy woman. He scammed her out of money, a lot of money. Instead of telling him to go pound sand, she wanted revenge. She called us. Can you find him? (We can try). She called us from Indiana. What do you know about him?

He supposedly was from the state of NJ, went to MIT, yada, yada. She gave us his social profile and the tidbits she knew, the dating app, his dating app ID, etc. We found him. We found his entire online profile. He was on SO MANY dating apps. This one was called “Our Time”. He never went to MIT but he was from New Jersey.

We not only found this guy’s profile; we found many profiles. The only thing consistent were his photos. He apparently had all these various identities and we broke the news to this woman; she probably wasn’t the first lady he scammed. Adamant, she wanted to know who he truly was and sue him. Well, we found his true identity. He wasn’t quite the wealthy entrepreneur he claimed to be. Nothing he said was true, except his age and year he graduated. Oh, and his pictures were legit. We found him. He was from Florida He said he currently lived in Los Angeles and mentioned a couple of coffee shops he could walk to and frequented in a neighborhood in Venice. She had a lawyer draw up a summons and complaint and wanted him served. We encouraged her to keep the “relationship” going.

We went to and staked out one of these coffee shops one morning. By God, there he is. Wearing a white undershirt, shorts, not clean-shaven. But it was him. I walked up to him after he exited in the parking lot. “Mike?!” (His true first name was Michael). He looked at me up and down and said “Hi” but then seemed to hesitate; maybe he realized he didn’t recognize me from anywhere. So, I whipped out the paperwork I had from my purse. He let it bounce off of him and left it there and did a fast walk away from me. I yelled “I already served you, do you want anyone else to see this paperwork lying in the parking lot?” He slowly started to jog away from me. I yelled “you were served, you are being video’d”. He started running faster. Oh God, I ran after him, I wanted to see where he goes. I chased him down some alley and lost him in the alley. He went in to one of these homes…behind gated driveways but which one? I gave up. He was served. Like a dumb-ass, he panics and drives right passed me. I got his plate. Ran his plate and yep, that’s him. I saw where the car came out of. We got him!! His car was ready to be impounded. The report came back, his name, overdue parking tickets, late registration, and suspended license.

He scammed so many women. So what, he was handsome. Why women fall for this I will never know. At least this guy wasn’t dangerous. This lady was going to pursue it. You can always win a lawsuit but that does not mean you can collect….

Be careful who you meet online, ladies!!

If you have doubts about your online date, don’t hesitate to contact us! We are ready to listen very carefully to your issues, suggest solutions, and get the very best possible outcome for you.