I received a fax today from a publishing company. Evidently, this company is writing a book on the internet dating industry and examines how scammers from West Africa (especially Nigeria), Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have stolen money using romance scams.

In this fax, they ask the following questions. These are good questions and every dating site should address these issues on their site. We feel we do address these issues and will ask and answer each question here:

1) How does your organization address a customer's complaint concerning scamming abuse? Does your company have policies in place to address a customer complaint? Has your organization implemented a criteria system to determine whether a profile should be removed or maintained on your site?

On universalsingles.net
we take scamming very seriously. We have a scam tracking system in place that
detects scammers via the online mail system and, in most cases, deletes and
flags their profiles before they can even send out the first mail.

We then
send a copy of the mail to us to confirm that it is a scammer. We then block the
IP address using the first 3 sets of numbers, rather than all 4 sets of numbers,
in order to block out future attempts by the same person. If the member gets
past our scam tracking system, we have a link at the bottom of each profile
where a member can click and report that member for scam abuse.

We
immediately delete profiles and we post these profiles and any uploaded photos
in our online scam report system. When a member logs into our web site, they are
first taken to our scam reports page where they can view the latest scammers and
read reports of how they are scammers so that they can be educated to spot
scammers immediately.