Free Dating Online – Is It Ever Really Free?

If you want to try dating online, you may think that testing out a dating service by way of a free membership or a free registration is a good idea. This will let you see what sort of potential dating partners they have available, before you spend any money, right?

This is fine, but you should be aware of some issues with free online dating services.

Firstly, only a very small or very new dating service will offer free online dating to all its subscribers (in other words, will give you the full profile and full contact details of your selected date). This is because they will be trying to build up the numbers of people they have in their database before they start to charge members a subscription for their service. Though their service is free, as the number of people using their service is small, you will be very unlikely to find a compatible date this way.

Another problem with free dating online services, or trial subscriptions, is that you will quickly discover that the service you get for free lacks some of the features of full or paid membership. You may not be able to contact other members you may be interested in, or email them. You may not have access to all the most recent or most attractive members. In other words, the 'free' service is actually just bait to get you hooked, so that you are more likely to get your credit card out.

Speaking of credit cards, many free dating online companies will offer you time-limited free access to the full service. Using the old marketing trick which was in use by magazine publishers and others long before the Internet came along, you will be required to give your credit card details before you get access; after a month or less, you will start being charged for full membership unless you remember to cancel. This will happen whether you have successfully got a date from using the service or not. Some services also use monthly charging via Paypal, which you are even less likely to check regularly.

Another issue is that many of the potential dates you see on free dating sites may not even be real people. While a paying credit card registration will ensure a person is who they say they are, a free registration can be faked – with a false photograph, false age, false address and even a false gender being given. The only real detail given may be the email address, and we all know how easy it is to get an anonymous email address from Yahoo or Hotmail. But why would someone set up a free profile like this?

This is called a 'romance scam', in which a person looking for love gets in touch with someone who looks like an attractive date online. Often, the photo of a model will actually be used as bait. The scammer will refuse to meet, pleading that they are short of money or have a medical or other crisis that needs to be solved first. An appeal to the victim soon follows, money is sent, and the 'date' is never heard from again.

Despite these warnings, there are honest and useful services for free dating online which are available, and many successful relationships have started this way. The best approach is to take some time to browse many of the services, decide whether you want to go with a specialist or general dating site, compare their membership numbers and professionalism, then test the ones you feel most comfortable with.

By the way, you sound nice, how about doing dinner?