Dating safety guides
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Dating Safety for Different Life Stages: Why Risk Isn’t the Same for Everyone
Romance scam advice is often written as though every online dater faces the same risk in the same way. The data doesn’t support that — both UK and US figures show risk concentrated in specific age groups and life circumstances, for identifiable reasons, which means the advice worth prioritising differs depending on your own situation.…
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Reverse Image Search and Verifying Someone’s Identity Online
A reverse image search is one of the fastest, free ways to check whether a dating profile’s photos have been taken from somewhere else — a common tactic in fake profiles and romance scams, where stolen photos of an attractive, often military or professional-looking person are used to build trust quickly. It’s a genuinely useful…
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Protecting Your Financial Information When Dating Online
Romance scams and financial fraud have increasingly merged into a single category, because emotional trust turns out to be one of the most effective tools for getting someone to bypass their normal financial caution. This is about protecting the financial side specifically — the details, requests and patterns worth treating as hard limits, regardless of…
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Meeting an Online Match in Person Safely: A First-Date Safety Checklist
Most first-date safety advice condenses into a small number of genuinely effective habits, repeated consistently rather than followed occasionally. None of it requires distrust of the specific person you’re meeting — it’s simply good practice regardless of how the person seems, the same way wearing a seatbelt isn’t a comment on your driving. Tell someone,…
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How to Spot a Romance Scammer: Common Tactics and Warning Signs
Romance scams work precisely because they don’t feel like scams while they’re happening — they feel like a genuine, fast-moving connection. That’s not an accident; it’s the deliberate design of the tactic. Understanding the specific playbook makes it much easier to notice when you’re inside one. Love bombing: the opening move FTC guidance describes “love…
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Dating App Permissions: What to Allow and What to Deny on Your Phone
In short: When you install a dating app, your phone’s operating system — not the app itself — asks whether to grant access to your contacts, photos, camera, microphone and location. These are separate from the privacy settings inside the app (like hiding your distance). This guide covers the device-level prompts and a simple allow/limit/deny…
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Using a Secondary Phone Number for Online Dating: What It Protects and What It Doesn’t
In short: A free secondary or “virtual” phone number keeps your real number private while you get to know someone through a dating app. It is a useful privacy layer, not a safety guarantee — it will not tell you who is really on the other end of the line, and it will not stop…
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Why Romance Scams Spike at Certain Times of Year, and How to Stay Safer During Them
In short: Romance-scam activity is not spread evenly across the year. Reported cases and losses tend to rise around three calendar windows: the January surge in new dating-app sign-ups, Valentine’s Day, and isolating holiday periods like Thanksgiving and the Christmas/New Year stretch. Knowing why helps explain why extra caution during these specific windows is worth…