look before you leap

Washington, Jan. 28: Kimberly Hall was twice betrayed by men she met dating online. Both turned out to be married.

So she started doing background checks on her dates using a website called Intelius. Now, the 33-year-old from Laurel is engaged to a man she met on Blackplanet.com, but even he had to undergo record checks. “He wasn’t happy” doing it, Hall said of her fiance. But eventually he turned over his Social Security number.

In the past decade, sites such as Yahoo Personals, Match.com and eHarmony helped make web-based courtship mainstream for 10 million current daters. But some seasoned veterans say the thrill of using the Internet’s power to find soul mates has given way to caution. Singles now draw on a growing arsenal of security and research tools — from services that verify identity and background to companies that provide temporary phone numbers as a barrier to stalkers.

Sites like DontDateHimGirl.com allow scorned lovers to warn others away from their bad dates.

The growth of the dating-security industry is part of the evolution of the Internet, where every powerful tool such as online banking or email comes with a dark side of data theft and spam messages.

MySpace, which started as a way for kids to exchange likes and dislikes, recently set up checks against sex-offender registries. By comparison, dating sites have been slow to adopt safety-filtering measures; few dating sites conduct their own background checks on members and only one seeks to verify marital status.

Thirty-one per cent of American adults say they know someone who has used a dating website, and nearly 60 per cent of Internet users said they think a lot of online daters lie about their marital status, said the Pew Internet & American Life Project study.

Dating site True.com is the only major web firm that conducts criminal and marital background checks on all of its members — a practice that keeps 2 per cent of applicants from joining because they are convicted felons. Three per cent flunk because they are married, the company said.

The company sued a felon who slipped through the background-check process. Herb Vest, True.com chief, said he won’t rule out suing a married person who gets onto the site.