What very simple check can you run on your correspondents to identify at least a proportion of those who are not who they say they are?

If you are using the internet to search for a partner, there are some things you need to know. Not everyone apparently searching for a partner on the net is who he or she says he or she is, and some of those who say they are looking for a long-term monogamous relationship are saying the same thing to a dozen others too. Of course this applies not just to the internet: plenty of people have several so-called monogamous relationships on the go at any one time. But here, we are concentrating relationships started online.

I want to tell you a cautionary tale about a friend of mine, in the hope that you will not suffer the same distress he did. This friend of mine, whom I'll call Joe, met a woman online in a chatroom for people in his town in England. They chatted and emailed madly for ages, Joe falling passionately in love with her. She had sent him her picture (well, a picture – who can say if it was of her? It is easy to grab a picture of someone else off the net...). After Joe had well and truly fallen for her, and was in a terrible state because she kept either refusing to meet him or cancelling dates, he discovered that far from being a 35 year old accountant in England, this person (we still don't know if it was a woman....) was writing from a university server in the USA. It was probably a student.

I mention this story because there were some big red flags he should have seen, and which you should not miss yourself if you are in a similar situation:

First, despite writing vast amounts of email to Joe and chatting a lot, and appearing from what she said to be extremely keen on Joe, this person did not meet Joe, not even in a public place for coffee. If a person is really interested, and he or she has nothing to hide, they are going to want to meet up. There is nothing worse than getting really close to someone online, only to discover that there is zero attraction chemistry when you meet in person. This woman claimed that she had had bad experiences/been abused or something, and that that was why she was reluctant to meet even after a long time, but given the feeling expressed in her email messages and chats, this reluctance simply did not add up.

On several occasions, she agreed to meet, and then did not turn up. Later, she always had a perfect excuse – car accident, grandmother dying, you name it, it sounded plausible. But after about the third such time, I smelt a rat... One thing that everyone in any kind of relationship needs to keep clear in their mind is that actions speak louder than words and if a person's actions belie their words, it is the actions you should believe, not the words.

Another friend of mine fell apart over a woman who was extremely friendly to him whenever they met, looking deeply into his eyes and appearing to find him so very interesting.... and yet somehow, she never quite got around to seeing him alone, on a date. There was always some excuse. Her words said she was very interested indeed; her actions said she wasn't. He should have listened to her actions. Instead, she led him a merry dance that went nowhere and cost him a fortune in expensive gifts to her, not to mention a broken heart...

But to get back to Joe, eventually, I got so sick of his angst-ridden phone calls to me about this woman whose actions did not seem to me consistent with her words, that I persuaded Joe to run the most basic check on her, just to rule out my hunch that she was not who she said she was.

Joe was at first very angry with me for suggesting that she wasn't genuine. After all, he had her home address, and he had driven past her house and seen her BMW outside, and she really seemed to know about accountancy so she must be an accountant, right? And surely she must be in England, because her email address was a yahoo.co.uk one, right? Wrong! You can get a yahoo.co.uk address whether or not you are in the UK. You can get a yahoo.com address whether or not you are in the USA. And if you have visited a place, you might know that there is often a BMW parked outside the house.

So when you get into a correspondence with a potential partner on the internet, the first thing you should do is to determine where their email is coming from. This is usually very easy, but just knowing the domain name in the From: line is not enough. From line domain names do not necessarily reflect the geographical location from which the email is being sent. (The domain name is something like: “companynamehere.com”. The domain name of Taken In Hand is takeninhand.com.)

Here's what to do:

Gather together the email messages you have from the person, and look at the full headers. Do this early in your correspondence! Don't wait months to find out that they are not who they say they are!

In case you have no idea what I mean by the “full headers”, here is an example of the headers of a hypothetical message. I have replaced some identifying features with xxx and yyy and changed the numbers etc:

Received: from xxxx.xxxx.com (xxxx.xxxx.com [xxx.xx.183.6])
  by yyy.xxxx.com (x.11.6/x.9.3) with ESMTP id xxxxxxxxxxx
  for [email address]; Tue, 1 Oct 2002 10:13:39 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from mta06-svc.ntlworld.com (62.253.162.46)
  by xxxx.xxxx.com (MX V5.3 AnHh) with ESMTP
  for [email address]; Tue, 1 Oct 2002 10:13:40 -0800
Received: from [10.0.1.1] ([80.3.241.216]) by mta06-svc.ntlworld.com
  (InterMail vM.4.01.03.xxxxx-229-xxx-127-20010xxx)
  with ESMTP id Tue, 1 Oct 2002 18:13:31 +0100
MIME-Version: 1.0
Message-ID: xxx
Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 18:13:12 +0100

You will normally find at least two lines in a row that start with “Received:”; if not, you are probably not seeing the full headers. And if they are not all together – if there is a “Date:” or a “Message-ID:” or anything else in the middle – then the lower ones are fake; ignore them, and be suspicious.

For each message, look for the lowest “Received:” line. This is the earliest (even if the times do not agree, since computers often have their clocks set incorrectly), and it tells you where the message originated. It won't necessarily look exactly like the one here, but it will normally contain an IP address – four numbers with dots in between, like 10.0.1.1 or 80.3.241.216 in the example.

If there is more than one IP address in the line, then one of them will start in one of these three ways: 10.x.y.z, or 192.168.0.z or, less commonly, 172.a.b.c (with a being a number between 16 and 31). This is perfectly normal; all it tells you is that there may be more than one computer in the home or workplace sharing an internet connection. Ignore that IP address, and use the other one. In the example, above, you would ignore 10.0.1.1 and use 80.3.241.216.

Now that you have an IP address, the next step is to find the domain name that it belongs to. There are different ways to do this, and some of them depend on the kind of computer system you have. Plenty of web sites will do it for you, but they come and go; try searching the web for “reverse DNS lookup”.

Most current computers also have a way to do it from a command line: on most UNIX or Linux systems, and on Windows NT or XP, type “nslookup 80.3.241.216”; on Mac OS X and some Linux versions, type “dig -x 80.3.241.216”, without the quotes, and using the appropriate IP address in place of 80.3.241.216 in the example. You could also try “whois 80.3.241.216”. If you are uncomfortable typing commands, there are several readily available programs you can download and install on your computer to do the same thing; current examples include Neotrace, Net Tool Box, and OT Tool. Mac OS X comes with a utility called Network Utility. Simply paste the IP address into the box under “Lookup”.

If you do that for my example, the IP address 80.3.241.216 resolves to the domain name:

cpc2-oxfd-6-0-cust216.oxfd.cable.ntl.com

This means that this hypothetical message would have come from customer 216 of NTL.com in Oxford, UK.

When a person is using dialup access, you should expect to see different IP addresses in different messages, but if they are all sent via the same dialup, the IP addresses should resolve to the same ISP or other domain – the tail end of the domain name will be the same. If the domain name does not tell you much, put the last bit of the domain into Google, or simply try to go to it as a URL. For example, if you receive a message from an IP address which resolves to a domain “glorp.burble.pciwest.net”, and you go to http://www.pciwest.net/, you will see that they describe themselves as “Providing service to over 200 cities in Oregon”.

If the person writes from several different places, such as home, work, a friend's house, on holiday in Greece, etc., depending on the type of access he or she has, you would expect to see this reflected in the IP address. You would usually expect to see different IP addresses. This is not foolproof though. I have a broadband account with a facility for web-based access to my ISP, and if I send email using my ISP's web-based front end, the originating IP is the same wherever I am in the world. But in general, and especially if they are on a dialup line, resolving the IP address will tell you where they are. People don't usually make international calls into their ISP, they usually use local access.

If the person is using AOL to access the internet (and don't assume that if there is AOL in the From: line, it is necessarily AOL that is being used for access – From: lines can be changed) you will not be able to find out where he or she is writing from, but each AOL customer is of course known to AOL, as am I to my ISP.

If the person is using one of the major pseudo-anonymous services like Yahoo or Hotmail (which are actually the least anonymous addresses there are!), then look through the message headers for a line like “X-Originating-IP: 80.3.241.216”, and look up that IP address; it tells you where the person was when they connected to the Yahoo or Hotmail web site. Other web-based email services often also provide that information in their headers, but perhaps under a different label from “X-Originating-IP”.

Had my friend Joe taken this simple step of resolving the originating IP addresses of the messages sent to him by this woman claiming to live in his town in England, he would immediately have noticed that wherever she said she was writing from, whether Edinburgh, Paris, London or Brussels, all her messages were being sent from a university server in a particular city in the USA.

If you have done this, and there appears on the face of it to be a discrepancy, it might be that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation, so don't immediately accuse your correspondent of playing games, simply ask him or her about it, and suggest that they give you hard evidence that they are where they say they are. No one should be offended that you have run this little check, because we all know that there are many many people on the internet who are not who they say they are. That you might need to do this is another reason to do it early in your correspondence, when it is less likely to be taken personally.

If you suggest that a man give you a phone number and permit you to phone him briefly to verify that he is genuine, and he accuses you of not trusting him and says that one should never give out one's phone number to someone on the internet, the question in your mind should be: who is it who is doing the not trusting, here? Why does he not trust you with his phone number? He is asking you to trust him but he is not trusting you with a phone number or other evidence? This is not a gentleman!

Other possible evidence might include where they work. The thing that persuaded Joe to check his friend's IP address was that when he phoned her accountancy firm and asked to speak to her, they had never heard of her. Or you can do a Google search and see what comes up. Or you can ask for references. I was once invited to stay with a complete stranger in a different country, after a very short correspondence. He did not mind in the slightest my asking for references, and he put me in touch with his good friends, and even found someone he knew slightly whom I also knew, and his parents phoned me. He never once accused me of not trusting him.

If a man refuses to give you any evidence that he is where/who he says he is, and accuses you of not trusting him rather than congratulating you on your good sense, walk away. He is already playing mind games. Anyone genuine is not going to object to your taking sensible precautions of this sort, just as you would not object to potential partners doing the same with respect to you. Some women might be more reluctant to give their home phone number very early in the correspondence, but they should still be amenable to providing evidence of some sort. Perhaps they can receive a call at a neighbour's home? Another possibility is that they find a local business, hotel or shop whose management is prepared to permit them to receive a brief phone call from you. This is not at all difficult to arrange. If your correspondent's attitude suggests that it is, you should be seeing the red flags flying.

the boss

Weeding out the nutters

When using the internet in your search for a man, weeding through the nutjobs can be a difficult process. I ended up marrying a conservative man with traditional values whom I introduced to the idea of domestic discipline. Worked out well on this count, although he did not warm up to the idea instantly. I did, however, meet him on the internet. He actually emailed me based on my profile (which was not ad-like but did mention I was single), so luck or fate was on my side there. We were living thousands of miles away from one another, but I was already planning on moving to where he was at the point he contacted me (again, luck or fate you pick smile) We ended up talking on the phone 5-6 hours a day on average for the 6 weeks before it was moving day for me.

The day I returned to my hometown, he met my stepmom and brother (who although younger than me has a bit of an intimidating appearance given the bulk of his muscle) and went down to the airport with them to meet me. I had seen a picture, but he was MUCH better looking in person and I had already liked the picture he'd sent and was already falling in love with his personality from our conversations. It's amazing how we never ran out of things to talk about. I ended up riding with him to my mom's place (I was staying with her till I could get an apartment) so he ended up meeting most of my family that day. Within a month I was spending most nights at his place... he already had a spare bedroom set up for my daughter. Less than 3 months after I met him in person, we married :-) and are very happily married a couple years later.

My advice on weeding through the good and bad is to get to know the person as best you can before ever meeting them in person. Look for compatibilities outside of DD and spanking. learn about his family, and be on your toes for inconsistencies. If you start to feel a warning flag, trust your instincts and go much slower or back away altogether. Also as someone else said, be wary of anyone who wants to dominate you right now, or attempts to make you feel that you should obey him. If he is the one for you, that will come in time, not during the audition process so to speak. At this moment, you hold the control. Men who are looking for someone with beliefs such as yours will be willing to be patient and help you to feel secure. Women with conservative values are not an easy find these days. I wish you the best of luck.

Robin

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