Quick Summary:

Hookup potential: 4/5 Features: 4/5 Design: 3/5 Content: 4.5/5

• Strong search functionality.
• 3,000+ streaming videos.
• Allows trial membership.
• Erotic games on offer.

The Full Story:

Many webmasters or makers of adult dating sites mistakenly think that a site that allows for multi-tasking is a good one, and that multitudes of patrons would be enticed to join because of this. While this is true in some cases, there are sites that simply come across as too confusing–they just have too many features and complications that make first-timers intimidated instead of being encouraged to pay for a membership.

Thankfully, Eroticy is not one of these kinds of websites. It has many features, but its webmasters have managed to organize these features in such a way that you don’t see them as clutter.

This is a place where people can explore and affirm their sexuality. Eroticy is a website that is both adult dating and adult content. When you sign up, you are led to the “Your Eroticy” menu. It is here where you input your weight, height, and the other personal data. This includes what you want in terms of sexual relations. Uploading your own photo is not exactly a must, but is a big help getting feedback and hits to your profile.

Let me now go to the second section — The Community. This is where you can browse through profiles. This section is also where sending emails to others is done. The search parameters are one of the chief criteria for a site to be judged as good, bad, or mediocre. The search functions of the site are above-average, since I was able to search for particular places and qualities. For example, I tried “Heterosexual Caucasian Women in Texas, 20-25 years old, and into Threesome Play.” Believe me, I found a lot of hot and gorgeous hotties in the site that met my requirements.

Eroticy also has a web chatting option, basically a standard offering in this genre of sites. You may not be looking for a serious relationship, and this part is a good service for meeting friends simply for the sake of platonic relationships.

Now, what about the hot stuff of this site? Is the content of Eroticy worth your time? Indeed, the site has a big adult content collection that is every bit the match (or more) of any competitor. Eroticy has no less than 3,000 streaming videos (non-exclusive). If you think that the site only has run-of-the-mill one-minute clips, then you are wrong. I was able to get clips running from five to forty minutes. Choose your category: Double Penetration, BDSM, straight sex, etc. Whatever your inclinations may be, Eroticy has it.

Generally, most of the videos in this site are of good quality. Having Windows Media Player in your PC is a necessity. You could also enjoy additional incentives: about fifty streaming video sites such as Anal University and Asian Hunger, just to name a few.

I am not yet done! As a member of Eroticy, you get access to all of the following: live house cams, amateur chat, 3,000 pic galleries. The live house cam shows gorgeous chicks with their webcams right in their own homes.

Does Eroticy have more? Yes it does have more to offer to its members. You get access to erotic narrations both in audio and in written forms. The site even has a Sex Education part that gives informative Q and A tidbits. When you get tired of chatting with that redhead Russian or reading erotic stories, you can take a break. You can sample the site’s fun games such as Ass Blaster or Anal Invader.

Eroticy also presents an informative guide on swing clubs and escorts for certain territories. Then, the site has a sex shop where you can do some shopping.

Do you have to be a member at once? Of course not, that is the reason why the site’s webmasters have put up a free trial period, so that you can get a feel of the site’s offerings. One feature that makes this adult dating site one of the most popular is the Eroticy TV, which allows you to view streaming videos. Eroticy not only has sex webcams, it also has voyeur webcams. (These are webcams of the site’s members who are currently logged on.)

Just so you know the price range, allow me to mention them. I’ve rounded off the figures: $25/a month, $120/180 days, and $180/year. Reasonable sums for the amount of content and the number and quality of services you receive if you ask me.

So, if you want an online dating place that is easy, fun, and has a lot of offerings, then this site is worth your time and money. Check out Eroticy now, and judge for yourself.

While most online dating sites are legitimate, there are plenty of scammers out there looking to take advantage of the members of such sites. Even on reputable paid dating sites, scammers may find it worthwhile to pay for memberships in order to use them to scam other paid members out of money. In this article we’re going to look at the different scams that exist and give you some tips on recognizing them and avoiding them, as well as giving you advice about how to spot fake user profiles, hopefully enabling you to avoid scammers before they even have a chance to interact with you.

One disclaimer before going further: I don’t mean to suggest that profiles or people you contact exhibiting (or even all) of the features and behaviors I am going to describe are necessarily scams—some may very well not be. The sad fact is though, most will be. If it looks too good to be true, guys, it usually is.

Ways to spot a fake user profile

There are a number of features that many fake profiles will have in common. We’ll list some of them here. If a profile you’re looking at ticks any of these boxes, it should be a warning bell—proceed with caution (if at all!)

Suggestive usernames, particularly on female profiles

Even on explicitly “adult” dating sites, genuine female members will very rarely choose sexually-suggestive usernames. Scammers (and hookers) often do use such names, as they know the names will attract attention. Genuine women won’t, because they don’t want the deluge of lewd and sleazy attention that such names provoke.

Glossy, glamorous, “model-looking” photos

Genuine women will occasionally get glamor shots done for their dating profiles, but this should be thought of as the exception rather than the rule. Genuine photos tend to be in natural settings (not studios, or obviously “lit” environments) and tend to be taken by regular consumer cameras, not by professional ones.

Only a single photo

Because scammers are only usually creating multiple fake profiles, a person having only a single photo can be grounds for suspicion, especially if the photo looks like  it might be of a model.

“Unnatural” language and answers on a profile

The language in fake profiles will often seem unnatural and forced. For female profiles, language that is flirty, suggestive and implies an eagerness to quickly embark upon a physical relationship (without preconditions, specifics, or partner criteria) should be seen as highly suspicious. Likewise a man’s profile that mentions wealth.

Poor English in profile (on an English-speaking site)

Unfortunately it is common to see women from poorer countries trying to attract men from wealthier ones in order to gain access to the wealthier country for reasons of economic opportunity. Poorly-written English full of semantic, spelling, and grammatical errors can be the clue that will help you spot these profiles early.

Profiles that claim to be local, but aren’t

If you find a profile that claims that the indicated individual lives near you, yet once you start communicating with you they reveal they live overseas, walk away. Don’t listen to any excuses they may offer: it’s almost certainly a scam.

Incomplete profiles or profiles that try to be too “generically attractive”

Such profiles “widen the net” the scammer is casting  for his prospective victims.

Profiles that are “too good to be true”

You need to ask yourself what the odds are of finding someone on an online dating site who likes exactly all the things you like and, additionally, is super-attractive, super-attracted to you, and super charming.

The profile asks you to visit a webpage

If a profile suggests that you visit a web page, that may be a clue that it’s fake. Many such profiles will link directly to signup forms for adult or adult dating websites, or perhaps to a small fake “personal” site that tries to convince you to join a paid site. Also be wary of profiles where the user tries to get you to go straight to Yahoo messenger or another IM client; usually these profiles are directing you to a bot or to linkspam.

An example of a fake profile

Now just for fun, let’s take a look at a known fake profile, and look at how the tips I’ve given above should help us to figure out that it’s probably fake.

Here’s the profile. It was recently submitted to localsex.com, a free adult dating site, and was quickly reported and deleted by a sharp-eyed member. Take a look at it, and think about why it doesn’t ring true (you can click on it to see the full-sized version.)

How about that username? It’s sort of borderline. “msalisonangel” isn’t quite “readyforsexnow”, but it’s still a little cutesier than genuine women tend to go for. The real giveaways are:

1) The photos. She’s extremely attractive, which is always a red flag. More importantly though, the photos are clearly professionally-taken, and in the second photo (thumbnail at the bottom) “msalisonangel” is striking an obvious “model pose”. I’d be prepared to call “fake” based on the photos alone.

As it turned out, the reason this profile was identified as fake was because a member recognized the photos as being those of a well-known soft-porn star.

2) The language. The title and “About Me” language is designed both to have an extremely broad appeal and to make the woman appear eager for sex. She wants “a soulmate for the eventide years of her life” (and seriously, what 22-year-old even uses the word “eventide”?) and yet also says “Committment-wise, I’m pretty casual”. The language also feels quite forced and unnatural (not to mention “confused”), and the opening “Sexually, I’m an explorer” gambit should ring alarm bells.

Common online dating scams

How much fun was that? Of course, fake profiles are just the tip of the iceberg as far as online dating scams go. The bait to tempt you, if you will. We also want to be more broadly aware of what sort of scams fake profiles might lure us into, so here’s an overview of the more common ones to watch out for:

The damsel in distress scam

A (usually female) site member with an attractive photo claims to be in need/trouble, and requests that you help her out financially. A variation on this scam is the travel scam, where the person claims to need money so they can afford to travel to meet you, with a view to pursuing a long term relationship.

The phishing scam

Email from contacts that press you for detailed personal information such as your financial information, your home address, full name, phone number, or social security number are almost certainly scammers. These people either try to scam the online dating users outright, using the information to masquerade as the victim for pecuniary gain, or are collecting the data to sell to some third party who will exploit the data in the same way.

The laundering scam

The fraudster may not ask you for any money directly. Instead, he may ask you to cash money orders or cheques and to wire (or perhaps Western Union) him the proceeds, or some fraction of the proceeds. The money orders or cheques will later turn out to be fake or stolen and you will be left out of pocket and possibly be held responsible for receiving stolen funds.

Prostitute scam

Prostitutes advertising illegally on dating sites tend to be straightforward. They place profiles to solicit business. Such profiles are usually easily recognized by sleazy user names, suggestive photos, and explicit self-descriptions. They don’t waste time letting you know what they are after.

Phonesex scam

The person will ask you to call them, and after you do you‘ll get a bill in the mail for hundreds of dollars. In the United States such phone numbers will start with 1-900, but pay lines in other countries will have different numerical prefixes. The scammer in this case might try to allay your fears of having to pay for a call by making up some story explaining why you won’t have to. Don’t be fooled.

The “Nigerian” postal scam

The person pretends to be a relative of a deceased government official or some other dignitary who asks for your help in a financial transaction. Sometimes mention of a lottery having been won, but the winner being able to collect the winnings himself for some reason. The author of the email will offer a huge reward if you help him to transfer a large sum of money. It’s called the Nigerian postal scam because the first such scams originated in Nigeria, but the scam “type” has now spread, and may originate from other countries as well.

I hope I’ve given you some good pointers and ideas about what to look out for in profiles so you don’t fall victim to online dating scams. Just to lighten the mood a little, though, check out this “Nigerian Scam Dating” parody site–it’s good for a chuckle or two.

Stay smart and safe out there!

Quick Summary:

Hookup potential: 2/5    Features: 3/5    Design: 4/5    Content: 4/5

• Clean-looking site with a tight, integrated design and interface.
• Fake profiles galore.
• Chatroom shills.
• Lots of XXX content, but more of a porn site, really?

The Full Story:

This was going to be a review of fling.com, but they decided they were going to have some big problem with our credit card, so we’ve postponed it until we can figure that crap out. Instead, this will be a review of uLust.com.

So I kicked it off by landing here, signing up and logging in. Here’s a screenshot of the members’ area.

Well, first impressions: it’s a clean, white, uncluttered, and attractive site with a lot of Ajax-y Web 2.0 bells and whistles. The upsell advertising (cams and penis pills while I was on the site) isn’t so in-your face and ubiquitous as it is with AFF.

The membership database, however, is considerably smaller than AFF ‘s–clocking in at around 5.5 million, but while I was logged in there seemed to be a proportionately larger number of active members; namely, 57-115k active/5.5 million for uLust.com compared to 132k active/32 million on AFF. My later interaction with the site ended up leaving me with some serious reservations about the accuracy of that figure, though. For which read on.

So I finished filling in my profile details, fired up the search function, and went trawling for tail. Now what you should probably know about mainstream adult dating sites is that a sizable percentage of them create fake profiles, usually of women, to attract and retain the interest of paying male members. The first thing I noticed was that there were a lot of suspicious profiles, even by industry standards. Like “the overwhelming majority” a lot.

Some, like this one, is just too “Penthouse Pet” to be real, while others, like this one, were real-but-c’mon-guys-it’s-a- freaking-hooker. Genuine profiles like this one, this one, and this one were in the decided minority plus, uh, you know. Look at them. “Hoorah?”

It wasn’t too long before the whole site started to give me a serious “porn” vibe. It seemed to be far more about the fake profiles and shilling for camwhores than it was about anything else. Like, for example, “adult dating”. Or “getting laid.” There was also an annoying bug in the picture viewing code, which kept distorting the picture dimensions in the thumbnail view when I was reviewing profiles.

After about half an hour searching profiles I wandered over to check the “Members’ Video Chat”. The girls here (and surprise, they were all girls) all seemed to be professional websluts doing “teaser” shows. They weren’t overly responsive to what was being typed, and one of the rooms was empty when I looked at it. Two others closed while I was viewing them, leading me to suspect the girls had received requests for private shows .

The main Cams link here goes to pages full of thumbnails. You can click on a thumbnail to talk to the associated girl if she’s available AND you join the ulustcams.com site. Joining this complementary site requires validation of your credit card, then presumably (I didn’t investigate much further) the payment of some per-minute charge to naked cam-to-cam with the googly-eyed slut of your choice.

Like I said, a glorified porn site. The “Movies” link takes you to a bunch of porn clips (yeah, I’m on an adult dating site because I only want porn, right?) These clips have some Firefox playability issues, which I couldn’t be bothered figuring out. The user videos are little better, though they suffer from the same issues as the profiles. Namely that a lot of them consist of generic porn content. i.e. “they’re fakes.”

uLust’s chatrooms were all dead when I looked in on them, except for one (the “Lounge”) which had a fake-profile “babe” chatting in it. This prosti-shill regaled the room with a banal chronicle of “her” daily routine (“Yeah, sorry I was just on the phone. Yeah, I’m feeling pretty tired now. Yeah, wonder what I’ll have for dinner tonight.”) The (old, unattractive, desperate, horny) men floating around the room were hanging on her every utterance, entranced. Some of them definitely seemed to be regulars. They had kind of a leering, wolfish demeanor and snippily informed me that if any REAL women turned up (keep dreaming, losers!) the “vetereins” would have first crack at them.

I scanned through the forums and groups. They have a reasonable number of posts, but they’re all moderated (there’s a general theme of heavy-handed moderation, presumably because the owners of the property don’t want people squawking publicly about how much the site, you know, sucks.) You can see that most of them are of the LADIES HERE I AM LET’S FUCK variety. Yeah. I hear that’s how the hardcore playaz really pull.

As you can probably tell by now, I was less than impressed by my uLust.com experience. There’s very little evidence of genuine community here and I’m skeptical about both the userbase size and participation level claims that they’re making. On the bright side, the site looks good, and there’s a ton of porn (movies and galleries) there, if that’s really what you’re after. But don’t expect to get laid, and don’t expect not to feel like you’ve been cheated, if you join expecting anything other than a boatload of porn.

C-. Must try harder.