Do Your Homework Experts say if you must have a private liaison with somebody you've met online, it's worth doing a little research on the person before meeting them. It would be a lot easier not to do any of this, but it's not smart. These women would have been a lot better off to take two to three hours to do a little investigative work than to just hop a plane and meet with this fellow. Experts also suggest calling prospective partners from pay phones so they can't get the caller's home number, investigating their reputations in related online forums, meeting them in a public place, perhaps even verifying their statements on employment and other aspects of their lives. Unfortunately, they say, most people take few precautions before meeting sex partners they've met online, often secretly.
Experts say people seem to feel secrecy and risk heightens the excitement.
Brian S. Joseph, a forensic psychiatrist based in Buffalo, N.Y., believes people often make decisions based upon a risk-benefit scale. If the benefits of an action appear exceptionally desireable, the sense of risk can be minimized in a person's mind to rationalize their pursuit of that desire. And the opportunity to have those fantasies fulfilled at little cost or little risk, or so it seems, is very compelling. The problem of opportunity perhaps lowering the people's guard predates the Internet. Maheu said that in the 1950s, her teenage aunt was sucked in by an offer of a job as a house cleaner in a classified ad.