Location

I am not sure what the woman from Australia was thinking, who was mentioned in this article about her being scammed from someone she met on a dating site? Let's go over the facts:

• Her husband died 11 years ago
• She has 2 teenage kids
• She never met the guy in person
• He promised her marriage and $28 million
• She sold her home and investment property for $600,000 and sent him the money to "invest"

At the moment she is warning women to avoid dating sites because of her experience. First of all, this could have happened to her with a person she met in real life, I do not see how it is the fault of online dating. She should be warning women about not sending men they just met online, money. In her story there are huge warning flags and I think the women choose to ignore them just because she was being greedy, especially when she thought she was getting $28 million out of it. I think the real victims here are her two children, she should have been thinking about them. Now I don't think anyone deserves to be scammed, she just should have thought things through.

eHarmony has launched dating sites in the United Kingdom (2008), Brazil (2010) and now it looks like one will be launched in Japan soon. Currently the eHarmony's Japan website (eHarmony.jp) has a welcome message explaining what Japanese singles can expect if they join the dating site plus a short message at the top saying that they will launch soon.

If the launching of the last two country specific eHarmony dating sites is any indication, eHarmony will probably offer three month memberships for free, for the first three months to help populate the member database. We will update our blog when the new site goes live so stay tuned.

To find out more about this popular international dating service, read our eHarmony review.

Here is an UK eHarmony voucher code for one of their popular promotions. This voucher code expires on November 31, 2010.

eHarmony UK Voucher

The coupon code listed above is valid on eHarmony in the United Kingdom (eHarmony.co.uk).

For US singles, go here for our eHarmony USA (eHarmony.com) coupons.

For Canadian singles, go here for our eHarmony Canada (eHarmony.ca) coupons.

Read our review of eHarmony for more information about this online matchmaking service.

AshleyMadison.com has now opened their affair website to married men and women in the United Kingdom. For those of you who haven't heard of this site before it is described as a traditional dating site but for people who are already married. For UK members it costs £49 for 100 credits. With these credits members can email someone for 5 credits, chat in real-time for another 30 credits and send a virtual gift from 20 to 50 credits.

Apparently there are plans to spend upwards of £10million in advertising if Ashley Madison can get their ads approved by the Advertising Standards Authority. With this type of marketing budget Ashley Madison expects to have 1 million UK members in 3 months.

For more on this story read TNT Magazine.

“Japan's Fukui prefecture has the nation's biggest share of dual-income households, the highest ratio of working women, and the lowest unemployment rate. What it doesn't have is enough babies.”

With those arresting leading lines, Aki Ito, a reporter for Bloomberg News in Tokyo, opens “Japan's Government Plays Matchmaker,” an article that details an interesting new initiative that’s about to be launched in the island nation.

Introducing…the Fukui Marriage-Hunting Café, the government’s new online dating site for Japanese singles. The idea of government-sponsored matchmaking might sound crazy, but Japan is not the first country to set up a service with the intention of encouraging and aiding the love lives of its citizens. The Social Developmental Network of Singapore, for example, runs LoveByte, a Web site that doles out dating advice and has a search function that allows registered users to find other single users.

The Fukui Marriage-Hunting Café is a unique solution to a potentially-devastating problem Japan now faces: “At 1.34 children per woman, Japan's fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world, well below the 2.1 that is considered the minimum for a developed nation to maintain a constant population.” According to census data, 32 percent of Japanese women between the ages of 30 and 34 were unwed in 2005, a figure that is more than twice the number from 15 years earlier. As an increasing number of Japanese women postpone marriage, or decline to marry at all, the country’s birthrate is dropping to a dangerously low point with serious financial consequences.

Approximately “23 percent of the population is over 65, the highest ratio among the 62 countries tracked by Bloomberg,” which means that the “ranks of pensioners are swelling” while “the pool of workers and consumers is shrinking.” To combat this problem, Japan’s Democratic Party promised to lessen the burden of child rearing by offering families a monthly allowance of 13,000 yen ($150) per child and abolishing the fees for public high school. Naoto Kan, the current Prime Minister, also supported relationships and procreation in his former job as Finance Minister by encouraging his employees to leave work at 6 p.m. to go on dates.

The Fukui Marriage-Hunting Café will go above and beyond traditional online dating sites and Japan’s previous efforts to increase the country’s sagging birthrate by offering money or gifts to couples who marry partners they met using the site’s services. While government-sponsored matchmaking is an interesting idea, critics of the scheme note that “the central government's previous attempts to nudge up the birthrate have not met with success.”

So what do you think, readers? Should governments attempt to play cupid for their populace, or should they steer clear of citizens’ love lives?

JetPlace, the owners of the Australian dating and swinger site Red Hot Pie, was ordered by the federal court to remove 1,371 fake profiles that they had on their website. Jetplace must also disclose to its Red Hot Pie members that they had misrepresented the number of users on the dating site. Members who registered between December 2004 and November 26, 2008 will also receive notices via email of this information. These same users can also apply for a refund if they can show that they were mislead by these fake profiles.

These fake profiles created by Jetplace contravened the Australian Trade Practices Act of 1974 since the dating site engaged in misleading conduct. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said they would have gone after Red Hot Pie in civil court where penalties are more severe but the conduct of the dating site happened before the new Australian Consumer Law. In their defence, Red Hot Pie said these profiles were created over a 4 year period and only a small number were active at any one time. They were used by the dating site's User Security Suite.

For more information on this story, read The Sydney Morning Herald.