Well I can safely say that it is not a scam. The site has been around for a very long time and they have a lot of subscribers, in fact they are the largest online dating adult site. There are also no reports of them scamming subscribers with out of the blue credit card charges or overcharging or anything like that.

But, if you think you can just sign up and instantly hook up with someone, that’s just not the case, unless of course you are a halfway decent looking woman. Then it’s easy. But if you are just a regular looking guy then you are going to need some skills in conversing online in order to get someone to meet.

If some of their advertising is misleading and makes you think anyone that signs up will be hooking up like a madman then I would say its just misleading but you definetly have a chance of meeting someone there.

Here is our affiliate link to adultfriendfinder if you want to give it a go.

Click Here for Adultfriendfinder

You can also create a profile and do some limited browsing around for free. They charge I believe $20 to try it for a month if you want full access to contact other members and test your skills!

First, the offer is not completely free, you do have to pay for shipping and handling, which is usually around 7-8 dollars, but they state that upfront and its on your bill when you checkout.

I’ve actually ordered the cards before and they turn out really nice, and they have some nice professional templates you can choose from. But you do have to be careful when going through the checkout process that you make sure you check or uncheck all the little extra boxes to make sure you are not signing up for any other services. You just gotta be careful is all.

What spammers do is also send emails that mimic these emails or they send you a email about some kind of update where you can click on a link to login and update your information. You NEVER need to do this. If you click on a link to get to facebook that is in the email you will not be taken to your facebook account but to another site that looks like facebook but is designed to only steal your information. Any info you enter on this site you will be stolen from you.

What you can do is always go to facebook directly via your browser. Just open up another tab and type in the facebook url to access your account, that way you can’t fall into the trap of entering a fake site.

One of the most popular scams that advertisers run is called the IQ Quiz scam and variants thereof. BTW they run this because its so profitable for them as the number of people that are tricked is so high. Basically, the user will click on an ad that entices them with a tagline like “See if you are smarter than your friends?” or “Find out how smart you really are!”. Anything that gets you to click on this ad that prepares you to answer some questions.

Once the user clicks on the ad, he or she will answer a series of questions, usually they are pretty basic, and at the end of the questions you have to enter your phone number to see the results. This is the scam part, once you enter your phone number you are agreeing to purchase some kind of reoccuring service where you will be billed weekly or monthly, usually around $10 to $20 dollars. If you read the fine print on the page where you are supposed to enter the phone number you will probably find some terms and conditions that describe exactly this, but most people don’t bother to read the fine print, you know that and the companies know this too!

Usually the companies will refund you if you complain and its your first time canceling this kind of service, but they won’t be so nice afterwards because these kind of services are very profitable for them too! Just to be clear here the phone companies themselves don’t run these advertisements or run the companies that offer the services, but they do basically let it slide since its not illegal, just pretty misleading.

Never ever copy and paste a url into your browser, once the unsuspecting person did this, this can unleash a software virus that can hijack your computer, normally this causes your computer to send out tons and tons of spam, spam that makes the hijacker money in some way. You probably won’t be blamed for the spam but it will seriously mess up your computer as well as slowing down to a crawl. Sometimes the only way to recover your computer is to completely wipe out your harddrive resulting in the loss of all your data.

Remember, if there are offers of something thats a little to interesting on facebook, and especially if its from someone you don’t know, DON’T DO IT!

Basically people were shopping in one of the duty free shops that are in every international airport in the world and had picked out an item which they were carrying around with them when they were arrested for shoplifting. Basically it was not allowed to take an item from one part of the store to another part of the store! That was considered shoplifting! Im not sure if there were signs posted or not, but irregardless, this kind of behavior is unacceptable.

But this is where the scam just starts unfortunately. Because in Thailand getting oneself out of legal trouble is not a straightforward process like it is in the West, and is typically where the profit is made during the scam. Needless to say, it requires much wrangling with authorities, shady third parties who intervene on your behalf for large sums of money in order to avoid the threat of a lengthy prison sentence.

Now to be fair there was a counterpoint made by the company involved claiming they had videotape of the person putting something in their purse, but this was not the only person who had complained about the scam so its hard to believe the company in this case, as well as, who the heck shoplifts in the duty free of an international terminal anyway!?!

When you step out of the airport there will be many taxis waiting at the curb. Do not take any of these taxis, almost assuredly all of them will try to rip you off, well they won’t just try they will rip you off.

A taxi to the center of district 1, where almost all tourist stay should run about 6-7 dollars in late 2011. That is about 120,000 to 140,000 dong. So I let some guy talk me into going for 200k. Then when we are leaving he says I need to pay the airport tax fee which is another 50,000. I say ok, another 2.5 dollars is whatever. I later found out that this is only really about 5k. Then when we get to the destination, he asks me to pay before getting out. I do so, I pay the agreed amount. He then points to the meter and tells me I have to pay that too, which is like another 250,000. I say no, that is not what we agreed, he is clearly cheating me here. Basically he wants to get 500k for something which cost 140k.

I say no and am pissed now. I try to open the doors and there are locked from the outside, I keep trying not really believing what is happening. I then say screw it and slam my shoulder into the door to try to force it open. At this point the driver tells me to stop and opens the door, I guess he didn’t want me to destroy his car.

In some ways I got lucky here, I have heard some taxi drivers will keep an crowbar under their seat, or sometimes they drive you in the middle of nowhere and then threaten to leave you there if you don’t pay hundreds of dollars.

HOW TO AVOID THE SCAM.

Take the bus, outside the international terminal on the arrivals floor there are buses outside, the 152. You have to go up a flight, and it drops you in the center of district 1, from there you can take a taxi. It costs like 25 cents. But what taxi?

There are 2 reliable taxi services in HCMC, mai linh and vinasum. But watch out for fakes, you can find pictures of the real thing and fakes on the internet, fakes will spell their name just slightly wrong, like mia linh, or mai lin. You can also try to get one of these taxis that are dropping off passengers at the airport, again you have to go up a floor, for some reason they are never at the departure floor.

I have heard that there is also a government run taxi service that is reliable call sasco. It is to the left at the end when you walk out of the building, i have never used it, if you ever have please write a comment below and let us know.

Basically someone will approach you on the street, usually in the touristy area of ho chi minh, and it will be an innocent remark, both times were a comment on my clothing, like ” Hey where did you buy that shirt?”. It will be someone friendly and outgoing, but if you are a very careful observer of human nature you may notice something is off.

Another warning sign is that the person is almost always filipino and not vietnamese. If you are familiar with filipinos you may be able to pick out there accent and demeanor. They will try to engage you in conversation for awhile regarding a number of subjects, and since they are friendly they will succeed in talking to a number of people, especially people on vacation whose guard is down and are looking for an “experience”.

At some point they will mention they know someone, a family member usually, that wants to go to your country or is planning to and they would like to invite you to their house to meet them. If you are stupid enough to go, you will eventually get drawn in to a card game where the objective is to win some money off of an unsuspecting rich person, but the victem will always be YOU!

Under no circumstances go to any persons house you meet off the street. Enough Said. I was lucky the first time and ended the conversation after about 10 minutes, I am a young male from the first world and educated and have really no desire to engage in conversation with some middle aged not too educated person that is not interesting, so I was lucky, I didn’t know it was scam at the time. Later I read about it on lonely planet and realized the scam.

Apparently, loads of people fall for this scam and lose thousands of dollars. Next post I’ll write about other scams Ive encountered in my travels.

Daily Show and Colbert Nation. Both are made available for free in their entirity by comedy central. Just go to thedailyshow.com or colbertnation.com, both hilarious and you don’t need to be a liberal to find it funny.

Also on comedy central you can find all the south park episodes and episodes of their comedy stand up show.

There is a ton of material there for you to enjoy.

And in case you’ve been living under a bridge, hulu.com has a ton of movies on there as well. They load fast and its totally legal.

And so I will be slowly sharing some of these tips with all of you over time on this site.

—Youtube Funny Comedians—

Pretty simple, but I bet most of you don’t know that there is a ton of material from all of the worlds funniest people online that can entertain one for hours time and time again.

Who do I recommend that has a large library of stuff?

1. Chris Rock – pretty much all of his shows, his specials where he solos for almost an hour are on youtube.

2. Sarah Silverman – Her material is all over the place

3. Comedy Central roasts – Check out David Hasselhoffs roast, flavor flav, pam anderson, william shatner…  This is some of the raunchiest and         funniest material out there.  So funny that it can and has been watched over and over and over again.

4. Dave Chappelle – His specials are awesome, a super smart guy with some incredible material.

5. Russell Peters – Here is one you may not have heard of.  He is an canadian of indian descent.  Does a ton of racial humour, but is not racist, in fact his crowds are packed with ethnicities that come to hear his insights and be poked fun of by this very funny comedian.

That should keep you guys busy for a while, enjoy.