InvestiDate: How To Make Sure You’re Not Dating a Criminal or a Con-Artist

By Rachel Belle

Listen to Investidate: How To Investigate Your Dates

Whether you meet someone online, or at a party, what do you really know about them when you meet up on a first date? It seems cynical to say, but they could be a convict, a con-artist or a cheater and you wouldn’t have a clue. But you could – if you Investidated. Maria Coder wrote the new book InvestiDate: How To Investigate Your Date.

“I was working as a crime reporter and the more that I started getting invested in the news, the more the stories started creeping up, like Laci Peterson and Natalie Holloway. I wanted to find ways to use the tools that I was learning to help other people when they were out there living their lives and dating. To prevent the types of things that were happening from happening to them.”

Maria had been investigating her dates for about seven years when she met a guy last year and fell in love. She had investigated him, but then…

“I was seeing a lot of the signs that I was writing about, with my mate. He wasn’t a criminal, or anything like that, but he actually was soliciting women for sex via Facebook. He had 36 other women on the side and when I found out I was devastated. Basically that’s what got me to finish this book that I had started. I had set it aside thinking it was playing mind tricks with me, when in fact it was showing me that I was right about everything I was doing all along.”

She says a good place to start is to run your date’s name through a sex offender registry.

“Criminalcheck.com and familywatchdog.us are two criminal sex offenders registries that are free. So if you know a person’s name you can just type their name in, and you’ll see if they have a record. You can also type in an address or a zip code, so it’s a good way to get to know your neighbors, to see if anyone that you might recognize is there.”

A very smart idea, that I’ve never thought about, is creating an email address that you only use for dating.

“It’s not going to have your name in it, it’s not going to have any personal identifiers in it. You want to make sure that you share the password to this database email address with two of your best friends. So that in case you don’t turn up, for some reason, within the first 24 to 48 hours of a missing person case, which are the most crucial, authorities have a good starting point for where you went and with whom. [They’ll also have] a good chance of finding a picture of what this person may look like.”

You can treat the email address like a personal journal.

“As you’re out there, and you’re dating, you can just email yourself where it is you’re going to next. So if you’re going from one bar to another bar, you can send yourself a quick email to this database email address. It serves two purposes: One, you’re going to have a bolded email in your inbox so that people know that it’s new. Also, because you’re sending it from a cell phone, if for some reason cell phone tower records need to be subpoenaed, there’s a cell phone tower record that’s going to have some more information as to your whereabouts.”

If you think this sounds completely paranoid and unromantic…

“Everyone has insurance, no one wants to think that something could happen to them. But better to have it and not need it, then other way around.”