Internet Dating, Fraud and ....

INTERNET DATING, FRAUD AND NANA KWAME AMPADU II

If Nana Kwame Ampadu II were to recompose his popular song-we find love at different places- he would probably mention the internet as the most important love breeder in our information age. Today, he is a building contractor but his Agatha love story makes sense than most of the sex-fixated abushkeleke lyrics that are driving our youth to pornography.

The internet is serving our varied communication needs, but it is also performing the role of a better matchmaker than many pastors in Pentecostal churches. Even dogs have their own dating websites. A male dog sits by its owner and is made to view images of prospective mating partners on a website, as he flips different WebPages for the dog to make a choice. It barks when it sees a potential wife. You don’t believe me? Visit www.dogstogether.com. There is also a site-www.illicitencounters.com-that teaches married people how to successfully cheat on their spouses and still maintain their marriages. It’s only fair that there are thousands of internet dating websites for singles.

The internet is not a bad thing, but some people are giving the inventors reason to rethink its many uses. Recently, Ghanaweb published a story of a Ghanaian lady who used the web to net some $150,000 from her besotted lover in the USA. My initial reaction was to brand the chap a fool but a quick reflection on my own experiences, and those of others I have been privy to learn, endorsed Ambrose Bierce’s definition of love: a temporary insanity curable by marriage. Even in marriage, many of us are still insane, very insane.

A gentleman I taught years ago in Ghana visited me in my hideout in South Harrow last year. He came with a very curvaceous Swedish girl he had met on the internet. He found it shameful telling me where he met the bimbo so he lied to me. Later the girl led the cat out most confidently and actually recommended the website for me. In less than a week after meeting, they had developed so much chemistry that they were talking of marriage. Today, they are a married couple and the lady is now two persons in one-pregnant.

Perhaps, the internet offers the best opportunity to find a partner, because it cuts out the ‘betweeners’. They usually find themselves in trouble when the match becomes a mismatch. But why do folks, especially our laydeez, find internet dating unconventional? It is just as normal as going to the hospital to cure your ailment or seeing the estate agent for a house. If the internet is full of love, why don’t you get your share?

So I tried to scoop my fair share of the internet-brewed love and paid a price bigger than what the American paid. The magic is, often, the romance that heralds your first meeting is mind blowing. When you open your in-box, her mail is the first thing you look for. The conversation proceeds like any other. There is often the temptation to give every detail about yourself: profession, university, car and when the romance is deep, your favorite positions during sex. If you have a healthy salary, she would be pleased to know. It helps the profile. Usually, you start by convincing yourself that you are lying, but you end up lying truthfully. That is where the insanity sets in. You open your private treasure to a total stranger without realizing the danger. A few are quite careful though. A bad photograph will ruin the deal, so parties send their best photographs as the ice breaker. Of course, it is always a tussle who should be the first to send it. After we had gone through these preliminary stages, we agreed to meet at a Chinese Restaurant in Streatham, London. She chose the venue. Teeth dutifully polished, hair shaved and moustache religiously trimmed, I made my way to the venue. Armed with chewing gums and other breath fresheners, I looked a perfect gentleman in a new suit. I got there earlier.

Minutes later, a figure that looked exactly like the improvised chamber and hall self-contained structure I had tried to rent in Kwashieman, Accra, Ghana, walked through the doors. It was too late to run away or pretend I wasn’t the guy she had come to meet. I don’t expect too much from women: moderate curves, a Masters degree and a dimple will be a bonus. Instead, a scruffy lady with a roomy stomach suspending on thin legs was smiling towards me. Her bottom was as flat as a pancake and her body distribution was laughable: huge arms, the size 16th century queens used as billboards to display the royal jewelry and a neck that was so short that her torso tucked under her chin. The face powder she was wearing was thicker than the shaving foam I had used that morning.

As we sat eating, I wondered whose photographs she had sent me. One good thing about ugly girls is that they usually have lovely voices, to compensate for their predicament. At least, the voice was hers but she might have plagiarized somebody’s face in the photos. We parted honorably. Strangely, as it turned out, she also didn’t like me. God is always faithful. You don’t reap what you haven’t sowed; an ugly man does not deserve a beautiful woman. If we had had babies, they would have gone into the Guinness Book of Records as the strangest species of Homo sapiens. Wherever she is, May God Bless her!

I didn’t lose much, but a chap I know who found love on the internet is today a broken man. Unlike me, his date, a polytechnic graduate, was in Ghana. She wears her opportunism on her sleeves; a born again Christian who believes in buy one, get one free. Impressed by the near nude photographs she sent, the guy in London instantly assumed the role of a husband. She rented an apartment for her in Kumasi and wired her a decent monthly remittance, at a time that President Kufour was struggling to pay teachers in Ghana. Once she had bought my friend, her parents had him for free. The love grew, so did the demands. Eventually, he married her by ‘proxy’ and she joined him in London.

It is a shame that after 50 years of independence, folks still hold the ‘burger’ mentality. There are too many stories of women who use marriage certificates as wings to fly abroad. Once they get there, it is a different negotiation altogether. So my friend paid for his buffoonery. The girl came with a bag full of pregnancy-preventing-pills while the husband had piled up Alomo Bitters and herbs that would enable him generate gallons of sperms at the sight of a nipple. So as he pumped away, trying for twins, the lady intensified her anti-pregnancy campaign, so his bullets never hit her eggs. She is now in Belgium, breeding babies for her real love at a rate faster than what it takes for your light to come on when you flick the switch. Similarly, there are some okotobonku gentlemen who use hardworking ladies as conduits to travel abroad. When they finally join them, they become wife beaters. They make sex appear a veritable donkomi; they want it before and in between shifts, just like their security jobs. This is the worst kind of Stowaway. Love-that hazy veil, through which people pretend to lose themselves in the sheer wonder of other peoples’ humanity, is a tricky thing. The moment you fall in love, you are not in charge of all your faculties. When you are too careful, the passions evaporate. In many ways, it is an intoxication; you enjoy it while it is happening, even if it is not reciprocated. When you become sober, you wonder whether a solitary journey would have sufficed. At the same time, you realize you need it and you will do anything for it: beg, cry, pay, pledge and even kill. It is really about compromise, co-operation and cohabitation. Those who pretend they don’t want love are in fact, those who need it most.

But not everybody was born to love or be loved. There is such a thing as sexual selection-the theory that some people are inherently unlucky with love, as popularized by Sir Robert Winston of BBC fame. They put in their best, but it just does not work for them. After all, the woman credited with producing the first Valentine card, American Esther Howland, died a spinster. And St. Valentine himself was a Catholic priest.

For the rest of us, love remains an irresistible pursuit. And it is all over: in the church, the pub, chop bar, club, Ghana@50, Legon, at the office and on the internet. I think it makes sense to delay parting with anything valuable until the die is cast. When you follow a course with money and love, and you lose both, it is like a religious experience-very difficult to forget. But Nana Ampadu’s words ring home: everybody finds their love in different ways. The internet is a brilliant way if we could get rid of the crooks.

The author is a freelance journalist. He lives in London.

Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.