August 13, 2007 7:13 AM
Not All Online Love Affair Ends Happily Ever After
And in the case of the Australian farmer who went all the way from Australia to Mali in Africa, it was a love affair that could have ended with the lost of his own life. According to this AP report, Des Gregor, a 56 year old Australian national went to Mali to meet his supposed bride whom he met, communicated with and possible proposed marriage, online.
But what could have been a wonderful meeting with her supposed bride was changed into a horrifying experience when Gregor was abducted instead by armed bandits. Gregor was beaten, stolen with cash and credit card was threatened to be decapitated if he refuse to give his abductors $85,000.00.
Gregor was able to escape from his abductors only when local police authorities who were contacted by Gregor’s family, to bring the victim to the Canadian embassy to collect the ransom. From there he was rescued and brought back to his home country.
Now, that was some kind of news, huh? There’s a lot of lessons to be learned from what happened to Gregor and one of the most obvious is the fact that in the vast space of the web, one could not really tell who is real and who is not. The freedom to be anonymous on the web has its negative side indeed. And we, the netizens have to fend for ourselves whenever we deal with anyone online, because we are never really sure who really is the real person and who are just out there waiting for their next prey.
This news would also give a blow on social dating sites proliferating on the interweb today. With a netizen as matured as Gregor being an easy prey to online vultures, what more of the teens and youngsters who hang around virtual sites such as second life, and social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.
I think its about time that every netizen become more vigilant and be cautious when dealing with people online. Or maybe its about time that the web reduces its anonimity factor and trascend the boundaries of being a virtual space into an extension of the real society.
Leave a comment