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Chat Rooms: Have Fun, but Be Careful

You go to chat rooms to meet new people, to share experiences, to live out fantasies and explore facets of yourself you didn’t know existed.

You don’t go to chat rooms to have your identity stolen.

Adult chat rooms allow you to have a greatly expanded social and sexual life, and while this can lead to unforgettable friendships and experiences, it can also allow people who mean you harm to gain access to your most sensitive information.

The unfortunate reality of identity theft has resulted in all too many cases where people who have logged into an adult chat room to live a freer lifestyle have become the target of unscrupulous con men and flim-flam artists seeking an easy mark.

Chat rooms can be happy hunting grounds for hackers, seeking naive users with valuable information to lose. This type of fraud known as identity theft is becoming more common as Internet usage and availability increases. Hackers prey on chat room users, obtaining any sensitive personal information that they can. In turn, they may go to a Hacker chat room, using an internet relay chat that allows more anonymity, and try to sell the information to the highest bidder. All too many neophyte computer users have been taken to the cleaners by unscrupulous chat room hackers.

While many free adult chat rooms are on the up-and-up, there are others out there that act as nothing more than the lair for online trap-door spiders, shady individuals just waiting for someone to fall into their lair.

To avoid the potential dangers of an adult chat room, consider taking the following precautions.

• Regularly update virus, spy ware, antispam and filtering protection.
• Use a strong password for your online chat room user ID – a tough combo of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols can greatly increase the security of your user ID and protect any personal information you may have submitted to the site.  Laptops are big targets for the unscrupulous, so it is vitally important to use a tough-to-crack password on laptops.
• Avoid using an automatic login feature on chat sites.
• Thoroughly read website privacy policies to learn how your personal information is treated.

An adult chat room should be a place to go to let your hair down, drop your guard and be free of worry and care. Take the proper precautions beforehand, and they still can be.