Safety Advice and Guidelines

The LikeMynds website is a great way to find people for love, happiness, fun, enjoying life and achieving your goals! If you follow a few commonsense guidelines you will also find it to be one of the safest ways to meet new people.

The following advice applies to all our services but is particulary applicable to dating.

How does the LikeMynds service help ensure my safety and privacy?

We have developed our services to help ensure your safety and privacy by:

• Never displaying your postcode or email address to other users.
• Letting you send messages to other users without exposing your email address or other personal information that is not visible on your profile.
• Only asking for your date of birth to the nearest month.
• Suggesting you use only your first name on your profile.

How can I, as a LikeMynds user, ensure my safety and privacy?

Firstly, please don't worry unduly about things going wrong but do recognise that you are responsible for your own actions and there are some sensible precautions you might want to consider.

• Don't provide information in your profile that could personally identify you such as your email address, telephone number or address.
• Use our messaging system to contact other users. You don't need to give out any contact details or additional personal information and can block anyone from sending you messages at anytime.
• Wait until you are really comfortable with someone before providing them with alternative contact details or arranging to meet. Trust your instincts.
• Bear in mind that what you read in a profile may not be true and that photos may not be genuine. Our staff review profiles and photos to ensure they are suitable but we do not validate their authenticity.
• Consider using an email account and/or phone number that is solely for giving out to people online. Hotmail, Yahoo and others offer free email accounts that can be deleted at any time. Pay-as-you-go mobile phones can be obtained relatively cheaply.
• If you contact another user by phone, find out how to stop your number appearing on their phone ("caller ID").
• Keep your messages to subjects you'd be happy to talk about in person. Be yourself, don't lie and avoid excessive flirting on the dating service (well, on any of our services for that matter!).
• Tell the truth in your profile and messages and don't fake your photo. It's not going to help when you meet someone and have to confess to your deceitful behaviour!
• Always use your commonsense and be responsible for your own safety.

Face-to-face meetings

If you reach the stage of wanting to meet someone face-to-face, great! Use your own judgment and consider some of the following guidelines.

• Meet in a public place that you both know.
• Inform a friend or relative where you are going and consider arranging to call them by a certain time to let them know everything is OK.
• Never arrange to be picked up, dropped off or to meet at your house or somewhere you go on a regular basis such as your place of work.
• Don't let your the person you are meeting arrange your travel or accommodation.
• Take your time and don't be pushed into something you don't feel completely comfortable with.
• Remember, you met this person through LikeMynds and you can meet others if this one doesn't work out. Don't feel pressured into making it work.

Buying and selling

Our Small Ads Service allows you to advertise and search for goods, services, good causes and more. Please be aware that there are certain unscrupulous rogues out there who may try to scam you when you are buying and even selling an item. Watch out for anyone offering unusual payment terms and always wait for cheques to clear before handing over an item.

Also please note, LikeMynds does not handle payments for goods and is not responsible for the authenticity of adverts. All transactions should be carried out directly between buyer and seller. We recommend you physically inspect and collect goods rather than have them sent to you.

If you experience problems dealing with an advertiser on our site, please use the contact link to send us a message. All ads are placed by signed up users so we are able to follow up any abuse of the service.

Abuse of our services

Please be aware that despite our best efforts you may occassionally receive abusive, unsuitable or 'spam' messages. This is hard to prevent completely, especially for our free services. In particular, be aware of any message that promises to make you rich, especially those that request you transfer money to someone first! It is best that you do not respond to such messages and use the 'report abuse' link to let us know. You will probably also want to block them from seeing your profile and sending you messages - simply view their profile and click 'add to blocked'. We will act swiftly to ban anyone abusing our services.