Ceremony Pathways

Category: Love

  • Catphishing

    Catphishing

    The Top Ten Scams of 2014 is out and the top love scam is catphishing. It has been around for years but mutates as does our social media.

    Catphishing – A romance scam in which a fraudster pretends to be someone they are not on an online dating or social media website, for the purpose of taking money or personal information from their targets.

    For those with an online profile on any of the multiple dating sites available to us, it can start innocently enough with a friendly hello and some comment about your profile, usually of a complimentary nature. If you reply the game is afoot. Usually there is an exchange of email addresses to take communications outside the dating site itself.

    Other social media sites like Facebook are also prime for catphishing, especially those with very relaxed or no security settings. Young people can be particularly vulnerable. Lisa Shaw, Senior Director, Child Online Safety and Protection at SpectorSoft, in an article for Parentingtodayskids.com says “unfortunately, kids and teens can be lured into unsafe situations because they truly believe they are building a relationship with a boyfriend/girlfriend who is a peer, when in reality they could be talking to a predator.”

    You can learn about the origins of the term by checking out this video, an interview with Executive Producer of MTV’s “Catfish” who discusses how the scam works and how Manti Te’o may have been hooked.
    Or find out more about the Top 10 in this article over at the Better Business Bureau. Better yet, here’s the brochure.
  • Braden Summers

    Braden Summers

    A link to this photographer’s work showed up in my facebook stream today. Some of these pictures just sizzle with creativity and artistic aesthetic.

    Braden says he really loves creating portraits and celebrating romantic moments. Now this guy has created some incredible romantic moments in the past. Then one day his boyfriend suggested that he photograph a gay couple, and Braden had to ask himself why, as a gay man, that he had not thought of this instinctively?

    “We’ve seen it millions of times in commercials, movies and advertising for as long as the mediums have existed. Now, I know first hand that there’s a lot of love and romance in the gay community, and what’s lacking is representation of this in these mediums. Now what we do see of the LGBT community is often overtly sexualized and sometimes deviant. I want to show a campaign that illustrates the love and romance in various cultures around the world, that communicates all love is equal.”

    The results of his project are absolutely stunning.

    Go immediately to Braden Summers and check his work.