How to fact-check your significant maybe
Ethan Baron
Province
Nicole Hall let her guard down while vacationing in the Dominican Republic. Back home, she checked Facebook and discovered her new boyfriend was ‘kind of a sleazebag.’ Photograph by: Ric Ernst, The Province
Go ahead, fall in love. But don’t forget to check for skeletons in the closet.
You don’t want to end up being someone’s bloody Valentine.
Tomorrow marks the first Valentine’s Day on which a new online investigative tool has been available to British Columbians. It’s never been so easy to find out if the person who makes your heart throb should make you run for your life.
Meet “Justin,” your best defence against Cupid’s whims.
B.C.’s court services have put the “Justin” provincial court-records system on the Internet. Go to Court Services Online.
Leave the court location blank, so the search covers all B.C., plug in a name, and up comes the criminal history. You can find out if your significant maybe has been charged with a crime, when and where they appeared in court, and what the result was if there has been one.
First-degree murder, sexual assault, uttering threats, criminal harassment, theft, drug-dealing — you can get it all. Justin even shows speeding tickets.
Now, this search works best if your love interest has an unusual name. Search for Mike Smith or Jennifer Jones and you’re going to get a lot of different people. It helps if you know the person’s middle name. You can narrow it down if you know their age — go to the “participants” tab and you’ll get a year of birth for the accused.
If you’re still not sure, you can visit the registry of the court that handled the case, and ask for whatever files are publicly available.
Justin is an excellent new tool to protect yourself from heartbreak, or worse. But, with so many liars, cheats, thieves, con artists, perverts, sociopaths, psychopaths, drug addicts, drunks, deadbeats, derelicts and even gangsters among us, you need additional Cupid-control.
Facebook can be a treasure-trove of personal information, especially if someone doesn’t limit access to their profile, or if you and the other person have become Facebook friends.
Vancouver public-relations consultant Nicole Hall, 24, met a man from Regina while on vacation in the Dominican Republic. Travis assured her he was single. Although Hall typically checks Facebook before dating someone, she was on vacation and let her personal rules slide. But before she flew home, she agreed to Travis’s suggestion that she add him on Facebook. Back home, she checked his profile, which showed he was “in a relationship.”
“He basically flat-out lied about his relationship status,” Hall says. “He’s kind of a sleazebag and not really someone that I would ever really want to associate myself with again.”
Even without access to someone’s profile, you can usually see who their friends are, unless they’re one of the few Facebook users who restrict that from public view. Are his friends smoking joints and throwing gang signs? Are her friends flaunting prison tattoos and drinking straight from the whiskey bottle? You may want to cancel that coffee date.
This Valentine’s Day, listen to your heart. Then go online, and get a second opinion.
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