Rent-a-Stalker Online?

By David Cassel, AlterNet. Posted January 16, 2002.

A startling and disturbing Web site recently rose to online notoriety. It welcomes visitors with a picture of a female, shown from behind, whom it describes as the perfect woman. She's attractive, intelligent, well dressed, and "Doesn't throw tantrums. Maybe she can even skydive." But would-be suitors have a problem. "You aren't some law-breaking psycho. You can't STALK her.

"But we can."

The site, CoincidenceDesign.com, hedges that, in lieu of stalking, "We can use a clever pretext to interview roommates and classmates from her past and colleagues and girlfriends from her present. We can send an agent to check out her relatives. We can watch her apartment and squeeze information from previous boyfriends. Then, we'll design a 'COINCIDENCE'...." Love can't be bought, but "it can be nurtured and the environment to foster it can be prepared."

Surely this was a hoax, Web-surfers thought. For one thing, the information provided to register the domain name CoincidenceDesign.com didn't check out. Though its postal address was in Dallas, the phone number belonged to a Ford dealership in Davis, California (no one at the dealership had ever heard of the site). "I just typed in a number," the Webmaster behind Coincidence Design now admits -- adding that the contact name he'd provided on the registration, Jason Bourne, was also fictitious. He took it from Robert Ludlum's book "The Bourne Identity." His real name is Nick, he says, but he declines to provide a surname. "You want me to make one up?" he offers instead.

Nick's idea has its predecessors. The search for love has been a long-standing subject of parody on the Internet. One page (www.geocities.com/walters_mission) claimed it had been created by a 17-year-old Canadian named Walter, whose female classmate had agreed to help him lose his virginity if only everyone on the Internet would access his Web page one million times. Two years ago the page added a description of victory -- which concluded with "a beautiful sunrise the next morning" -- but those details have since been removed.

Another page, started in April of 1999, purported to be the log of two friends competing to see which of them could find a sexual partner first. The contest dragged on for 19 months, until it finally reached its anticlimactic conclusion. ("Ric Won.")

One spurious Web site even pretended to auction off the eggs of fashion models -- and fooled more than a few news outlets. A Web site masquerading as that of a video-store clerk stalker even drew the attention of Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

But stranger things have happened for real, online. A 25-year-old Webmistress really did offer her services as an online temptress-for-hire to catch romantic partners that were cheating online. (Though her site -- Infidelity Busters -- appears to have since been discontinued.) And a touching real-life example is provided by Rod Barnett, CEO of the St. Louis company Automation Service. He created a Web site offering a bounty of $10,000 to anyone who can find him a wife. Wednesday Barnett said that over the years his call for assistant cupids has drawn 1000 voicemail messages, 25,000 emails, and 2 million unique visitors. "I talked to hundreds, met 15 over 3 years, and dated one almost 2 years -- a Delta Flight attendant. Her sister saw me in Glamour magazine, spent days reading the Web site, and then couldn't wait any longer." To show his seriousness of commitment, he says he took the Web page down during their courtship. But now -- alas -- his quest for a bride continues.

Though Barnett's efforts have themselves been parodied by sites like paintjobforagirlfriend.com and youcrazy.com/10k4aho, Barnett's search for love appears to be completely serious. He's even set up an earnest voice-mail message about the importance of taking risks. In true geek fashion, while the enterprise seems a little ham-handed and obsessive, it's colored with a touching idealism. In the message he's left out for the world, he reminds those searching for love to keep their eye on the prize.

"Remember, it doesn't matter how you meet someone. It only matters that you do..."

Precisely because some people are, in fact, prepared to go to such great lengths to find true love, it's easy for the line between reality and fiction to blur. As it does with the mysterious Nick, at Coincidence Design. Nick claims he replaced his true phone number with a fake one when his site's popularity began climbing in December. This, too, appears to be untrue, since the registration shows that phone number was input the day the site was created, 18 months ago. But putting aside questions about Nick -- is his Web site a hoax or a legitimate business?

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