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Things to Remember With Domestic Education Verifications

Gordon Basichis — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 11:45:34 +0000

Employers and recruiters often need to verify a job applicant’s education history. Usually, these background checks are pretty straightforward. With education is is the name of the school, the location of the school, type of degree, major and year of graduation.

With common names, sometimes the degree is not enough. The researcher may require the major and the actual campus of the college or university. The campus is always important as most colleges and universities, despite the myriad branches, do not centralize their databases. The records for graduates and post-graduate degrees are housed with the registrar of that particular campus.

The wrong graduation date can cause confusion when conducting an education verification background search. With the wrong graduation date, it is sometimes difficult to find the student in the database. In some cases, and good to remember, those applicants who are lying about actually graduating from that college or university, will provide a fictitious graduation date. By doing so they try to hide the fact that they were “enrollment only” or never attended at all. So often we need to verify the graduation date.

Female graduates often go to school under their maiden names and then, years later, forget and provide only their married name. Time can be wasted searching for your candidate under her married name, when she attended school under her maiden name.

With international students, there is a similar condition as with female graduations. Often a foreign student went to school under a formal, native name. And then, over time, to “Americanize,” if you will the Bao Wynn Nguyen is now Ben or Frank. Good for him or her. But when we are unable to verify, it is something necessary to go back to the candidate and ask if what name he or she used to register as a student.

Be aware of diploma mills. This is where the employment candidate has spend all of a couple hundred bucks and twenty minutes, sometimes, in qualifying as a graduate from some mythical Internet School under the guise of “life experience.” Diploma mills often have them high falutin’ names that can sound like real schools. They are not. They are not legitimate remote or distance learning institutions. They are bugus, unacdredited by anyone other than themselves, and the degree is worthless.

Sometimes, when all else fails, it is incumbent upon the employment candidate to supply a copy or his or her degree or transcripts. We request this when the registrar is unable to locate the student in its database. Sometimes it’s a technical glitch, sometimes it’s an oversight on the part of the registrar. And sometimes the employment candidate never attended that college or university. As for their explanations and excuses, we have heard quite a few. Some or mundane and predictable, akin to the dog ate my homework. But some are pretty creative. One day I will list a few. One chestnut was the lament, “The school just can’t get it’s s**t together.”

Too rare.

Minnesota Massage Parlor Fails to Pass Background Checks

Gordon Basichis — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 12:43:41 +0000

When you are a massage parlor in Minnesota, you would think you would have your ducks in a row to pass the necessary background checks. Not in this case. According to the Savage Pacer, Oriental Massage was denied the necessary approval to open its doors.

As with employment candidates, when the education verifications come up bonus, then the license is denied. In this case two of the three massage therapists working at the school were not graduates of an accredited massage therapy school. Additionally, the business owner came up short in his background checks as different references he provided could not be reached by the researcher. The massage parlor owner has refiled his forms for further consideration.

What I found interesting in this particular case is how those concerned with passing background checks will often provide incorrect or inaccurate information with the expectation they will clear the searches. However, be it a city, state, or a private employer, most entities take their background checks very seriously. Most mandate accuracy and truthfulness and the filing of inaccurate data will often raise red flags.

As an employment candidate or as someone applying for a business license, it always pays to review what is required and ask any questions as to what data is required for conducting background checks. Being proactive will not only save a lot of grief but will serve to allay suspicion about intent. Most public agencies and private employers appreciate advanced questions rather than excuses when the background report returns as incomplete for inability to verify.

Pay attention to detail. It may be the difference in getting hired and getting a license or being denied.

Which Employers are Laying Off Because of the Economy, and Which Are Just Cleaning House?

Gordon Basichis — Thu, 21 May 2009 12:19:45 +0000

Not every employer is laying off its workers. In fact, some are hiring new employers. Despite the economy, according to the New York Times, while 4.8 million people were laid off from their jobs, there were 4.3 million applicants who were hired in the same period. I realize this leaves the employment shortfall at close to half-million jobs lost that month, but then one has it wonder is all of it due to the economy.

It is no secret that every employer has dead wood in its work force. There are people whose skills sets are outdated and have neither the initiative or desire to retrain. There are the employees whose performance levels are sub-par. There are the workers who spend too much time surfing the Internet or engaging other employees and wasting their time. Then there is the office theft issue. On the still expensive but more negligible levels, this could mean the employee who steals office supplies. At the more extreme level, it is the employee who steals valuable databases and proprietary information. This is what they try to sell to your competitors, either to resolve a perceived slight or just to make some money. Either way, in any form, none of it is any good for the working environment.

It should be no secret that employers use economic downturns to rid themselves of the dead wood. It is the perfect excuses. The economy is terrible, times are tight, we have to thin out the staff. Those who are obsolete, overlapping, under-performing, or thieves, can be discharged with minimum of repercussions. They are merely part of a mass layoff policy. The thing is, these are not the people who will be hired back. Other, more valued workers will return to their jobs, or ones like it, when the economy turns around. But the underperformers and underskilled, they are the canon fodder in a recession.

Surely, they will try to find jobs elsewhere. Which is all the more reason the conduct background checks. While a preemployment screening program cannot vet very negative aspect of a job candidate, it can go a long way in weeding out the underqualified. Besides the usual background searches, an intensive interview process and even aptitude and psychological testing may better enable the employer to dodge the deadwood that will most certainly still be floating around once the economy has rebounded.

As with many things in life, there are few bargains out there. So check them out before you hire.

Background Checks Against Inept Nurses

Gordon Basichis — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 13:14:35 +0000

Following up on my previous postings about a joint Los Angeles Times ProPublica study on the breakdown in oversight of the nursing and healthcare industry, the Times has published another article, describing how inept nurses lose their license in one state and move to another. In some cases the nurses who move around have the legitimate capacity to obtain a license from a different state. There is either a lack of reciprocation where disciplinary actions or sanctions are concerned, or the new state licensing boards are claiming they are overburdened and short staffed due to economic downsizing, they do not have either the time or capability of running background checks on the new applicants.

Of course, as I indicated in my earlier posting, More California Registered Nurses Shown As Convicted Criminals this is a mistake and there needs to be a standardized system for conducting background checks and performance history on nurses and people in the healthcare industry. There are two major databases to retrieve information, concerning disciplinary actions against nurses. One if the federal Database, which the study claims is incomplete. The other is provided by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing. But with that database, submitting information about incompetent nurses is voluntary. Keeping in mind that States also earn much needed revenue by testing nurses, charging for licenses, etc. Nothing like an economic downturn to create in state and public services a systematic sequence of negligence and ineptitude that fails to monitor the healthcare industry, where there is another systematic sequence of negligence and ineptitude. The public, of course, ends up the loser.

Negligence is the word. There really are no excuses. Because it is sheer negligence if any public service agency, healthcare group, or staffing agency fails to conduct the Office of the Inspector General/Government Services Agency, OIG/GSA, Sanctions background check on its nurses. Or the FACIS Search, which includes the OIG/GSAHealthcare Sanctions Report as well as the 800 odd healthcare agencies in all fifty states who report disciplinary actions taken against anyone in the healthcare industry. Since Federal Funding is dependent on a healthcare facility not having anyone on its staff who is marked for disciplinary action on the OIG/GSA, this would seem like a no brainer. But there are temp staffing groups who staff nurses to private healthcare services or to individuals, and apparently they manage to avoid running the sanctions reports.

Thanks to the joint study from the Los Angeles Times and ProPublica, there is an increase in public awareness a about the terrible state of the healthcare industry with respect to background checks and public safeguards. Some states are already responding and initiating renewed efforts to monitor their nurses and healthcare professionals. It’s just a shame it has taken so long.

When Tough Times Bring Out the Financial Scammers

Gordon Basichis — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 00:51:32 +0000

A tightening economy and skittish financial situations bring out more of the con artists and frauds. Take caution against the bad guys in increasingly desperate times and do your research.

Perhaps one of the few perks of living long enough is you can recognize how things come around in cycles. Be it fashion or issues, or, in this case, the economy, you get to see different patterns emerge. You get to see how the tightening economy elicits the desperation in some.

Desperation in turn breeds irrational judgment and impulsive decisions, which in turn provide a fertile breeding ground for the scam artists of every stripe and variety. These are the swindlers or prey upon your insecurities, who offer through what they term â€œgood dealsâ€ and ways to beat the system. While there are ways to beat the system and in fact profit and prosper during dicey economic cycles, the scammers are only out to take your money.

Some of the methods stay the same. But thanks to technology, purveyors of fraud play new angles and work variations on a theme. Thanks to Photo Shop and other software, they can show you Bank Statements and financial statements that will wow you with their number of zeros. They will assure their own financial security by showing you statements listing their assets in the millions. All while asking for you to put up your hard earned money. Not only put it up, but put it up first.

And why must you put it up first? Because their money is tied up somewhere. That is one of the more common excuses. They will lie by telling you their money is tied up in property or in some other way just isnâ€™t liquid. Or, hereâ€™s a very popular one, they will tell you they are going through a nasty divorce, and they canâ€™t show their money at the moment. They will request you put up the investment funds for both of you and they will gladly pay you back later.

The sad fact is later never comes around. You are left in the lurch, listening to their excuses about the delays in your joint business proposition. They will tell you that your thing is still â€œsure,â€ but there are a few hang ups to overcome. And then there are more delays. And finally, miraculously either the great deal fades away or they do. Leaving you holding the bag.

At Corra we have been approached lately with a lot more fraudulent schemes. Businesses, individuals, financial and equity groups, and attorneys are all requesting business research and records that potentially reveal previous fraudulent or criminal activity. In the course of conducting these background reports we are examining counterfeit financial statements. We discover people living on assumed names or doing business by using the social security numbers of dead people. In fact, some of having been using the decedentâ€™s social security number for so long, it looks legitimate. The social security number first appears as if it belongs to the scammer. Until you look deeper and find out the actual owner of the social security number has been dead a number of years.

At Corra we are also seeing social security numbers in the 700 series. These belonged to retired railroad workers, some of the first to receive social security benefits. The United States government ended the issue or use of these numbers somewhere around 1962. So itâ€™s safe to say there are not many old, dead retired railroad workers participating in fraudulent activity. We are also seeing a few 800 series social security numbers. This series has yet to be issue, legitimately. So be on the lookout for these.

All numbers and documents aside, most scam artists win you over by gaining your confidence, hence the term con artist. They prey on you when you are insecure, when your business is in trouble, or when you are looking for extra bucks to make ends meet. Or, if you are the greedy sort, they prey upon your greed and promise you the type of lucrative returns that sound too good to be true. Because they are too good to be true. Or they are illegal, and more often than not you will end up paying the piper.

The federal government has law enforcement task forces in many major cities, investigating real estate fraud. They are finding rings of realtors, appraisers, mortgage brokers, stand-ins and various and sundry folks who fooled with the numbers to falsify the appraisal value of a house, the net work of the buyer and just about everything else. If you are curious, check your local paper or the national news. Each is filled with stories about this.

But now that the housing market has imploded, the predators are out conning people into investment schemes that will save their personal worth or their businesses. They show you the documents, falsify previous returns and then ask for your money.

Donâ€™t be so quick to leap into anything. With any deal, run background checks and do the corporate research. For suspicious businesses, you can run a business credit report. There are many searches you can conduct for relatively nominal fees. Certainly the fees can save you from being swindled for a lot of money and the embarrassment it brings with it. Nothing is guaranteed. There is always a chance a con artist can slip through the cracks. But due diligence will filter out most of them.

So realize bad times can bring on real opportunity. Legitimate opportunity. But bad times can also bring out the bad people. So watch yourself. As they say in boxing, â€œprotect yourself at all times.â€

Mortgage Crash Puts New Background Checking Demands on Landlords

Gordon Basichis — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 00:22:52 +0000

Corra has seen an accelerated demand in its tenant screening services. The housing crash has steadily accelerated foreclosures, and now more former homeowners are looking to rent property. The fact that mortgages are so tough tom come by also creates a higher renters market. And then of course there are many people waiting on the sidelines for the housing prices to further depreciate, so they too are renting.

The housing crisis has also created financial and domestic issues that have led to more divorces and once married, now single parents and partners are looking for a place to live.

So if you are a property management group, leasing agent, or merely a guy with a couple of apartments to rent, the prudent move is to run background check on all your applicants. Your applicants may have stories, which are either simple or elaborate excuses as to why things are the way they are. They may assure you and beg you, but at the end of the day, if things go wrong, it is you left holding the bag.

Corra has heard the horror stories and has helped clients in need of advice. Our clients are decent people, and sometimes want to be assured that thing are not how they appear to be. But…usually they are how they appear to be. Suspicious and sketchy circumstances almost never pan out into better conditions.

If you are a landlord, you should be running tenant screening, including criminal and credit reports. It may pay to run eviction searches as well. An ounce of prevention and a few bucks is worth the pounds of cure and the thousands you will have to spend in court or in eviction proceedings.

So check them out before you rent to them.

Scam Artists Could Be Ruining Your Business

Gordon Basichis — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 19:53:10 +0000

We saw this article on Yahoo.com
MarketWatch
What 2 crooks told me over lunch

By Herb Greenberg

Commentary: “You cannot accept information at face value”

This column first appeared in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend.SAN DIEGO (MarketWatch) — My lunch with two crooks: “Hi Sammy, it’s great to see you.” Barry Minkow gave Sam E. Antar a hug as we walked to our table at a fish restaurant overlooking San Diego Bay. It was a Friday, and Antar made the trek to San Diego from Los Angeles, where he was visiting his son; a few days earlier, this convicted felon had lectured students and faculty at the Stanford Law School on how not to get taken by a crook like him.Antar was chief financial officer of Crazy Eddie, a New York electronics retailer that in the 1970s and 1980s claimed “our prices are inSANE” as it bilked investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars. He stayed out of jail by turning on several others, including his cousin, Eddie Antar, who was Crazy Eddie’s co-founder. Minkow, on the other hand, spent seven years behind bars after stealing more than $20 million from investors in the 1980s as founder and chief executive of ZZZZ Best, a once-hot rug-cleaning company whose books could’ve used a good scrubbing.”He’s an orthodox Jew and I’m a Jew who is a pastor,” cracks Minkow, who like Antar now spends time lecturing and working with cops to bust white-collar financial frauds. Minkow has reverence for Antar, who looks like Carla’s husband from the sitcom “Cheers” and who claims to suffer from a bipolar disorder and serious insomnia. (I can vouch for the latter because his e-mails and postings on blogs come at all hours, mostly in the middle of the night.) “Criminals don’t sleep,” he explains.A former CPA, Antar makes no excuses for his criminal past, referring to himself in e-mails, casual discussion and his Web site — whitecollarfraud.com1 — as a “low life” and “convicted felon.” Even the normally loquacious Minkow appears to enjoy leaving the talking to Antar, who takes no money for his speeches. “I don’t want to be held up on the pedestal of redemption,” he says. “I would rather people learn from my vile, ugly and vicious crimes. It is most important that they understand the ugly nature of criminality. My life is a mistake of history.”A mistake, maybe, but one other people can learn from. “Do not trust verify,” was his mantra as the meal began.Verify what? “Everything.”Even whether Antar and Minkow aren’t still scamming?

“Everything.”

To read the rest of this article go to Yahoo.com

The scam artists listed in this article are legends of notoriety or even infamy. They are brand name scammers who made and possibly lost fortunes by playing one illegal angle or another. Corra has known people like these and for the most part they can be very colorful characters.But then these are the well known guys who are out of the scamming business. They are public figures. But what about the guy working in your business who is quietly running scams of his own. What kind of scams? They could be selling off your sensitive databases, diverting inside information to your competitors. They could be stealing sensitive intellectual property and peddling it to the highest bidder. You don’t think so? Thing again. The business section of the paper will often contain an article detailing one scam or another.That’s why Corra always recommends running a criminal check on new employees, and a credit check on job candidates and, periodically, on current employees with access to sensitive information. Education Verification is as important as Employment Verification to help ascertain if this candidate is going to be an asset to you company or a silent and deadly partner.

As Corra says, check them out before you hire.

IS SANTA CLAUS A PERVERT?

Gordon Basichis — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 18:51:24 +0000

If You Are a Single Parent, Especially, Be Careful Who You Let Into Your House This Holiday Season

Christmas is the time of year when we like to spend our time with our children, friends and family. At least, that is how the story goes, and for the most part it is pretty true. We forget last yearâ€™s tribulations, the traffic jams and crowded stores. We fill our cars with ever-precious gasoline and our spirits with holiday cheer, and then we head off to the mall. We do a little shopping, trying to avoid the crazies who in increasing frequency are ready to do physical battle over the fad gift of the moment.

We stand in line for what seems like forever, juggling shopping bags and restive children, waiting our chance for a few minute conference with none other than the Big Guy from the North Pole, Santa Claus. There he sits on his gilded throne, amid all the blinking lights and Christmas dÃ©cor. He is assisted by his helpers, who less often these days are midgets or dwarves, posing as elves. Midgets and dwarves allegedly scare the kiddies. The scene is fully nostalgic, resplendent with your own childhood memories. Your children are so anxious to sit and tell Santa what they want for Christmas, they can barely stand it. And here, amid the fake snow and the holiday festivities, it never occurs to you that Santa Claus may be a pervert.

Thatâ€™s right. Despite all good intentions, your favorite mall may have mistakenly hired a child molester, whose recent residential address may have been the state penitentiary and not the North Pole. And you think you should be concerned about your childâ€™s fear of midgets and dwarves. The truth is, that very lap where you place your child to declare his holiday wishes may actually belong to a pedophile.

To support this claim, CBS News recently had one of its staff impersonate a convicted felon and child molester. The staff member applied in five Los Angeles malls, under the name of the actual felon. The felon was a man who was registered along with 63,000 sickos on what is commonly known as â€œMeaganâ€™s List.â€ He was hardly a well-kept secret. And yet all five shopping malls hired the man to be their Santa Claus. Later, when confronted with the issue, one man claimed to have run a free pre-employment background check that is generally good for nothing. The others mumbled lame excuses that, when translated logically, meant they probably had not run any kind of pre-employment background check.

In other malls throughout the country, those responsible do conduct pre-employment background checks, along with drug testing. The good news is, employers like Santa Plus, of Fallon, Missouri, which screens the 500 Santas it places in 250 malls, in 46 states, do conduct background checks. However, by some accounts, 70 out of every 1000 applicants for the Santa or Santaâ€™s helper jobs have a felony record of some sort. That is approximately seven percent of those screened. They may also be applying to the malls and services that donâ€™t do any background checking. They may be like the staff member of CBS, who, while posing as a child molester, got hired anyway. At five different malls. In the case of CBS, their guy was an imposter, helping to work a feature story. In the other cases, they are the real thing.

I know this is terrible. But if it ended there, we could almost be grateful. . Perhaps the larger question is, who are what are you having over for the holidays? Are you not doing the same thing as the shopping malls when you are thinking of dating someone without first checking him out? I know, your new Mr. Possible seems perfectly lovely on the Internet, and he is charming on the telephone. It is the holiday season. You feel lonely. It would be nice to share the holidays with someone who shows the potential for romance. But a confidence man, a criminal, or a pedophile, has had lots of practice at disarming his pray. Winning you over is what his life is all about. Getting to your wallet; getting to your children. They are good at it.

This is not to suggest you investigate old Uncle Fred, although itâ€™s not always a bad idea. It is to suggest, however, that if you are a single woman, especially a single parent, and you are using the singles and online dating sites, you had best run an online dating background check on your potential paramours. Not only does an online singles background check help protect you from theft of goods, confidence scams, identity theft and your own risk of physical harm, but most importantly, it helps protect your children from the kind of strangers they should never meet.

At Corra Group, where we specialize in servicing professional women with their online dating background checks, we have a special sayingâ€”Check Him Out Before You Date Him. If you have children, we canâ€™t urge it enough.

Corra ran this article last year. We thought it is important enough to run it again this holiday season. n fact, it may become a tradition to remind families and especially single parents what may be lurking out there. As the world changes, we hear horror stories about child abductions and molestations with alarming frequency. What was once terribly shocking, unfortunately has become a knowing routine.

We urge you to run background checks on any stranger who has proximity to your children. Be it your new nanny, a housekeeper, your new romantic prospect, it is always important to run a criminal background check and to review his or her name on the sexual offenders’ registry. There are a variety of criminal background checks, but the Nationwide Criminal Check not only reports back crimes in most states, but reports back those listed on the sexual registry in all fifty states.

There are no guarantees for the safety of you or your children. But there are ways to help prevent you from becoming a victim of one of the many predators lurking our society. So please listen to Corra and check them out. It will give you peace of mind.

Don’t Be So Caught Up in Romance You Are Blinded to the Warning Signs

Gordon Basichis — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 21:18:35 +0000

We spotted this in a bright new magazine Tango, and we excerpted part of the article. Michael Shnayerson wrote the article that alerts you to the twelve red flags that should discourage further engagement

2:The Dirty Dozen

Watch out for the Fling-o-matic, the Parent Trap, the Anger Hum, and these other stop signs.Chronic lateness.
For clarity, â€œchronicâ€ here means â€œthree dates in a row.â€ If your date arrives more than ten minutes late each time, donâ€™t wait for his (or her) fourth arrival. Be gone. No doubt your date will have wonderful excuses, and one or two may even be sound. But three in a row is a pattern, and what the pattern says is: I donâ€™t want to get into this. So neither do you.

Ketchup on eggs.
If one of those ï¬rst dates is brunch, and your new friend reaches for the ketchup to put on her eggs, RED FLAG! I realize this may seem arbitrary or fussy. Or perhaps you think Iâ€™m making a class judgment here. Well, maybe I am! Whatâ€™s wrong with that? All I know is: Nothing good ever comes of ketchup on eggs. And itâ€™s really gross.

Rudeness to waiters.
And taxi drivers, and any-one else in a service job. I shouldnâ€™t even have to explain why this is a dealbreaker. Just remember that it is.

Scary divorce stories.
Itâ€™s amazing how much a new prospect will tell you about her life on a ï¬rst or second dateâ€”much more than she knows sheâ€™s saying. The question is: Do you hear it? If she launches into the story of her messy divorce, is her ex the villain in every respect? To me, thatâ€™s a red ï¬‚ag right there. Anyone whoâ€™s emotionally grounded should be able to see that two people, not one, contributed to a divorce.

A deep attachment to disturbing pets.
A golden retriever is ï¬ne, and cats are all right if they donâ€™t do much. But Iâ€™m still haunted by the memory of an ancient, hairless dachshund that would manage to jump up on the bed during inopportune moments and bay. Not until the dog-owner chose to disengage herself from me and comfort the dog instead did I know that this was trouble.

Fling-o-matics.
During a ï¬rst, incredibly romantic lunch with a new prospect some time ago, I mentioned that my most recent relationship had ended after a year. â€œA year,â€ my new friend marveled. â€œThatâ€™s so impressive! All of my relationships end after three months.â€ Of course I resolved to be the exception. Over the next weeks, which happened to include Christmas and New Yearâ€™s, we had an amazing time, both in New York City, where she had a charming Hellâ€™s Kitchen walk-up, and at my house in the Hamptons. One Sunday, after Iâ€™d put her on the train home, I came back to ï¬nd the most tenderly romantic note on my pillow, something about soul mates joined. The next week, for no outward cause, she called to break up with me. No argument, no terrible time, just end of story. Only later did I realize it was week 12. Lesson: When a woman over 35 tells you all her relationships have ended after a few months, RED FLAG.

Demon children.
Children with an issue or two? Maybe. Children who hate you? Watch out. Hopelessly spoiled or angry children, like Dâ€”â€™s? Head for the door.

Money matters.
Money stirs up so many issues, conscious and unconscious, far more than any magazine article can cover. For now, letâ€™s just list two red ï¬‚ags you can spot early on. One: If a man suggests splitting the tab on a ï¬rst date, the woman should payâ€”then bolt. I donâ€™t say this is fair, especially if, for instance, the woman is a CEO and the man is a freelance writer. But itâ€™s the way it is, and any man who tries to worm out of his society-given role as tab-picker-upper on the ï¬rst (or second or third) date for the sake of saving a few bucks is a creep to be ditched. For men, an early red ï¬‚ag about money may not start waving until the third or fourth date. A lot of women begin life as daddyâ€™s girls; a few stay that way. They feel men should provide them with the lifestyle to which theyâ€™ve grown accustomed from other men who did just that. If youâ€™re a sugar daddy yourself, have fun. If not, back off. Over time youâ€™ll only be despisedâ€”and dropped.

The Parent Trap.
Powerful emotions about oneâ€™s parentsâ€”positive or negativeâ€”are a huge red ï¬‚ag. For men, mother-worship is relationship death. One 50-year-old man I know has dated every single woman in New York and found, to his bafï¬‚ement, that none is good enoughâ€”for his mother, that is. (Sheâ€™s still calling the shots at age 85.) One of this guyâ€™s many castoffs is a very attractive, successful woman of 42, whom I later dated myself. Now that I know both, I can only wonder who was the ï¬rst to reject the other. It must have been like two gunï¬ghters at the O.K. Corral. Nâ€” rejected me after three really nice dates because she decided my eight-year-old daughter, whom she hadnâ€™t yet met, would be an â€œencumbranceâ€ to our relationship. (Since she hadnâ€™t met her, she couldnâ€™t claim my daughter was a demon child.) Only after we became friends did I learn how much she resents both her parents. Coin-cidence? I donâ€™t think so.

Bad sex.
I donâ€™t need to go into detail here, do I? Except to say that bad sex may get better after a ï¬rst, fumbling time, but bad sex two or three times in a row is sex that only gets worse. Donâ€™t fool yourself into thinking that sex is just one part of a relationship, that laughter and shared values are as important, etc., etc. Theyâ€™re not. Red ï¬‚ag. BIG red ï¬‚ag.

Dirty underwear and socks.
Your mother was right. They have to be clean. Dirty underwear is the hallmark of a secret slob, and every secret slob has many worse habits you donâ€™t even want to think aboutâ€”but will all too soon get to know if you donâ€™t leave now.

The Anger Hum.
As he or she talks, not just about past romantic relationships but about work, friends, and family, listen for a low hum of anger, like a third rail running along the tracks of your new prospectâ€™s life. For reasons I never quite ï¬gured out, I used to be attracted to women who had that vibe. Maybe it seemed sexy; maybe it reminded me of my mother. But I now know how to recognize angerâ€”not shows of temper, which may be healthy in moderation, but the deeper, more destructive humâ€”and to back off when I hear it.

We think these are great words of wisdom. We were especially taken with thewarning about ketchup on eggs and quite agree that no good comes of it. We are also aware of a recent study where the study demonstrates that those who are rude to waiters and service help are usually terrible in supervising staff. They are not only terse, insulting and often dismissive, but they lack the essential communications skills necessary to relate to their allged “underlings.” One more thing we don’t need is a lover with an attitude problem.

Dirty underwear and socks, etc., aka a slob, well let’s say for graphic reasons we can see where dirty underwear and bad sex can go hand in hand. We are always puzzled that when we live in a world of millions of showers, how few of our citizens choose to use them on a regular basis. And while the writer is at it, perhaps they should include the wearing of too much cologne and perfume as the baker’s dozen warning signs. If the perfume scent arrives several minutes before your date, then perhaps you should beat a retreat.

There are other warning signs, some are obvious and some more esoteric. Some of you can read them, and some cannot. In any event, before the B.O. the ketchup or the late arrivals overwhelm your senses, run a background check on your new romantic prospect. If nothing else, it helps make sure they are who they say they are and tips the guessing game in your favor. And if you see something that raises the proverbial red flag, like time in prison for sexual abuse, embezzlement, domestic violence, confidence scams, all the fun things we confront in this modern age, you will know it is time to leave before it ever begins.

There are a lot of predators out there. When you open your house to predators they will take advantage of you and any situation you offer. They will steal your identity, take your money, and then there is always the possibility of physical harm.

Corra offers special background checks for singles and people interested in dating. Look at the packages and see what one is maybe best for you. If not, we will customize a package for you. No matter what, cover your assets.

Check them out before you date them.

Is Santa Claus a Pervert?

Gordon Basichis — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 22:32:41 +0000

Christmas is the time of year when we like to spend our time with our children, friends and family. At least, that is how the story goes, and for the most part it is pretty true. We forget last yearâ€™s tribulations, the traffic jams and crowded stores. We fill our cars with ever-precious gasoline and our spirits with holiday cheer, and then we head off to the mall. We do a little shopping, trying to avoid the crazies who in increasing frequency are ready to do physical battle over the fad gift of the moment.

We stand in line for what seems like forever, juggling shopping bags and restive children, waiting our chance for a few minute conference with none other than the Big Guy from the North Pole, Santa Claus. There he sits on his gilded throne, amid all the blinking lights and Christmas dÃ©cor. He is assisted by his helpers, who less often these days are midgets or dwarves, posing as elves. Midgets and dwarves allegedly scare the kiddies. The scene is fully nostalgic, resplendent with your own childhood memories. Your children are so anxious to sit and tell Santa what they want for Christmas, they can barely stand it. And here, amid the fake snow and the holiday festivities, it never occurs to you that Santa Claus may be a pervert.

Thatâ€™s right. Despite all good intentions, your favorite mall may have mistakenly hired a child molester, whose recent residential address may have been the state penitentiary and not the North Pole. And you think you should be concerned about your childâ€™s fear of midgets and dwarves. The truth is, that very lap where you place your child to declare his holiday wishes may actually belong to a pedophile.

To support this claim, CBS News recently had one of its staff impersonate a convicted felon and child molester. The staff member applied in five Los Angeles malls, under the name of the actual felon. The felon was a man who was registered along with 63,000 sickos on what is commonly known as â€œMeaganâ€™s List.â€ He was hardly a well-kept secret. And yet all five shopping malls hired the man to be their Santa Claus. Later, when confronted with the issue, one man claimed to have run a free pre-employment background check that is generally good for nothing. The others mumbled lame excuses that, when translated logically, meant they probably had not run any kind of pre-employment background check.

In other malls throughout the country, those responsible do conduct pre-employment background checks, along with drug testing. The good news is, employers like Santa Plus, of Fallon, Missouri, which screens the 500 Santas it places in 250 malls, in 46 states, do conduct background checks. However, by some accounts, 70 out of every 1000 applicants for the Santa or Santaâ€™s helper jobs have a felony record of some sort. That is approximately seven percent of those screened. They may also be applying to the malls and services that donâ€™t do any background checking. They may be like the staff member of CBS, who, while posing as a child molester, got hired anyway. At five different malls. In the case of CBS, their guy was an imposter, helping to work a feature story. In the other cases, they are the real thing.

I know this is terrible. But if it ended there, we could almost be grateful. . Perhaps the larger question is, who are what are you having over for the holidays? Are you not doing the same thing as the shopping malls when you are thinking of dating someone without first checking him out? I know, your new Mr. Possible seems perfectly lovely on the Internet, and he is charming on the telephone. It is the holiday season. You feel lonely. It would be nice to share the holidays with someone who shows the potential for romance. But a confidence man, a criminal, or a pedophile, has had lots of practice at disarming his pray. Winning you over is what his life is all about. Getting to your wallet; getting to your children. They are good at it.

This is not to suggest you investigate old Uncle Fred, although itâ€™s not always a bad idea. It is to suggest, however, that if you are a single woman, especially a single parent, and you are using the singles and online dating sites, you had best run an online dating background check on your potential paramours. Not only does an online singles background check help protect you from theft of goods, confidence scams, identity theft and your own risk of physical harm, but most importantly, it helps protect your children from the kind of strangers they should never meet.

Remember, Check Him Out Before You Date Him.