Are Adults safe on the internet?

Adults talk about how the internet isn't a safe place for children and teenagers, after hearing news reports/ stories with horror stories of kids who have met people on the internet and been murdered/sexually assaulted etc.. all very extreme stories. And we do well to warn people of the danger.

 It is something that plagues the mind of parents as their children being to talk to strangers in chat rooms/message boards and other websites, but are they practising what they preach or are they being just as unsafe as anyone else? So I did a little experiment to find out...

I signed up to f-buddy.co.uk for two days, which is a website for adults to meet online, and have sexual encounters with, whether it's just emails, phone calls, or meeting up in person and having a fling. Straight away I received messages from multiple people giving me their contact details and where they lived etc... Which got me to thinking, how many people on this website are willing to meet up with a person without knowing them?

I posed as a 21 year old girl called Charlotte using a fake picture and information, then, I posted a status on the website, which is viewable by males who had joined saying. 'Who wants to be a part of an experiment? message me?' To which I received 232 responses from people, all of different ages from 18 upwards, below is a graph of how many people replied from each age bracket.

Each of these people gave either one of 3 responses. They either;
Said yes straight away, and gave contact details (Phone numbers etc)
Said yes, while asking for details
Or just asked for details before agreeing.

Below is a graph showing the numbers between the different responses from the people who did respond.

The blue slice shows the amount of people who asked before agreeing, which in the situation is the safest option. However, my reply to everyone who did respond to me was
'Hi, thanks for getting back to me, before I send out any details about the experiment, can I just ask one question? Would you be willing to meet me in person?'
To which everyone replied 'Yes'
While giving out contact details, even addresses (Which I have deleted)

So what I'm trying to say is, through the power of sending two messages to complete strangers, 232 people agreed to meet me in person off the internet.
Considering how easy it was to fake a profile, lying about my appearance, name, age, location etc. People have been known to be murdered/sexually assaulted by people they meet off the internet, so 232 adults had put themselves at risk by agreeing to see me personally.

Luckily i'm a nice person! And wouldn't assault any of these people if I had met them.
So if you do decide to meet up with anyone on the internet, be VERY careful. You can never know for sure that the complete stranger you're talking to is safe. I hope this experiment opens your eyes just a little bit.


*I understand this experiment was open only to males, I am currently looking for a similar site that is free for men to join to conduct the same experiment on females, as I'm sure I would get a different response,
Females are much more cautious than men when it comes to this type of thing, however some females do also fall into the same trap.
I didn't feel comfortable giving the website my bank details, also being a student, I am rather quite skint atm!*
Also I apologise for the small font on the graphs, it was the largest I could make it! :(