Lonely dating sites searching for love

Privately, she's beginning to think she just doesn't "click" with Frenchmen.

So Andrea has taken matters into her own hands: She put up a "profile" on an online dating site for expatriates.

Dave, a financial consultant living in Vienna, has been playing the dating game online for over two years with mixed results.

The biggest problem in each case, he says, has been making the leap to reality after an intimate cyberspace romance.

A week later she got a response from Tom, an Australian, who shares her interest in sports, and they set up a date."I am feeling — I don't want to say 'desperate,"' she said.

But can online dating shed its sleazy reputation and become respectable?

Once the money is sent, the women vanish from the Internet.

For women, online dating poses certain security risks.

Users pay only when they want to contact someone on the site. But the ease and accessibility of online dating, along with its anonymity, can leave it open to abuse.

At Expatica Date, €15, or , buys a one-month membership that allows a subscriber to leave and receive messages from would-be daters. The Japanese police are asking for new laws to help regulate online dating sites used by teenage prostitutes, according to Japanese media reports posted on the Web site Ananova.