"Sara" (Had a Bad Dating Experience): "...and as the night progressed he was flirting with me a lot and hitting on me and talking about taking me to like, Lake Tahoe where he had a business trip and would fly me out there..."

We'll call this woman Sara. She'd rather not be identified.

This thirty-something professional thought she was having a nice, casual, honest dinner date. But, to her horror, she found exactly the opposite when a man took her to dinner, left her alone for a minute and her cell phone rang.

Sara: "The female voice is on the other end and asks for this person...'um', I say to her, 'you know I'm really sorry to hear about your separation' and she said, 'Oh, is that what he told you?' and I said, ‘yeah' and she said, 'Did he mention to you that I'm carrying? I'm pregnant with his fourth child.'"

Sara could have checked out the man she dated on any one of the growing number of online websites that searches databases for marriages, criminal records, bankruptcies, and past addresses.

Sara later on admitted after hiring me to investigate her next date: "I mean to think of what could have happened and just the deceit and I really wouldn't have known had she not, um, found my telephone number."

Dozens of these sites have sprung up, letting you play detective and comb public records to see if someone you've met is secretly married, bankrupt or has been in prison.

Our fees range from 50.00 dollars to about 200.00 and the search takes less than 24 hours.

In fact, many dating services, routinely do these basic background checks on their members before they can join.

If you are looking fr a long- term relationship or planning to spend the rest of your life with someone you owe it to yourself to run a background check on him/her.