Your choice of question implies you think it's better to trust people you've met physically. This certainly matches typical human intuition; most people think t

Your choice of question implies you think it's better to trust people you've met physically. This certainly matches typical human intuition; most people think they can tell all sorts of things about other people from a face-to-face meeting. Intuition turns out to be wildly wrong in this regard. Whenever the results are actually measured, the strong feelings we get about people from face-to-face meetings are just noise; they aren't significantly more accurate than random chance. Objectively you're probably better off to trust people you've only met online because that way you know you're working with little data (and therefore should be cautious about degree of trust, and seek objective feedback before committing large sums of money); you're not lulled into a false sense of security.