Welcome to our scam page. On this page will be listed a variety of romance scams that men often fall prey to while searching for relationships online. As well we’ll i.d. resources that you can use to screen for romance scammers.
First off, I’m going to switch from we to me, Gary, since I’ll be doing the basic grunge work here (and it is grunge work to look into the dark, nefarious side of an industry). There are translation issues and cultural issues where Alla’s input will be of inestimable value, but for the most part, I, Gary will be the primary “muckraker”.
My primary focus here will be the foreign bride type of relationships. Certainly there are scams to be aware of when using online resources for in-country dating connections. And in truth many of those scams are identical to the foreign bride scams.
But it’s the foreign bride scams that are by far the more insidious and painful to deal with. That’s true first because of men’s elevated hopes and expectations when searching for a foreign bride; and second because of the sense of hopelessness and exasperation experienced by a scammed man due to seemingly insurmountable distance, language, and legal barriers.
And note here that I’m not talking here only about Russian dating scams or mail order bride scams. Scams and scammers come in all nationalities. Some foreign bride romance scammers are Russian and some are Latin and some are Asian.
The structure of this page will be as follows:
There will initially be two sections, one each, for the two primary romance scam sources, scams by women and scams by agencies.
Later, after describing different types of women’s romance scams and agency romance scams, I’ll expand into a third section that describes resources you can use to identify specific romance scammers and how some of those seemingly helpful resources are actually scammers too.
I’ll start off slowly and add to this page one scam at a time with each addition being dated. As scams are added I’ll post an alert on our regular blog with a link to this page and an item date. So this page will grow serially with the most recent entries on top within each category, women’s romance scams or agency romance scams.
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WOMEN’S ROMANCE SCAMS
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There’s no way I’ll be able to document a comprehensive list of foreign women romance scams here. It’s just the nature of scamming and scammers that such a list will be very short lived as variants of cheating ways evolve, seemingly at the speed of light. But I’ll try to write about things in a broad enough manner to catch “outliers.”
9-27-11 - Romance Scam Type = The Misrepresentation Scam:
In this scam, a woman blatantly posts false information about herself to entice men’s interest. Why is this a scam? After all, no money has been taken. Well that’s not necessarily true because at a minimum, you probably paid some cash to the agency to communicate with her. Yes, perhaps it’s “chump change” but the facts are her profile enticed you and you paid.
PLUS, the woman has sucked your energy through leading you to believe she has more to offer than she can deliver.
Here’s an example of a misrepresentation scam.
I came across a 21 year old woman’s profile the other day where she claimed to be university educated with “good” English and a profession of financier. Her occupation was listed as “financial consultant.”
Oooooh, a “financial consultant.” A very high sounding title indicating significant expertise and accomplishment. Give me a break. At age 21 she’s possibly still in college. Maybe she’s studying business finance, but a “financial consultant” she ain’t. How about a bank teller trying to work her way through school?
Is this just a language issue? Well it could be, but that means her English is not “good” in the way usually put forth on foreign woman’s profiles where “good” is below excellent and above “fair”.
The bottom line is that this woman is trying to present herself as something she’s not. So you have to consider that she is strongly motivated to “catch” some man and she’s not being particularly ethical about how she goes about it. If you start writing to her, can you believe what she says? Deceit is not a good way to start and build a strong loving relationship.
Your defense against the misrepresentation romance scam:
Study those profiles CAREFULLY. Is everything on the profile consistent, realistic and believable? Can you detect exaggerations? If you start writing to her, confront her with your concerns and analyze her responses. If she’s a phony, then sooner or later she’ll “trip up” and you can move on. Or maybe she’s for real but just let her enthusiasm run loose in which case maybe she’s the “catch of a lifetime.”
It’s for you to decide how much of your time and energy to invest in getting down to the real woman.
Here’s some practice for you using Latin women from A Foreign Affair’s site. Click on the pics and STUDY the profiles. Read what each woman writes “in her own words.” And click the search link at the bottom of a woman’s profile to see other women in her city/region. Make comparisons. If you do this through 20 or 30 profiles, I guarantee you you’ll find at least one women who is misrepresenting herself in some fashion through pictures, narratives, or profile statements.
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Now try the same exercise with some of A Foreign Affair’s Asian women.
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AGENCY ROMANCE SCAMS
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As is very obvious by other posts and pages on our site, we believe in certain agencies to provide you with a legitimate environment to use in your pursuit of a foreign bride.
We do not claim that you will not find scamming women on those sites because as we’ve stated, no agency is immune from scammers, and scammers go where the money flows.
BUT we are certain that our recommended agencies themselves will not scam you. As well, they will do their damndest to protect you from scammers.
But our recommended agencies are in a very small minority. There’s a lot of money in the international introductions industry and lots of “bad guys” are out there to steal from you.
As of today, 9-27-11, we recommend two specific agencies to use in your pursuit of a foreign bride. We continue research and perhaps in the future there will be more. But for now, that’s it, just 2. They are:
and
You can read our reviews of each of these marriage agencies here:
And I also suggest that you read our “marriage Agency Strategy” for our recommended method of how BEST to use a marriage agency to find and marry your foreign bride.
Click Here for our Marriage Agency Strategy
In the mean time, if your preference is to explore on your own, following are scams that dishonest agencies will run to separate you from your money and even from your “dream girl.”
10-22-11 - Romance Scam Type - The Disappearing Beauty Scam - Part 2.
As described in part 1 (posted below) of this scam type, the beauty you’ve been writing to suddenly disappears and because all of your communications with her were under the control of the agency, you’ve lost her.
BUT - - maybe you never had her to begin with. Maybe the woman is in “cahoots” with the agency and is writing progressively juicy letters to many men and being paid for it. When she detects that “it’s the right time” she disappears to another of the agency’s sites, or even to a different, better paying disreputable agency (in other words she even scams the agency) and starts over again.
Your Defense Against The Disappearing Beauty Scam (when the woman is a partner in the scam):
Some women are extremely good at this and are capable of making sizeable incomes running this kind of romance scam as partners of scamming agencies.
As with your defense in part 1 of the Disappearing Beauty Scam, your ONLY iron-clad defense is to NOT deal with agencies that control communications past the initial intro stage.
Beyond that, you’ll have to rely on your own innate ability to psyche out through subtlety and innuendo just how genuine the woman really is. This is not a good way to start a relationship, but if your last name is “Freud” or “holmes” (Sigmund and Sherlock), Good Luck.
But here’s a helpful hint. If she resists disclosing any info to you about her physical whereabouts, such as job, company name, or any addresses at all, that could be a red flag. Look for red flags in the context of communicating with her. A reluctance to disclose is possibly deception and you may be better off by moving on.
And by the way, the agencies recommended on our site are not susceptible to this kind of scam because they DO NOT create a communication wall between you and the women you are interested in.
O.K., that’s it for the disappearing beauty agency scam part 2. Stay tuned for part 3 where I’ll discuss a very insidious version of this type of marriage agency scam.
9-27-11 - Romance Scam Type = The Disappearing Beauty Scam - Part 1.
There are several business models that marriage agencies use. One popular model is where a man pays to communicate with foreign women on an e-mail by e-mail basis (or phone/video). This particular marriage agency business model lends itself to a particularly vicious type of scam.
There are multiple variants of the following described scan including one where the woman is complicit with the agency as part of the scam. I’ll describe those variants and their ramifications in a follow up post.
For now though, let’s just assume that it’s strictly an agency scam and that the woman is as much a victim as you, the male agency customer.
And by the way, our recommended agencies do not operate with a business model that enables this scam.
The scam works like this:
So here you are, enraptured. You’ve been exchanging emails with a gorgeous, talented women for months and you’re positive “she’s the one.” And then all of a sudden, your emails get no response from her and her profile is gone from the site. You pursue with the agency your concern and they inform you that her profile has been deleted because of X, Y, or Z.
You’re “dead in the water” because the agency controlled all of your communications with your “dream girl.” WTF you say. What happened?
Here’s what happened - -
Yep, you’ve got good taste, dude. You hooked up with a prime woman. And the agency computers pick up on her popularity. Because of your intensified interest and perhaps of other men too the agency removes her from the site. After all, this woman is a “moneymaker.” If she actually does hook up with a man and gets married, the agency’s income falls by however much she was generating for them. So what the agency does is deactivate her profile on one site and activate her as a “new woman” on a different site that the agency owns.
Your Defense Against The Disappearing Beauty Scam (when the woman is a victim too):
Your ultimate defense against this type of scam is to not deal with agencies that insist on controlling all of your communications with the women you choose. To do so is to expose yourself to the possibility of disappointment and pain.
But if you insist on pursuing your “dream girl” through one of these agencies, you only have one option for defense against this agency scam. That option is to conspire with your lady to get around the communication wall of the agency.
I’m not advocating cheating the agency. After all they provide a valuable service and deserve to be paid.
BUT, I do advocate protecting yourself and the only way to do this is to somehow get the woman your actual email address. Perhaps you include it in a small gift you send her for some special occasion, or “snail-mail” to her workplace. Once she has your email, she can send you emails from an Internet cafe, etc..
But only use this as a backup tool. Keep paying your “dues.” Like I said, the agency deserves to be paid for the service they provide and they are innocent until proven guilty. Look at it this way. If it were not for this agency, you would not have the opportunity to be communicating with this special woman, right? Fair is fair. And too, you don’t want to leave your lady with the impression that you’re a cheat and a cheapskate. But if she disappears for some “X, Y, or Z” reason you need to create a backup way to continue building your life.
