I recently had a very bad experience which I like to share with you. This is an experience from which I learned something and thus wish to pass it on for whatever it is worth to you.

About a month ago I had just placed my profile in Match.com as I wanted to see if I could get acquainted with some new friends and why not, find the love of my dreams. This was my very first experience using a dating agency on the Internet and otherwise. I had actually been already logged as a member some months prior but I had not uploaded a picture nor had I had access to contact anybody as I was not a paid member. About a month ago I finally decided, this is it, I am going to do this. So I did. I paid a month’s membership and then I uploaded a picture. It was the very next day when I received the first notification that I had not one but two letters waiting in my in-box at Match.com. I was excited! Not one but two! I rushed to open them up and then I found out that it was two ladies from Russia. I thought, hmm, this is interesting. There were no pictures and there was something odd about it because their profile said that they were writing from a state in Mexico. Their letters were one in Spanish (I am from Mexico and this is where I live) and the other was written in English but it was very crude English and Spanish and I thought they were just learning both of these languages. They both said more or less the same thing; they wanted to get to know me. They gave a brief description of themselves which actually grabbed my attention as they both said they were very good looking and made emphasis that they were “honest and sincere in their search” and that if I answered them I would get a picture of them. One was Oksana, 31 years old (the one writing in English) and the other was Evgeniya, 27 years old (the one writing in Spanish). So I did answer both of them just to see what would come back. They provided their personal e-mail addresses as they both noted that they would not be able to reply if I answered via the generic e-mail provided by Match.com for members to communicate with (another oddity which I did not pay attention to).

The next day I received two letters, one from Oksana and the other from Evgeniya. Photos accompanied them both. Ooh my god! They were both beautiful! Oksana had long brown hair, she was sitting at a table in what seemed to be a very posh restaurant or hotel posing for the camera sort of holding her face with her hands entwined and resting her elbows on the table. She was very beautiful. Evgeniya sent two pictures one close-up of her face with long straight blond hair, and stunningly beautiful blue eyes. The other picture was a full body take where she was sort of like near the sea but was very well and nicely dressed wearing a jacket a scarf and pats. They both looked like models!

In their first letters they were both telling me about their intentions for writing which was (and this was more or less the same pitch from both) that their intentions were serious in their search to find “my second half” and that the reason why they were looking abroad was because they had heard very marvelous stories of friends of theirs who had met someone via the internet and now they were married or together or getting married etc. One of them also mentioned a fact, which I was not aware of which is that in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union, all combined, there are about 10,000,000 more women than there are men! This makes it difficult for many women to find a partner and so there are many dating agencies, which specialize in helping women of these countries to find partners abroad. After I heard this from her I started checking this out and I did find that there are very many sites for “Russian Brides”. Women on these sites, I must mention, for the most part are very beautiful. So then it “made sense” to me why these two beautiful women wanted to get in touch with me.

After some days of communication with both I decided to stick with one only and tell the other that I had no interest, although I did this very polite and diplomatic as she seemed to be a very nice girl and it was a tough choice deciding for either of them but I did this. I decided that I was going to stay in communication with Evgeniya who was writing to me in Spanish as I thought, if I am going to bring either of them here I prefer Evgeniya since she at least knows some Spanish and will be easier for her to adapt to this new environment.

With every letter there was always a new photo and any one of these photos could easily make it into the front cover of an international fashion magazine! I kid you not!

Evgeniya presented herself as a hard-working, independent woman who nevertheless was very attached to her father and mother and one sister of whom she even sent me pictures together with them. She told me that she worked at a small construction company dedicated to make the major repairs of her local city and that she was the director of the sales department in this company. The letters between us were coming in and going out on a daily basis. Everyday it was a challenge to a get a good picture I could send to her of myself as I was very impressed with hers but there was no way I could match her offerings to me.

With every new letter we were discovering something of each other and I was thinking to myself that the little money I had spend on my Mach.com subscription had won me the lottery! I felt the most fortunate man on Earth! But this did not last too long.

After about 2 weeks of communications back and forth Evgeniya and I had developed what I thought was a real long distance relationship. It was something I had never experienced before. It was such that she had told all about me to her parents and after much talk with them she “got their support” for this “relationship” and then she decided that she did not want to wait a long time and that she wanted to meet me very soon. I told her the soonest I could visit her in Russia would be in two months. She said “too long”. Since you can’t come here now, I am going to you. I of course did not challenge this; I said, “You are invited to my country!” She then proceeded to do all the paperwork she needed to do and said that she had enough money to come and visit me and only needed my help for food and a place to stay once here in Mexico. I said, “That’s no problem”. After getting the complete support of her parents and especially from mother, she then handled her job so she could take a vacation since she had not had a vacation for the 3 years she had been there and there was no problem there either. Her boss was very supportive and granted this for her.

Living a bit far from Moscow where she needed to travel for the visa, she made all arrangements for this and as soon as she there she would brief me of what was occurring daily. She arrived after 8 hours of travel and had to stay at a hotel perhaps for the next 5 days. She had her interviews. Everything seemed to be going smoothly. Until the third day in Moscow. The third day in Moscow she tells me that it is 99% she will get the visa. But there is one problem. Now she has totally run out of money with all of the expenses incurred on passport, visa, travel to Moscow, food, hotel etc. And so she asked me to help her with the tickets. This was something unexpected. But I said fine. I will. I requested all of the data that I needed in order to purchase her tickets on my next e-mail. (You see, even though I had made many attempts to get in touch on the phone with her it was never possible and so we were on this stage of the game and we had yet to talk on the phone!) So her reply was that because she needed to show financial independence and because she was getting a “tourist visa” she could not tell the embassy anything about me and needed to prove that she had purchased her tickets with her own money. So basically she requested the money for the tickets sent to her via Western Union as had no bank account (what?). This was the very last step needed for her to go back to the embassy and get her visa. At this point things did not smell to good to me and given the circumstances (we had never met and never even talked on the phone) and so I sent her a letter which I titled “Proof of love”. Basically saying “if you really love me you will not object to my request” and proceeded to request from her (in order for me to send her the money) her ID with a photo, and any other means of identifying herself such as the slip you get at the embassy showing what you are soliciting and to where etc. I did not get these things except her full name (Evgeniya Galeeva) and her address typed on the e-mail. I then told her if I did not see these things she would not see any money from me (I was ready to send the full $1,700.00 USD needed for her tickets!). The next reply was just “an appeal to my hart” and that I needed to trust her and that I could not do this to her after all that she had already done for our encounter etc. Now it stank. Which it should have a long time ago.

You see there were many red flags popping up along the way from the very beginning and I was blinded by “the lure of the call of love” and did not pay attention to them.

I told you that I found out about these Russian Brides web sites and many of them offer as part of their service information about how not to be scammed on these deals. Many of them feature “Black List” of known scammers and I did browse through some of these but I did not find anything. It was not until this “appeal to my hart” e-mail came in that I decided to really look at these lists. After quite a bit of searching there she was! Evgeniya was on these lists! And not only that, she was actually quite a prominent figure on them! She appeared on at least 5 black lists that I checked with several different names and hundreds of different pictures some of which were quite saucy! There went the illusion of the decent and sincere girl I had in y mind.

So I uploaded some of these pictures and sent her my last e-mail telling her what I had found and that I hoped to never hear back from her again. And have not so far.

About a week later I found out the girl on the pictures was actually a model and had nothing to do with this. So, who knows who Evgeniya really was. It could have been a very hairy man or an old fat woman.

In any case, I did learn a lesson from this.

So these are some of the things I want to alert you to if you receive unsolicited mail from a Russian lady:  

1. As in my case, I received mail from people who did not have profiles in the web site where they got my data from and this was the first red flag ignored. Even though I did ask, I never got an answer. It made no sense and an answer to this should have been gotten.

2. One thing that I noticed is that I asked many questions and many these were not answered. Another red flag ignored. It was even as if some my letters were not read. Perhaps these people are so busy writing love letters to so many others that they do not read what you write. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.

3. If it looks too good to be true, it probably isn’t. We live in an era where anybody can talk to anybody anywhere on Earth in seconds (even for FREE with SKYPE) and there is no excuse for not been able to talk to anybody if the two parties REALLY want. This was another red flag I let go by my nose without challenge.

4. Another thing is that by the eight letter there was already “very warm feelings about you” on her letters and it served to entice me even more, blinding me to what errors they might commit and securing my confidence that I now had “a relationship”.

5. And finally, my last advice is DO NOT SEND MONEY TO ANYBODY YOU DON´T KNOW. JUST DON´T. Otherwise you will wind up a statistic. One more person who was scammed.

There are very legitimate web sites that screen the ladies that they feature to ensure they are real people and not just a stolen picture used for evil purposes. These ladies are sincere in their efforts to find their beloved man and I have since been in communication with a couple of real ladies from Russia. I subscribed to:

OneWife.com

And

Elena’s Models

I recommend these to you.

I did not end up being scammed but it was a heart break to find out that Evgeniya did not exist. I do not wish this on anybody and so I pass this to you for whatever it is worth to you.

Augustus