Posted on June 04th, 2003 06:27 PM by admin

By Elena Petrova Russian Brides Cyber Guide

Secret 6 - Part 2
How to separate sincere women from gold diggers?

Another story that comes to my mind belongs to Czech writer Carel Chapek. It was a novel about a police detective who unexpectedly met two of his former clients at a posh restaurant, a respectably looking man in his 50th and a middle aged glossy woman - the joke was that both of them were famous marital scammers, and were extracting money from the opposite sex promising to marry them. Both were very angry and frustrated when found out the truth about their partner for the dinner!

Well, leaving along classic literature, what I was trying to say is that marriage scams are not new to this world. They are in use for at least few hundreds years. You can encounter the similar problem using local personals. What Internet has brought new is a possibility of using typing to express feelings that requires much less actor skills than face-to-face communication. Paper can bear anything, you know that. Even phone conversation can give you more clues of what's really going on (though men usually tend to misinterpret subtle signs excusing them by the language barrier).

So you must be aware of the fact that there are some individuals out there who may try to extract from you some amount in cash playing on your feelings.

1.5 years ago I organized a web page called "Russian dating agencies Black List" (http://www.womenrussia.com/blacklist.htm) with the aim to list unscrupulous services from international dating industry. This page only includes comments of my visitors, but now it became a long list of names of individual scammers! After reading the horror stories of this page many men say that they feel frustrated with the whole thing. They think it's too many bad girls out there.

As a volunteer editor of this little forum, I can say that nothing can be further from the truth. On my books I have data of more than 2,500 women. Only 5 of them for the time being were reported as scammers (yes, of course, any agency may unwillingly list them - how do you get in person's head?). 2 of them managed to extract money from my clients - though both victims say they have seen the signs of scam, just decided to go ahead.

From my experience, there are several scam patterns that are used over and over, and I believe that it's the same individual or group hiding under a few names behind the each pattern (by the way, many are ... men!). And there are not a lot of them. All patterns have similarities that are very easy to spot if you know what to watch out for: