Russian Wife Scam

(skm) Slang n. A fraudulent business scheme; a swindle.tr.v. scammed, scam·ming, scams To defraud; swindle.

If you have spent any amount of searching on the internet for Russian or Ukrainian marriage or dating sites then you are aware of the myriad of scams that plague this industry. It seems half the sites are "so called" anti scam sites which blacklist many sites while recommending others. Yet on another site you can see the opposite conclusions. What is little known to most readers is that many of these "anti scam" sites are actually owned by competing marriage agencies themselves. Their primary purpose is to trash their competitors and promote their own sites. It is a huge maze of domain names and links to sort through to try and even understand who is scamming who! But the bigger question is what exactly a scam is. To some extent a scam is in the eyes of the beholder.

 

What exactly defines a Scam?

It is easy to find thousands of sites discussing or indentifying a myriad of scams involving Russian and Ukrainian Marriage - Bride - Wife agencies. But I question the exact definition of what a scam is.

If you are exchanging letters with a "woman" from Russia who is actually a man in Nigeria for sure that is a scam. The same could be said for letters requesting money for visa and passport processing. There are many others which are all detailed in the following pages. The real myth is that an agency or a woman is either "real" or a "scam". The fact is that all dating - mating interaction between females and males involves deception it is just a matter of what degree.

If you have ever had a profile on a major American dating site like Match.com, eHarmony.com, Perfectmatch.com, etc. then I am sure that you have received many emails from women that described their body type as "athletic or average" that were actually fat or even bordering on obese. In additional many shave some years of their actual age is this a scam? For sure this is a deception but I think few would categorize it as a scam.

Many websites in Russia and Ukraine generate their primary income from Western men paying to read and write letters to women whose profiles are posted with the agency. A new twist is the use video chat were western men get chat in real time. Usually the girls are very young and very attractive. Their profiles state they are interested in men up to 50, 55, even 60 and over.