Russian Scams In Person

Russian scams can happen every step of the way, including even if you visit their cities to meet their Russian women clients. You might think after reading about the other kinds of Russian dating scams that if you actually travel to meet Russian women, since you are physically there and can see what you're getting, that scams would be much harder to pull off. Sorry, but this isn't the case.

The in-person Russian scams are of a slightly different nature than those they perform from a distance. In person you can see the girls you asked to meet and know if they were presented accurately. What you cannot tell is their true intentions and their true relationship to the agency.

So if you asked to meet Irina, Natalia, and Elena, whose profiles you saw online, you know if you met them. And you immediately know whether they were accurately presented or not. So if you meet Irina, Natalia, and Elena (just sample names) and they are basically who you thought they would be, where is the scam?

Well, if you are lucky there may be no scam. But the agency may have a different kind of relationship with Irina, Natalia, and Elena than you might think. They may not be "real clients" of the agency, but are partners with it, or employees. They claim their English is inadequate so that you must have an interpreter present on dates. The agency's interpreter service is $10/hour. I actually know that some agencies pay their interpreters a flat monthly rate of as little as $100 for nearly full time work! That leaves the agency ownership with a high profit margin on translations that they can split with the girls.

Or maybe the women are not really in any formal partnership with the agency, but the agency management will encourage, and sometimes even pressure, their Russian women clients into accepting dates or engaging in dialog with men who write them and asking them to visit, all so that the agency can profit from the services they will provide the man.

In my personal opinion, the scam in a situation like this is really not so much the money. Think about it... before you selected the women you wished to meet you could see their English level on their profile and knew which ones would need translations and which ones wouldn't. You also knew the translation price (or at least could have known it) and were obviously OK with it, otherwise you would have limited your "wish list" to the English speakers.

The scam is the fact that these girls you wanted to meet were represented to you as women serious about finding a man to marry when in fact they were just "bait" to get you to go and spend the money on the tour, introductions, apartment, and translations.

So how do you spot and avoid these scams? Unfortunately this kind of scamming is the most difficult to spot and avoid, but there some things you can do to protect yourself.

The first strategy for defending yourself against in-person Russian scams is to try to check up on the agency or network whose services you wish to use and see if you can find any "dirt" on them online. At the very least, carefully read my Resources and Reviews sections where I list and review various sites, agencies, and materials about the whole Russian women scene.

A second strategy for lowering your risk of the in-person Russian scams is to simply hire your own local translator/guide. I spoke of this a bit on the "Live Translation" page.

I am in the process of building a network of local translators/guides that I would recommend as honest, and if you hire them to be your translator/guide, in one fell swoop you strip any crooked, scamming agency of most of their opportunity to scam you.

If you plan to use an independent guide/translator while on an individual tour with an agency, or even if you plan only to use an agency's "introduction service" (i.e. you go to their office and pay them only for introductions... nothing else, no apartment, no consultations, no airport pickup, etc.), you should DEFINITELY inform the agency IN ADVANCE that you have your own interpreter and confirm that they will cooperate.

Just say via email or phone call while planning your trip, "Hi, I would like to meet your ladies, but I will have my own interpreter accompanying me on all my dates. Does your agency have any policy against this?..."

By doing this, you immediately remove most of the agency's scamming opportunities. You won't be paying the agency anything for translations. This means that if the agency's woman client is a "ringer" who usually makes money on her dates when the translator shares the spoils with her, she won't make any money from the independent translator, and consequently may not even accept your introduction request (which is good if she was in it only for the money). It also means that the agency translator and woman client can't conspire with a restaurant or taxi company to collect kickbacks.

Basically, by using an independent translator/guide you pull the rug out from beneath most Russian scams.

As I say above, I am in the process now of building a network of recommended translator/guides. They will all be either someone I know and trust, or someone that they know and trust. Please check back often, or subscribe to our updates newsletter to check on my progress on this.