What Are Mail Order Bride Scams And How To Avoid This Trap?
Romance scammers are the same traditional thing as hackers or finance criminals. It’s impossible to get rid of online romance scammers fully, but you can secure yourself from this nasty experience if you use dating or mail order bride sites. How to do that? Learn more about this type of fraudulent activity and how to avoid scams online from this mail order bride scam warning!
Defining mail order bride scam
The most terrifying truth about mail order brides is possible scams that exist in this industry as well. However, the devil isn’t so black as he’s painted. Many people use dating sites and never suffer from gold-diggers or fun-makers. Why is it so? They have a clear understanding of what online dating scams are and how to protect themselves from them.
A dating scam is defined as a criminal activity when a person tries to get some benefit from another individual by imitating romantic relationships with him, lying, and inventing different unreal circumstances. In most cases, such scams are organized by people looking for financial profit. They join mail order brides sites like other brides-to-be, hide behind beautiful photos and sweet speeches, and get acquainted with potential victims to ingratiate with them and get what they want instead.
Mail order bride scams signs
When a person decides to find mail order bride, he can hardly admit that a potential bride may be a criminal. However, it won’t take much effort to recognize a fake if you’re aware of the signs of a mail order bride scam. It’s enough to be attentive and use basic analytical skills to spot the following:
- Professing takes a minimum of time: a feeling of true love develops with an incredible speed even if you know little about each other;
- Asking for personal details: any questions that require you to share sensitive data, even in small parts, can be considered suspicious. This information can be later used to breach your credit card, for example;
- Sharing circumstances that require financial support or help: you may be told moving stories about serious illnesses, deaths, car accidents, as well as be simply asked to give money on a variety of other things;
- Getting numerous excuses to avoid video socializing or real face-to-face dates: it can be a sign that a photo on the platform may belong to another person;
- Avoiding answering personal questions or giving contradictory details: e.g. when a date of birth indicated in the profile description doesn’t coincide with a zodiac sign;
- Convincing to leave a mail order bride site: since reliable platforms perform regular checks to ban potentially dangerous users, a scammer will encourage to use another tool for interaction.
If you notice several or at least one of these signs, it’s better to be more careful and try to bring a scammer to light or even stop communicating with a girl if she seems really suspicious to you!
How to protect yourself from dating scammers?
Every person wants to feel safe on a mail order bride platform, and it’s a reality if you know how to secure yourself from cheaters. Remember the following tips, and you’ll avoid scammers:
- Keep your personal details in secret: any sensitive details like a full name, date of birth, credit card number, home address can be used by fraudsters;
- Resist the temptation to send money to women you like: no matter how convincing a girl’s words are and how much you like her, avoid sending cash, making money transfers, or sharing credit card details;
- Register on the sites that have a good reputation: be careful with the choice of the platform since scammers try to avoid sites where they can be banned;
- Don’t leave the mail order bride site and never share personal contact details: the chances to be cheated can increase greatly if you change the tool of communication since you’ll be no longer protected by website security measures;
- Don’t share materials that can be later used against you: be careful with webcam usage since scammers can shoot compromising footage and blackmail you;
- Listen to your intuition: if you feel something but have no evidence, it’s better to be twice more attentive. You may find out questions to ask a scammer and try to figure out if a girl behind the screen is a liar;
- Let your relationships develop at an ordinary pace: never show you’re lonely or vulnerable and agree to move fast in your romance—it’ll be a direct sign for a fraudster to choose you as a victim.
What to do if you spot a scammer on the site?
The majority of mail order bride sites that offer premium membership want to provide users with a positive dating experience, so they hunt scammers by analyzing messages and user behavior, checking profiles of new users, validating their identities, and undertaking other actions to find them.
However, modern criminals are very inventive and may squeeze into popular mail order platforms despite any security measures. If you manage to spot someone suspicious, the first thing you should do is to report the issue to the website customer support. They’ll perform an extra check of the user and block the account if they find any evidence of the illegal behavior. Secondly, it’s important to stop communication and inform your bank if you’ve already shared some personal data to protect yourself! Thirdly, you should be more careful interacting with women online and send money only when you’re confident in your match for 100%!
Final thoughts
Do you think that mail order bride pricing seems to be the most popular query when it comes to building serious relationships online? The majority of people are afraid of scams and want to protect themselves more than they’re interested in the cost of a future wife. If you also want to have a seamless experience on a mail order bride platform and feel absolutely secure, this knowledge about romance scammers will help you for sure! It’s enough to be armed with necessary tips, and there’s no sense to worry about building a romance online!
FAQ
To detect a mail order bride scam, you can use the handy tips described above. If a lady claims that she loves you when you don’t know a lot about each other, it might be a sure sign that she’s a gold-digger. Besides, such ladies often ask for expensive gifts or your payment details.
Unfortunately, online dating scam is quite widespread these days. However, you’ll quickly understand that a woman is a scammer if she refuses to talk to you face to face, asks for personal details that can be used for getting access to your bank accounts, or suggests making expensive purchases.
You can often find bride scam on platforms that don’t have video conferencing tools. However, sometimes, scammers talk to their victims using video calls and even meet them in person. That’s why you need to analyze the behavior of a woman and the questions she asks. If you’re convinced that she’s a scammer, make sure to report her.