When activating women on my International dating sites (for women activating their profiles is free, but first I do the checking so that do not allow scammers to the site ) and working with checking women whose correspondence and information men send me for checking I meet often with 3 scammers group. They have different “handwriting”, different type of photos they use, different style of letters ( and on my dating site I see from their ip addresses that they are from this or that scammer group. )
The three scammers center that I meet (Moscow scammer group for the last 4-5 months almost stopped working), their scenarios, the pictures they use:
The biggest group is in Kazan. (Youshkar-Ola). This group mostly uses passport, visa and ticket scam. This group is well organized and as they use false credit cards, they often register to different western dating sites, like yahoo, American singles, match com, they pay from false credit card, usually write in their profile that they are from USA (as these sites are afraid of chargeback, they will block a user who pay from American credit card but is from Russia, so they have register as being from USA and go to these sites from American anonimizers (servers that hide the true ip of a person who use them, very often it is used by Nigerian or Russian scammers). ). Then these “girls” tell that there was a mistake and really they are from Russia. They quickly (on the first or second letter) give their personal email and begin to “work” on a victim there. As this group is well- organized – leaders hire other people just to do their work, some men register on different sites, others write a first letter to potential victims, other send standard letters to those who wrote to the “personal email” of one of “baits”. Those who write standard letters to men do not read the letters mostly or just look through them, they send standard letters (and they need to send more than 30 such letters a day) with an attached photo or two. The baits have real prototype but it does not know anything about this activity. This group took the passport data from this real prototype (but photos are taken from other girls, or just from Russian magazines), and when the time comes, a request is sent to send money to this prototype. Then this prototype goes to Western union, takes the money there and gives it to her employer (she has some salary). This group has about 200 or more people in their group, and they work in 3 shifts, and really many men are their victims. They often use many many photos, not model type, but of standard Russian girls, “My girlfriend and I”, “My mother and I”, “My work”, “Me this”, “Me that”. When needed they tell that they are from close cities (Naberezhnie Chelny, Kirov, Mari-El) and special female couriers (usually students) go to Western union offices to claim money when needed (they received 5 usd for each such money order).
The second big group (from 2006) is Luhansk’s scammer group (but in their profiles they can write that they are from other Ukrainian cities also). They use agency translation scam. They post model photos to different dating sites (models mostly taken from Playboy and similar). Then in a letter or two they send a request to pay for translation of letters to an agency. Very often nude or semi-nude pictures are sent for enticing. It is useless to say that of course there are no such girls in Ukraine and all the scheme is created just to take money from credulous men. If a man comes to the city to meet his lady, then he is met by a completely different from a picture girl that is not interested in him but wants him to spend and spend money on her.
The third active group is in Moscow. They register as girls from different cities. Very often they employ mass email spamming (when men gets a letter to their mailbox that claims that the “girl” got their email at some dating site and now write to him, even if he never was registered at any dating site). This group often prefers active policy. Very soon after the beginning of communication a girl goes to Moscow to get a visa and ticket to “her beloved” and there discovers that her money has gone. She sits there at the airport, she did not expect that the prices for hotel here are so high and did not expect that tickets are so expensive and she only hopes for her “white knight” to send her money to finish her trip. Very often the money are offered to send to a person living in Moscow (!) or to a bank account of one man, who is a “travel agent”/
These are the main scammers ‘centers at present. Individual scammers go from other cities, but they are less active and they easily got to scammers list and have problems with further scamming.