My first job in the online dating industry was as a moderator of online dating sites. Apart from all those “fun” Monday mornings when I had to do photo reviews and remove hundreds of photos of penis close up shots, my main jobs was hunting for and getting rid of online dating scammers. In general, we had two types of scammers on the sites – the “Nigerian money scammers” and the “Russian brides”. These were two umbrella terms encompassing any African (or African-inspired) lottery scam, Christian charity scam and any scam that had an African scammer behind it (soldier scams had not started up yet) and any East European scam involving a beautiful lady wanting to meet a Western man (“appearance and age not important”). We learnd to see the so-called Russian brides as either callous businesswomen / prostitutes in disguise or worse – men disguised as women, looking to scam unsuspecting men out of money and then disappear. I’ve heard of several stories where men travelled to foreign cities to meet such women and were fleeced out of more and more cash by the women and their families. In short, in the world of online dating, it was a clear cut case of who was the victim. Save for cases where the women were forced by gangs to play the part of an aspiring Russian bride, the brides were the criminals and the lovelorn men their unwitting prey.

I knew proper Russian bride introduction websites existed, but I sort of always assumed many of these were predominantly populated by the same sort of scammers. In fact, I assumed it was the scammers who ran them. I do recall seeing Louis Theroux do a show on mail order brides, but it was a Thai one, rather than a Russian one, if I recall correctly.

But here’s a different look at this story, making it clear things are not so black and white. An article in Salon sheds light on the lives of genuine Russian women who were not out to
scam anyone but were practically trafficked abroad to serve as sex slaves for Western men. It makes for
interesting reading and gives a totally new perspective on the whole issue. Highly recommended.