For those of you new to this, there are a growing number of women and agencies who use the internet to scam marriage minded men out of their hard earned dollars. Jack has one section on his FirstDream website that deals exclusively with scammers. Here are a couple of other links that also show scamming ladies:
http://scamalert.freeservers.com/index.html and
http://agencyscams.com/If for any reason you get hit with requests for money, you should be very suspicious. The only case where it may be allowable if the lady is asking for email/translation costs. Because email is pretty expensive for many of these ladies, this could be a legitimate cost, assuming it isn't too high. As you begin to correspond with a number of young ladies, you will be surprised how many relatives fall ill, how many people are in car accidents, how many people are about to be kicked out of their apartment, etc. Also, if the woman wants money to buy a travel visa, plane tickets, or to set up travel arrangements for you, be extremely cautious. This is a common scam that is used every day.
Jack's site, as well as the two I mentioned above, do provide pointers on how to weed out scammers. If you start getting serious with a young lady, it might not hurt to check her photo against some of the scammer references to make sure she isn't in there. Also, it also doesn't hurt to search on their full name (make sure it's in quotes) on a heavy duty search engine, like Google. Sometimes you find information pretty fast that way.
While a large number of ladies are out there trying to separate you from your money, there's actually a larger percentage who are legitimate. Just take your time and do your research. If for any reason you get a feeling like something isn't quite right, then stop and pay attention to that feeling. Trace it back to what caused you to feel that way. Chances are, there's something there that could be, or lead to, a major issue...
