In December 2018, half a year ago, I told you I have finished with the pay-per-letter (PPL) pseudo-dating websites. I am returning to this topic once again to make it clear what needs to happen if you have been hurt by PPL websites and wish to protect other people from being defrauded by this system.
Letters of despair
I am getting letters like these regularly. My answer is always the same, let me put it down here, so I can send people to this post when I get such cries for help.
These are just two letters I got this week. I get letters like these all the time.
Guys, if you have just began exploring how PPL dating scams work, first read all the posts on this website, there are plenty of links. Or search for “PPL pay per letter dating scams“. You will find plenty of information and possibly groups of people who got scammed just like you.
Related:
- PPL is immigration fraud
- How PPL agents hire brides
- Why are you so strongly against PPL websites?
- The list of PPL sites
- Elena, why this company is not on the list of PPL sites?
- Dating scams: From Jeff Peters to PPL websites
There are dozens more! Seriously, I am over writing about it. I have written so much about the subject, I have nothing new to say.
All pay per letter sites are scams!
Any genuine Ukrainian girl will talk to you on WhatsApp instantly, they all are using it. Any person who talks to you via a pay-per-letter site is doing it for money. Period. No other explanations necessary.
- It’s either the girl herself who is typing her own letters and chats (the worst kind), that’s her way of making a living — scamming foreign men promising them love and marriage.
- Or it’s a combination of a pretty face + the writer (the most typical scam pair) — the fake “bride” + the “author” of all the affectionate messages you are getting. The author of messages can be easily replaced and often change with time, another writer is hired to do the same job; the pretty face is continually being used. The girl who is the face (the fake “bride”) gets kickbacks in the form of cash for gifts (they are not delivered, the agent and the girl split the cash), plus sometimes they are also offered 10% of proceeds of the earnings from her profile. I don’t know whether they do get paid these 10%, the cash from gifts they also don’t always get (if the agent already has photos with a gift delivery, which girls make in shops posing with the items, without actually buying the gift).
You need to realize that it is only possible because you are paying per letter. Otherwise, it would be impossible to quantify “the work done” and hire people to fake relationships.
There are no genuine women who are writing their own letters only to the men they like and not being paid for that, on PPL sites. If you are paying per message, someone is earning a living off you.
Getting your money back
You also need to realize that most likely owners of PPL structures have long ago secured themselves against prosecution: The structures are legally owned by shell companies, change ownership every few years to secure profits and money streams against possible fines. Some poor guy in Panama with no assets or income is an owner of several hundreds of such enterprises with dubious past and present, which just close one domain name in case of a problem and open another. They even have your email address and all the data to immediately start marketing to you again!
It’s likely that owners of pay-per-letter websites also conducted an overhaul of their legal terms and conditions, which you had put a tick against without reading, which many of us do, and you have already agreed to hold them harmless in case the women on the other end were just faking it. Check their legal terms of use and you probably will find such clauses.
The actual scamming (letter writing) is done by the people living in Ukraine, although the major profits are obtained by charging citizens of the USA, Canada, or Australia. Owners enabled the scheme by having the software designed, advertising on Google and other content networks to attract new clients. Google gets paid millions of dollars in the advertising revenue by these sites.
It is a corporate scam, not something an individual could operate on his own. I am not saying that Google is a part of it; content networks simply haven’t banned such sites (the ones that charge per communication) as advertisers. If it was prohibited by law (like tobacco advertising), then it would be implemented, and the number of men scammed by these sites would drop substantially.
PPL can be only banned on the legislative level
If these sites, like tobacco companies, couldn’t advertise online, then they wouldn’t be getting clients. This scheme is easy to dismantle overnight, if proper mechanisms are implemented.
PPL in essence is phone sex, but in online chats and letters (and instead of steamy fantasies PPL uses promises of marriage). Pay per letter sites try to sell this “marriage talk” as something genuine, not just the pretend chat it is, and they charge money for it under a false pretence of it being genuine. That’s the essence of PPL scams.
It’s like you would be paying for phone sex thinking the woman on the other end indeed planned to fulfil all these fantasies with you in real life. Just this time, in case of PPL pseudo-dating sites, you are fed not streamy stories, but tales of love and devotion. Otherwise, it’s precisely the same thing. But owners of PPL sites try to convince you it is ‘for real’, not fake. This makes it simpler to understand, right?
The biggest part for you to get: It’s a system. It’s not some pretty girl from Ukraine who scammed you. She was hired to do precisely that: To be the scam bait.
And she was lied, too. Lots of these girls are promised money and “passive income” and they never get anything, or get little in the beginning, and then their photos just keep being used, sold and resold, and they can’t even control it. It is a scam system! Everyone is being defrauded, except the guys on top who designed it and keep getting mega-profits from it.
What Elenasmodels.com does to protect clients from PPL dating scams?
On our site, Elenasmodels.com, men are not paying per letter — and never have been. As you understand by now, it is the payments per message that enable hiring of impostors to fake relationships.
While most other long-established dating sites introducing women from Eastern Europe switched to the PPL systems (and thus turned into scamming grounds), we have increased the control over the quality of our database.
- We do not accept women who have active profiles on PPL sites. All such profiles have proven to be just bait-and-switch tactics to make men pay per letter, with no substance behind the announced “search for a partner abroad”.
- We have banned the worst PPL areas completely. Women from the Ukrainian cities of Odessa, Kharkiv, Zaporizhia cannot register on Elenasmodels.com. These areas have so many scams, it’s worthless to attempt to separate “honest” women from PPL fake brides; they all are corrupt, with so many young women involved in pay-per-letter schemes, every female knows someone who is working for these fraudulent schemes, gets “tips on dating foreigners” from them (how to get things and cash from foreign men). That’s not the type of women we want to see on our website.
- We conduct extensive searches to ensure that only people with genuine intentions have a chance to be registered and communicate with our clients.
- We conduct personal interviews with women prior to approval via phone or Skype.
This is what makes the quality of our database exceptional as compared to other non-PPL Russian dating sites. Other non-PPL sites (there are only 2 large websites, and here are their names) cannot get to this level, even if they started doing the same things now: It takes years to develop software, procedures, and the expertise of the personnel, so that every profile on the site has been thoroughly checked on several levels prior to approval.
This is why we have such exceptional results with so many happy couples constantly meeting in real life, dating, marrying and having kids in loving marriages.
What else do you want to know?
Yes, about the ways to do something about these dating scams originating on pseudo-dating websites charging for communication and paying commissions to providers of the content (messages, chats).
They are the same as if you discovered a consumer fraud in a store in your town.
Plus a few more options that could work (but require a lot of effort to make it work).
But before I explain to you what you can do, you also need to realize that you are unlikely to get your money back, just like you cannot get back the time you spent in the web of these scammers. If you try to chase them and get them prosecuted, you are likely to spend more time angry and upset, and get little to no result. You will be spending more time on trying to get them prosecuted, which you could spend on rather finding the right woman for you and enjoying a loving relationship with her.
This means, you may get better personal outcomes if you rather decide to cut your losses short and move on, despite “investing” in that imaginary relationship on a PPL site you were unfortunate enough to stumble upon. Don’t feel ashamed, many smart men before you got caught in the same webs. These scammers are professional criminals and the whole structure is very well organized. It’s a criminal gang. Are you ready to take on a criminal gang? If yes, proceed. This is what you can do.
Stopping scammers
Just for starters, I am not doing anything about PPL sites except publishing articles or blogs. I am not a prosecutor of online dating scammers, I am an expert on dating Russian, Ukrainian women. I am just providing information. I do not collect testimonies from victims, I don’t chase authorities trying to get the scammers prosecuted. I am just providing information. I hope it’s clear.
I did my best to contact media and current affairs programs myself, it didn’t work out at the time and I have given up on that by now. You should give it a try and it’s likely you will get better results than I did, it’s possible and probable, because you are a victim of a scam.
I am not a victim of a scam. I am just an expert on the industry and dating and relationship coach. My job is to teach men and women how to build happy relationships; I find it much more satisfying than chasing scammers. If I wanted to chase scammers, I would be working as a detective or federal agent.
OK, I hope it’s totally clear by now. Let’s get to the juicy part of scammer-chasing, shall we?
What can you do to stop scammers from hurting other people?
These are the people in the position of authority who are able to do something about it.
- Consumer protection federal watchdogs. It’s the same people you would complain to if you were sold a non-working TV and the seller would refuse to refund you. If you were scammed on a PPL website, it’s the system and not an individual, who scammed you. The responsible party is the person who authorised the installation of the pay-per-letter software, this is the piece that enables and causes the scams. It is not the “girl” who scammed you. Got it? Work on it.
- Consumer advocates. There are consumer groups that check the safety of products, the claims made by manufacturers, providers, and sellers, and publish their verdicts. Understanding the mechanics of PPL is easy and simple for any business-orientated person. Especially now, when communication is easy and simple and doesn’t require the knowledge of a foreign language with quality online translators (PPL sites used to mask their charges as “translation fees”, but it had always been a pay-per-letter scam).
- Media. Investigative reporters, current affair programs, even news programs may be interested. For instance, Dr.Phil show had a guy a few years ago who was scammed by a Ukrainian bride from a PPL website, but they didn’t understand the pay-per-letter part of the scam and couldn’t explain it. Dr. Phil tried to explain it as a usual ‘catfish’ dating scam, but it’s not. It’s a completely different type of a dating scam, more believable, since the girl who is used as “the face” is part of the scamming gang.
- Diplomats. In early 2000s there was a popular online dating scam where fraudsters were sending photos of pretty girls and love letters, and then they were asking for money for visas and tickets. It got the name “visa and tickets scam” and it’s a typical “catfish” online dating fraud. Many of such scams were coming from Russia. At that time I recommended to men to write letters to the American Embassy in the country of the perpetrators (where the money was received) and to the Embassy of the country of the perpetrator in their locations (i.e. the guy needed to write to the Russian Embassy in the USA, if he was an American). It worked and several online gangs were arrested and swiftly prosecuted in Russia, now such scams don’t happen there. It can happen in Ukraine in the same way with the PPL fraud gangs. There is a new president in Ukraine and he is set on fighting corruption. These gangs are definitely part of corruption, or they wouldn’t be able to operate. Try the diplomats’ way: Write a comprehensive letter to the Ukrainian Embassy in your country, including all the details of the story how you were scammed, step by step, and the proof of financial losses. Send the same letter to the Embassy of your country in Ukraine. Request to stop the fraudulent PPL scheme (again: It’s NOT the girl! It’s the whole scheme).
- Social media. Post on various social media sites, comment on topics of interest in the media, concentrating on your own factual experience and facts, monetary losses. Again, realize it is a properly set up fraudulent scheme from top to bottom, and it’s not the girl who was scamming you, but she was hired into the system to do precisely that. Spread the message. Re-post the articles that you find the most revealing from this website to your timeline, post links in forums on Reddit and others, include them in your comments on social media, if you don’t want to write your own story. Simple! Spreading the message works.
One day, someone in position of power will see a benefit for himself or herself in addressing the issue and it will be over in weeks: PPL is a giant with legs of clay, it will collapse instantly. But first, there should be a person willing to take on or authorise an investigation of this fraudulent scheme. How can you interest someone in the position of power to do it? Think and you shall succeed.
Any other ideas what can be done? Comment below!
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Thank you for doing what you do to try to protect us. A few months ago I met a girl from Minsk on this website who seemed legitimate at first, but before long, she wanted to move our communications to a website which didn’t exactly charge per letter, but did charge per word for translating. (Amorous Story.com) This immediately seemed a bit suspicious to me, but I gave it a try for a little while. It became much more suspicious when I noticed that she always wanted both of us to write nice, long letters, almost every day. I also… Read more »
George, that’s the same PPL thing!
If anyone asks you to do it, contact Help Desk and inform about it. We remove such profiles for immediately
Elena I need your advice please help! While I have never joined these PPL sites because I look at reviews before joining any site to get a sense of what people say about it and you can also tell very quickly if all women look like hollywood models something is not right it can’t be only model looking for love lol. My question though Elena is this on ElenasModels while all the women are real not all are seriously looking for love. Here is where I want your advice I have talked to several women and even one I visited… Read more »
John, your conclusion is 100% correct: “she expects me to do all the pursuing every single time and doesnt make any effort at all” — that’s exactly what she expects! That’s how it works in Russia. Women are not allowed to make any moves whatsoever. They have to sit quietly and look pretty, and the man has to behave like a stalker: Call and text her incessantly, invite her on dates, pay for dinners, give her flowers and presents, and pressure with intimacy. She does nothing but allows him to “court” her, resists intimacy and appears disinterested, or he might… Read more »
Hello Elena! Thanks for this article and for posting my letter. In my opinion, and while I believe all the methods you have listed are valid and effective, I believe they’re a bit slow in achieving quick results. There are two other methods to stop these scams. 1- Contact your elected federal representatives. Whether it’s your senators or congress person, this will alert the legislative body of this scam. You’re absolutely right. The only way to stop these scams is at the legislative level. 2- If 10 or more men were to hire a high caliber class action attorney and… Read more »
Rick, a good place to start is to check what User Agreement you have ticked when joined (without reading, I suppose). Did you check it?
I have been on Charmerly for months, talking to three girls, spent enough credits to get their personal contact, so i have their emails and try to write them all the time, but the excuses keep coming, bad internet, phone is broken, cant send you any new photos. BUT IF YOU GO TO THE SITE, WE CAN TALK THERE!! HAhahaha. What a joke! I have spent WELL over $10,000 without even realizing it. I have seen the change, every month, the girls demeanor changes, she acts like we just met??!! That’s because it’s a new GIRL taking over the chat.… Read more »
Gary, sad story, really. I admire your drive to bring the scammers to justice, as this will take a lot of your energy and possibly more money. Hope you’ll win at the end!