Online dating has long become an integral part of our world. More and more people find their partners online, and this dynamic has only increased in the recent years, whereas statistics show that conventional methods are losing ground.
Obviously, demand creates supply, and multiple services, websites and apps have emerged over the years to support the ongoing trend. A lot of them offer great functionality and a unique approach to the model of meeting someone online, but, unfortunately, there are plenty who view the craze simply as an opportunity to make money, and not necessarily by performing the services they claim to.
Enter VictoriaBrides. This service has fallen under scrutiny in the public eye a number of times over the last few years, but does not seem to care enough to change the model that seems to work for them and makes them money. VictoriaBrides has been accused of creating multiple fake accounts on their site, using pictures of models, and hiring full time staff to talk to subscribers from their point of view. Since the service utilizes a credit system for performing pretty much any basic action(like messaging, exchanging pictures, etc) along with a heavy emphasis on asking for gifts and money, people ended up with huge credit card bills with nothing to show for it
While the angry reviews and victim stories started to pile up on websites like trustpilot.com and even company insiders have come forward to explain how the service functions, the scam went on. While researching the service we came upon two stories that shocked us to the core, and today we will focus on one of them.
I was scammed out of over $187,000 by this site. The lady I was chatting with was a Russian model name Ekaterina Enokaeva. For over eight months I chatted with her. As the others have said, it became very obvious to me that there was several people pretending to be her(sic)
This is an intro to a scam report on the website www.ripoffreport.com – https://ripoffscams.com/reports-filed/victoria-brides/los-angeles-ca/victoria-brides-valentine-com-dream-singles-ekaterina-enokaeva-i-was-scammed-out-of-over-187000-by-this-site-kiev/74103/. The amount of money mentioned by itself is enough to grip your attention.
It became ridiculous because she would not let me get off the phone. She was insistent that I still on the phone with her up to 18 hours a day and I kept asking her how was she doing all his modeling was she was on the phone with me(sic)
As we continue reading the full story starts to form. A man looking for love on a website falls for a gorgeous Russian model, who seems to want nothing else but to chat and exchange pictures with him. Keep in mind, all of this is done through the VictoriaBrides service, so he has to pay for credits to perform any action.
She wanted me to send photos and stickers nonstop and we get upset and say I did not love her if I slow down. I stupidly fell in love and ended up spending over $2000 a day for up to three months(sic)
(Women, or people pretending to be them, will not agree to switch to any other way of communication under any circumstances)
When the situation started getting out of hand he tried to get in touch with the service support. They claimed to investigate everything while doing absolutely nothing.
She kept feeding me false information about the validity of this woman and how they were double checking her identity. I began taking screenshots of our conversations and tracking her movements to Instagram with her photos. She even sent me a video where she had the top of her face cropped off to try to convince me it was her. No matter how hard I tried, customer support would do nothing to help(sic)
Now let’s use the insider information previously leaked about the inner VictoriaBrides dating service workings to better understand what was actually going on. The profile was handled by one or multiple managers, whose job was to entice men into as much spending as possible, since their own salary and bonuses are directly tied into that. The support obviously did nothing, since there was simply nothing for them to do – they wanted to keep a high paying client on for as much as possible.
After I told the young lady that I would no longer spend that kind of money per day and I asked her to talk to me off-line with her phone number and email address. Customer support set this up for me, and the young lady never answered the phone and stop communicating with me. She had promised to come and live with me and help me buy her two rings over $6000 each. I was a fool(sic)
(The website uses professionally done pictures for all the women on it, VictoriaBrides claims that pictures are provided by “suppliers”)
It is indeed easy to call the victim a fool in this situation, but you have to take into account that the game was rigged from the start. It was not even a single person who scammed him, he got ground up by a huge machine, with each one of its cogs performing an evil and meditated task to pull him in as deep as possible and keep bleeding him for his hard earned money.
Was the dream even real to begin with? Well, the woman he mentions, Ekaterina Enokaeva, is indeed real. She is an instagram model with over 1.1 million followers, and by some reports does not even speak English. When we reached out to her for a comment via a direct message on Instagram, our request had been ignored. Her profile on VictoriaBrides was obviously created after she was paid for pictures by the company, and ran by trained and experienced managers with malicious intent.
Loneliness, emotions and love can sometimes drive men to make very reckless and bullheaded decisions. There are plenty of cases throughout history that prove this point. In our day and age, especially with the current quarantine measures in place in most countries, loneliness is felt even more than usual. A lot of people turn towards the internet and online dating services for that human connection that is otherwise missing in their life. This is normal, and it’s great that we have tools that can help us remain a collective during these trying times. It is however evil, fraudulent and heartbreaking that websites like VictoriaBrides abuse these sides of human nature for profit and ruin lives in the process. We encourage all our readers to carefully consider what services to send their money from, and steer away from anything that greatly limits your options of communication and charges you for the smallest action possible.
