they are roaches... can't stop them.

I have noticed, especially in recent years, that at least 90% of the women I have encountered on this site turn out to be scammers, frauds, impostors of some sort. (I don't have any knowledge about the men, but I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage there was similar.)

What is UP with all these phonies?? Usually you can spot them because they'll say they grew up in the States, but their profile will contain a obvious grammatical mistakes that clearly show that English is not their native language. Another obvious sign of phoniness is an accelerated urgency to collect my private email address and phone number. What do these
scammers do with this contact information? Do they sell them to Internet marketers who ultimately sent spam email to us? Can an active email address or phone number be so valuable to Internet marketers that they would pay these operators enough to go to the trouble of putting up and managing the phony profile of a "pretty girl", just to harvest the email addresses of unsuspecting guys? How lucrative can that be? Really, can anyone explain how these scammers work?

I usually explain to the women who press me for my contact information right away, that I'm wary of these phonies, so I don't divulge my contact info until I'm convinced the other party is a real woman hoping to connect with a real man, and not perhaps some 250 lb ex-linebacker just trying to get my email address! I then suggest that the quickest way to confirm that we're not impostors is to agree to hold a quick video chat on Skype. It's real time, it preserves our anonymity, and it'd be a fun way to hold our first virtual "coffee date". Invariably, I get no answer back, and the next day, when I click on her profile, her profile has been deactivated! Which pretty much confirms that "she" was indeed an impostor! But as soon as one phony impostor disappears, three more pop up, with perhaps a different phony picture posted. Seriously, it seems there are no more real women here! Everybody's a fraud!

Also...I notice there are certain cities or towns, that it turns out a lot of these phony women consistently list themselves as being from, that I can't find on Google Maps! So when I see a woman is from one of these non-existent towns, I can pretty much be assured that she's a phony! At least here in Southern California, these phony towns include Firestone Park, Federal, Foy. (It's interesting they all seem to start with F. Maybe that stands for "Fake"??) Does the Mingle2 site moderator have any knowledge about this?

So can anyone provide the real low-down on how these scammers generally operate? What's their end game? I suppose for many, the answer is, ultimately, to extract money from unwitting guys (or gals) who think they're helping out a "damsel in distress." But I think for some, they're just trying to harvest active email addresses and phone numbers! How do they "monetize" that? It doesn't seem there would be that much "value" in ferreting out someone's active email address! Am I wrong there? Can anyone provide real insight about this? And most importantly, how can we stop this?

-Garret

Another good idea to get rid of the scammers would be to put an option on the search page to only include members who participate in the forums. This would be a double edged sword, because if someone doesn't choose to participate in the forums they would be excluded, but at least we would know the profiles that we are seeing are for real people. I have heard several times that scammers don't last 5 minutes in the forums. So why not use that to the advantage of the people who are seriously looking?

Not sure, but I would guess they sell the email addresses and phone numbers to companies who create mailing lists or data banks that other companies then pay that company to generate lead lists for products they want to sell. I know Insurance companies pay for lists of people they can send out lead cards to in hopes that they will send the card back to them as being interested in insurance. It's a billion dollar lead business.