Well, I’m new to this forum and I’m sorry if I bore you to death with my first post.
I was wondering if there is anyone here by the name of Rick or someone who is having a similar experience.
I’ve been writing to a girl in Moldova from fiancé.com for a couple of months now and we seem to have been getting along great. Last week she asked me for my email address because she had a “sort of” surprise for me at the agency. I did so with pleasure, and then I had an email from her “agency” entitled “(girls name) request” saying she wanted to talk to me through a translator with the possibility of seeing her via webcam, and to let them know if I was interested. Of course I was, and received the following email:
Thank you for confirming that you are interested in chatting with ***** ******. Let me tell you first what you need for it.
1. The program we use at the agency is called Skype. We are sending you the link using which you can download it easily. The chat program is free of charge and you can use it both for chatting or using a camera with microphone. http://www.skype.com/intl/ru/download/
2. You have to contact the agency in advance, let us say 2 or 3 days to choose the day and time (our local time) you want to chat with a lady. In our turn we contact the lady you are interested in and inform her about the time chosen by you. If she agrees with that time and not busy we will send you a letter confirming the day and the time of the chat.
3. You are paying the fee for the translator’s service you will need during your chat by Western Union. The fee for the service is $6 per hour. The initial installment is $50. (which is about 8 hours 30 minutes of chatting)
4.The fee will be payable to the following address: Moldova, ********, ******** ******* by Western Union and please send us the code given you when wiring the money.
Please advise at your earliest convenience if all is appropriate with you.
If you have any more questions, feel free to ask
Earlier this week I had a letter from her but it was intended for someone else, someone called Rick. In this letter she was also talking about why she requested to the agency that she wanted to “talk to him badly”.
I wondered if this was some sort of scam from the agency, because with vip membership it costs nothing to set up a phone call and yes, I know it costs $3 per minute but I don’t think we would be talking for hours. The western union rang alarm bells too, I offered to pay via paypal instead but I didn’t get a response.
I don’t want to get anyone in trouble if they are trying to help me, it just seemed strange to me. But I wondered if anyone else had this sort of thing happen to them?
Thanks for listening to me!
Just my experience. I paid an Ukrainian agency in advance for some services by Western Union. The agency eventually turned out to be very serious and helpful.
King at least with a credit card if you're scammed you can debit back the account that burned you. If you do not receive the goods and services you were charged for. With Western Union you do not have that option. Anyone can cash a western union draft. Work on the side of common sense and responsibility and you don't get scammed. Trust but verify.
And Western Union is a country by country franchise, perhaps WU in USA might actually be WU but that's about the only place it is, most if not all other countries are WU franchises and in a previous experience I had with WU in Russia it is corrupt also.
I was more worried about the fact that she had set up a similar thing with this other guy in the letter she sent me by mistake, if I hadn't seen that in the letter I would probably have just paid and took the risk.
nasfan,
I agree with you. In fact, I had reasons to trust that agency before that transaction took place. I would not recommend to do it with some "unknown" agency.
If $50 is all you have to risk - that's a pretty small sum in this game.
The Western Union thing could raise a red flag - but as other writers have mentioned, PayPal is useless over there (PayPal wouldn't even let me use my own account when I tried accessing it from an IP address in Latvia). And Credit Card fees can typically be about 6% - which is not something the typical FSU merchant likes to swallow as a cost of doing business. As I am sure that you are aware, you will pay a heftier fee for Western Union - but YOU will pay it, not them, hence its appeal.
As far as getting a letter meant for a guy named Rick - that was a major slip-up on their part. But face it, if you are writing to her via fiance.com or some other service, you are NOT THE ONLY GUY writing to her. And not the only guy she might want to talk to. That's a cold hard fact.
If you think you have something going with this girl, for real, then ante up. But only you know if its for real. We don't.
When you asked for "Rick" as you began this thread, I'm guessing that you were hoping that the guy in question was a member of this forum and would respond as such. That's not likely to be the case.
At any given time there are probably fewer than twenty active contributors to this forum. Watching the number of time that a thread is viewed, would suggest that those who mearly check us out from time to time are about twice that (maybe around 30 to 40?)
Fiance.com gets profiles from many other agencies, and I'm guessing that few of their real cutomers ever seriously check out our forum, much less contribute to it. And each agency has customers itself, of course, who have no idea that fiance.com even exists. So you odds on getting a response fro this guy RICK here are pretty small.
Thanks guys. I feel a right arse now! Yes, I know she will be talking to other men after all that's why she signed up to the agency. I have been close to scammers before and maybe I over reacted to the fact she put a request in for me to "chat" at the same time as this Rick guy. It was a long shot that he might have been looking at this thread, but if it were a scam, I thought she would have contacted others with the same request. And on the face of it, $50 isn't a fortune is it? Thank you once again for your help!
Hi Metro,
I'm not sure if I'm the person you are looking for and I have never had a request like that, but I have been speaking with a lady from Moldova for a while now. If you want to speak leave another thread and I'll get back.