Just about sums up the fsu dating deal.
Essential only %10 of ladies "online" are looking for serious relationship.
10% of men looking are serious and are decent prospects.
Hey Bill, how are you doing? I maybe visiting Nikolaev in late april, I'll let you know.
Not sure about your percentages but I do agree many guys have NO sound reasoning for looking for
a FSU lady. I would think many feel by throwing around some cash that the girls would jump to them.
Got to be interesting, sociable and somewhat handsome. Hopefully I am in your 5% of men that know what they are doing and I definately have met many of the girls in your 5% of girls that are sincere. I also think the hardest thing is to find a girl that will leave her country to be with you.
I think Jamie's problem is in his head. There are thousands of girls that are scammers out there and he thinks the one he was with should get his total attention. I have my own definition of a scammer and that is a girl that is dishonest for $$$. A girl that actually mets you, has dinners with you, spends some time with you, may actually a dater/user. Who is to know that when she actually met you.....she was let down by your looks/personality. In jamie's case, I wrote to same girl for a couple months and figured she wasn't serious/sincere type. Maybe Jamie ignored the bad signals and let himself be taken for a ride by letting others(agency) take care of all his accomodations. It is just a good learning experience.
Billgreen is certaintly knowledgeable with what is going on in Nikolaev. No city in Ukraine, or the FSU, will you find more 18, 19, 20, 21 year old girls who will accept men to 50-55-60.
Why is this? Because of the effecient scamming coming out of Nikolaev, Mariupol, Meltipol, Berdyansk. This region over the past few years has made Lugansk look like the Vatican.
I wonder if the odds are any better here(for finding love). it seems some Waite there whole life for someone while others take action. scamming or professional daters are not limited to any one country. I think the words of wisdom in some of these posts can be applied any place.
There is no doubt that the FSU still offer many of us an advantage in that there are some beautiful women there with traits that would be unavailable in women coming from our home countries. But there ARE pits that one can fall into.
As I've mentioned before - there are SOME men who will never be able to find a decent woman - simply because they have major personality issues. I suspect that jamie1964 is one of those.
There are also guys who seem particularly inclined to falling in storm sewers (was going to say "man holes" but that has more than one meaning) and those guys will always find one to fall into.
There are not particularly bright guys and those who fall in love for all the wrong reasons.
All these guys are going to have trouble in the FSU.
There are also plenty of scammers and men who practically beg to be vitims of them.
The FSU is NOT a perfect place where you can go to a showroom and find a lady - but its still the best place to look that I know of.
(Has anybody noticed the lack of an(g)us smell by the way? And no old posts by him either. Congrats to the moderators who have removed his existance again!)
you said,
'scamming or professional daters are not limited to any one country.'
and not all terrorists are muslim, but.........
seriously though,
if you grew up in mid-western america, in a town where everybody knew, liked, and TRUSTED each other, then ukraine is just not the culture for you. it will eat you up and spit you out. shamelessly.
there are other cultures that respect more a decent guy, a nice guy. one that is polite, but maybe average on the charisma scale. for a guy like this, i would recomment a different area, like south america or asia.
RB
That's the major problem. You cannot be captivated by pictures and letters. There were many signals is jamies story that were red flags to me. Falling for pictures and letters is where guys get burned. They put on the blinders of common sense.
I think he entered in to it with a lot of naivity, perhaps his first FSU experience, OK it is easy to speak with experience but he was an accident waiting to happen.
Only after, and after some pointers from this forum, did he do a bit of googling on the 'slavgirl' agency, he can critize me for 'googling' as much as he likes but had he done this before he travelled then he would entered in to it more knowledgable than he did.
By googling for the agency registered address in Phoenix, USA it was revealed that it is merely, yet, another trading name of AFA, the agency website claims to be Nikolaev based but it lists ladies from all over FSU.
But even after this revelation jamie continued to refer to it as a Nikolaev agency and an affiliate of AFA, but it's not! It's a Phoenix, USA based organisation and it not an affiliate of but the same bl00dy thing as AFA.
But rather than listen and learn he came up with arguments against at almost every step and I don't believe he has listened, and learned, to a single 'pointer' provided to him on this forum thus he remains an accident waiting to happen.
We are all guilty of that, Nasfan. We fall for letters, pictures, phone calls, even meetings. We all should know that at any phase of the game, until marriage that it all could be a scam. I accept it as it is, but I do admire Jamie for standing up against it.
By the way, I met Jamie in another website. It was me who invited him here.
I'm a midwestern guy, grew up in a small midwestern town most of my life. It is like anything else in the world. Education is the key and common sense unlocks the door. I have traveled a major part of this world. Though I didn't have the experience in the FSU because of the cold war issues and visa etc. When this opened up, I looked at this after my divorce over ten years ago. I decided at the time to take a pass. I wasn't ready for a relationship nor was I prepared for what awaited me in the FSU.
When I decided to do this, after a couple of real winners here in the States I decided to leave the prozac laden victims to themselves. One woman opened her purse one day and I saw inside what looked like a CVS Pharmacy. I thought to myself, Oh jesus here we go.
So I joined this site and browsed through ladies profiles. I wasn't looking for the 20 year junior woman. 15 years was a stretch to me. When I came to this forum a guy named TimH kind of gave me the rundown on what is was like in the FSU. He told me take two weeks and just read the forum, which I did. Then I met Ptichka, who we emailed back and forth for a long time. She gave me the correct way to care and feed the Ukrainian woman. Both were highly instrumental in my success.
When I hit the ground I was pretty much prepared for anything. I had no preconceived ideas and I wasn't expecting much. I got a pleasant surprise. I did have many scammers try to bait me, but I had learned through the forum what were red flags.
This is where I have a small disagreement with RagingBull, you cannot, in a reasonable mind fall in love with letters and pictures, that's called infatuation and a totally different issue, though it's the main cause why guys get scammed. They let their mental guard down and got burned. In this same time frame of being on the forum, we didn't have so many guys that were getting ripped off. You had the occasional cry baby, but it wasn't as near as common then. This is what I think perturbs people here in the Forum. There is so much information here a guy can use. Guys still come on here and whine about scammers, like it's something new.
Jamie isn't standing up, though I have empathy for him, but unfortunately he chose the path he did. I could have written about the dozen or so scammers that tried to entice me. Some I reported to anti scam sites and others were in a grey area that I gave the benefit of the doubt.
Unlike dannys idiotic opinion I only made two promises to my wife. One that I would love her and her only and the only bed I would sleep in was hers. There was no financial discussion what so ever. No other promises.
Guys come here with the misconception that these ladies will jump at the chance of moving to a more well off lifestyle. That's not even remotely true, at least with the honest ones. They think their dollars and where they live will overcome their shortcomings and that's just a recipe for disaster. I have to agree with Bill and his perception of most of the guys that go over to the FSU. When you read Jamies posts, you can go back and read others that have cried foul and their is a common denominator. They let the pictures and letters override their common sense. There are varitions on a theme, but there is the common thread among them.
I've always followed Vince Lombardi's quote, "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail", nothing is more true than that and it's the same thing finding a lady in the FSU.
Nasfan, this is not a matter of preparation. It is not knowing you are going to be scammed. The lady sure is not going to tell you. There are scammers in the US or everywhere else, but you think it will be different because of the words of the website and the lady.
No. I am saying that no matter how prepared Jamie or anyone else is, especially those who are not members of forums like this, they would not know how to prepare for things like this.
I started this process in the early days of the internet, indeed early communications were via snail mail, in those days there were no forums, no blacklists, sure if was tempting to fall in love with a photo but in those days one needed to rely upon one's 'common sense' and not asking, or relying upon, opinions or knowledge of others.
There is a saying that if one is going to hang themselves then they're going to need to be provided with enough rope to do it with. Before meeting any lady, by reading her letters in detail and via search engines, establish as best as one can that she is genuine and should she want the shopping trip(s) once one arrives to meet her then allow her enough 'rope'. If one refuses to take her shopping then one is never going to know, but if one takes her shopping then, if she is a bad one, she will want to go shopping again and again, supposedly shop for one item but come out with a bag full and all it takes is one such shopping trip for her to reveal her true colours.
I recall an American guy I became drinking buddies with in Zaporozhye once, as the story had been initially reported to me he'd had a bust up with a lady, walked off, and my friend (agency owner) was worried about him and asked me to find him and try to resolve any issue(s).
Well he and I became good buddies and the story was that he and the lady were supposed to be having a short holiday in Turkey, she needed a suitcase so they went to the store and rather than buy a suitcase, something that gets thrown around by airport workers, she went for a complete set of cases, not just any cases but designer label cases, the sort of thing that one would never allow airport workers anywhere near, she also wanted other gifts but he made excuses regarding buying those for her.
He had employed, and used effectively, the 'rope' saying, he bought the cases for her, he walked her to the car, he put the cases in the car for her, then ..... then he told her to 'phuck off' :)
That guy didn't chat on forums, he didn't use search engines, but he went prepared and knew exactly what he was doing, he used his 'common sense'!
Things are always not that cut and dry, Martin. If your point is common sense, how many times do you go against your common sense and how many times do you see people go against their common sense? Sometimes we get lucky and when we don't, that's when we get attention.
Let me tell you a story about my second visit to Ukraine in Zaporozhye. I took her and her son to a shoe store. They both tried on shoes. I bought her son shoes, and I asked her about the shoes she tried on. She said it was too expensive and we did not buy it.
I was not part of any forums, but I did prepare the best I can. I bought and read Elena's book in elenasmodels.com, but that book didn't say anything about scammers. It couldn't have been anything I did because the last thing she said to me was, "Ben, you're a nice guy." But she did not continue much communication with me after I got back.