Russian Brides expert Elena Petrova says dating scams conducted through large personals sites are rampant, affecting virtually every male user of online dating sites. The losses are counted in millions.
Elena's Russian Women Black List lists thousands of stories of men scammed of various amounts of money, publishing several new reports every week.
I've received several emails from men angry about the US government passing a law which they say unjustly forces disclosure of personal information which could be misconstrued as negative.
First, some perspective. Did you know that between 8,000 and 12,000 American men find foreign wives through for-profit brokers each year? That's a pretty small niche for such sweeping legislation.
Men, what is your core problem with the IMBA law? Is it the background check requirement?
As I understand it a great number of the men seeking foreign brides could be considered less-than savory characters. Is there data to back that up or refute it?
Most of the disclosure requirement appear in a grey area where the intent to keep people safe is overshadowed by problematic wording.
It’s hard to believe they list convictions that may have been overturned. That’s right in the middle of the grey area.
On the other hand, people who have been arrested or had restraining orders against them are generally people one should be extra-careful about.
I would like to hear from some foreign women about how they feel the law will affect them.
Listening to American men berate American woman on countless blogs gets boring after a while. Many of these men make money on their blog sselling memberships to mail order bride companies. If that's their motive, it changes the whole equation, could they actually be working for foreign matchmaking service for example?
The contempt these men show American woman is startling and offputting at first. It seems their definition of feminist is "any woman that I don't like."
That's not getting them anywhere nearer to a solution, just repeating the same argument over and over again.
From what I've read, many of the circumstances surrounding importing women into the US have had negative results. This seems to be conveniently overlooked by most IMBA opponents.
Vital open discourse and informed debate seems to be missing. Here's to hoping both sides can meet and work out their differences.
New York Times has talks about the 5-1 ratio of women to men in Beirut. Maybe men should be looking there instead of the Baltic states.
1. Nathan Larson on November 26, 2006 5:20 PM writes...
There are a number of serious flaws in the IMBRA law. Immigration is already a lengthy bureaucratic process, but IMBRA's paperwork requirements are so onerous that many international correspondence services have suspended operations rather than incur the expense of obtaining background checks, translating forms into the recipient's native language, getting a separate written consent form signed by the foreign lady before releasing her address to each potential American correspondent, etc. Since many of these services only charge a nominal fee of $4 or $6 per address, this will greatly increase the price if the costs are passed on to consumers.
Some people would like to see these international correspondent services go away, because a small percentage of these marriages result in abusive relationships. However, matchmaking services like Match.com, FriendFinder, etc. where thousands of foreign women meet American men are unregulated by IMBRA. The distinction doesn't make sense. Specifically, exception clause (ii) excludes from regulation "an entity that provides dating services if its principal business is not to provide international dating services between United States citizens or United States residents and foreign nationals and it charges comparable rates and offers comparable services to all individuals it serves regardless of the individual's gender or country of citizenship."
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