This is
LONDON
13/03/03 - Life & style section
Me and my internet brides
By Geoffrey Wansell
The snow is 18 inches deep at the top
of the famous Odessa steps in what was once Soviet Russia,
and my feet are turning to lumps of ice. But the dazzling
smile on the face of 28-yearold Natalia is enough to melt
the coldest heart. Her luminous brown eyes positively
sparkle with life.
Russian can be a very sexy language,
the French of the Baltic. So, as she speaks through a
translator, I cannot help but be transfixed by the instant
platitude: “I just want to find a man, a foreigner, who
will make me feel safe, who will be reliable and
responsible, and, of course, I would like to have a family
with him.”
That, of course, is what one hopes to
hear as a man. Somewhere behind the thump-thump of my
beating heart - a temporary condition caused not by
incipient passion but intense cold - I wonder if all she
is interested in is a marriage certificate, an instant
passport to the good life in the West.
I have come to Odessa to find the truth
about Russian Brides, women from the former Soviet Union
who advertise for husbands on the internet. It is not that
I need one myself, you understand, but, well, like any
man, I am intrigued by this modern interpretation of the
mail-order bride. What quickly emerges from my
investigation, though, is that the Russian mafia has a
major interest in the business - for the single purpose of
fleecing gullible Westerners.
Some websites have false pictures and
names. They rip off prospective grooms by tempting them
into parting with thousands of pounds upfront for
translation services, visas and aeroplane tickets. The
women of their dreams, of course, do not exist.
Yet the girls I find on a genuine site,
one that I know to be authentic, represent a tapestry of
middle-class Russian womanhood - an economist, aged 36, an
office manager, 36, a teacher, 49, a designer, 31, and a
doctor, 32. None of them are hard on the eye, though some
are more attractive than others. They are all dressed
respectably, there’s not a trace of a decolletage.
It was just after 10pm on a Sunday when
I typed the words “Russian Bride” into my computer at home
in London and found Natalia. She was on one of the
hundreds of sites instantly listed on my screen, offering
thousands of potential partners.
A 5ft 6in beauty consultant, born and
brought up in Soviet Russia, Natalia claims she cannot
find a man to marry in Odessa, now part of the independent
state of Ukraine.
“The men here are so irresponsible.
They do not respect women. They treat them like slaves.
They leave their wives and children. Every second child
comes from an incomplete family, with no father. It is the
reason that I started to look on the internet.
“I have been looking for a husband for
my whole life,” she explains gently. “But I have come to
the conclusion that the man I will find will be a
foreigner.”
But she cannot afford to leave Odessa
to look for one. A visa to the West can cost the
equivalent of two months’ salary to a young woman like
Natalia - and the United States will not even grant a
single Russian woman a visa if she could afford it. They
demand an introduction, or an invitation, from a US
citizen.
“So I joined an internet site after
talking to a friend who had been successful by doing so,”
she explains.
“I am prepared to wait as long as it
takes to find the right man. When I do, I will learn
English and move to wherever he lives. Maybe I am
oldfashioned but I really just want to have a happy family
and a happy life. The main thing for a woman is to make a
family, and give birth to a child. That is why I will wait
for a foreigner.”
Natalia’s profile has been on
www.russianwife.co.uk for the past month. Yet mine is the
only email she has received so far. “But I am optimistic,”
she says. “Happy people attract happy people. Besides, if
I look like a pessimist no one will pay any attention to
me.” She is looking for a husband aged between 30 and 45
but you sense she would be happy with a man even older, if
he was what she calls “reliable”.
But is Natalia just too good to be true
- the one sincere young woman among thousands of others?
Not in my experience.
Another young Russian woman I met while
I was in Odessa was Galina, a 37-year-old chemist’s shop
manager, who has an eight-year-old daughter from a
relationship that broke up five years ago, and has been
advertising for a husband on the same internet site for
the past eight months.
This striking 5ft 5in blonde, with
dramatic green eyes, has had “five responses” in that
time, she tells me, again through a translator. “I think
two of the men are serious,” she says. “They have said
they are going to come and visit me. All five were from
the United States, and the two that are coming are both
from Washington.”
But Galina has never asked any of her
internet suitors for money. “I can earn enough here
myself,” she explains, “not to have to ask them. Money is
not the most important thing. It is the man himself.”
ONE of the men coming to see her is a
43-year-old scientist. “He is called Michael and he is
coming on 28 March,” she says. “The other man is called
Buddy, who’s 50 and works in air-traffic control. He tells
me that he is coming as soon as possible.”
Marriage has yet to be mentioned. “I am
hopeful,” she says calmly, “but I haven’t met either of
the men yet. I have to speak to them - to sense them - to
see whether we could have a future together, to see if the
man is sympathetic.
“I’d be happy to go to America. It
doesn’t matter where I live. The most important thing is
to have a family that is stable, and for my daughter to
have a future.”
The internet site provides a
translation service for both women. The men’s letters to
the site are translated into Russian and the women’s
replies translated into English. Galina, like Natalia,
insists that she would like to go to a country “where
women are regarded as ordinary people, not as slaves”. She
is convinced that the internet “is now the best way for a
Russian woman to find a husband” but warns “you have to be
very careful with the site you choose”.
That is the crucial point. There is
darker reality behind the world of Russian Brides than the
patently sincere Natalia and Galina. In particular, there
are a great many women who are what the trade calls “scammers”.
The pictures they put on the site are
false, and so are the names. The letters they send promise
relationships they will never deliver, and they simply
demand larger and larger sums of money. An honest site
will charge a small fee for translating letters and
organising the correspondence, say £2.50 a time, and it
will direct its male customers to the proper visa
authorities.
But the less honest sites simply let
the women who advertise ask for whatever they want from
their potential husbands - and that can amount to a great
deal of money.
Bob Captain - who started a website
called Russian Blacklist to warn against these
unscrupulous women - says he is contacted by about 250 men
a year who have been ripped off through the internet. He
estimates that “perhaps 50 per cent of all the internet
traffic is with scammers who are simply looking to make
money out of the men who reply to their ads”.
These scams can take all sorts of
forms. The potential Russian bride may, for example, ask
her admirer for $100 (it is always in US dollars because
the currency is so valuable in Russia) to cover the “translation and email costs” of their correspondence. The
man agrees but what he doesn’t know is that she may be
communicating with as many as 20 men at a time, earning
herself $2,000 a month - when her actual translation cost
is $20 - a dollar a time .
Another trap is the visa scam. After
just two or three letters, the Russian Bride announces
that she has “fallen in love” with her internet admirer
and asks him to send her $300 for a visa - when it
actually costs $30. She then asks for $200 for a passport
- which actually costs $20. Then there is money for the
flight - say $1,200.
But she never buys the ticket, because
she has no intention of travelling. She has given her
admirer a false name, and - in Bob Captain’s words - “she’s made $1,700 when the average monthly income is
$500.”
Or there is the woman who tells her
foreign admirer to meet her in her country, and asks to be
taken shopping. She wants jewellery, expensive clothes and
a monthly income - “until she is able to travel to be with
him to marry”.
“We’ve had guys scammed for $50,000
like that,” says Captain. The rewards are so considerable
that the trade has attracted the attentions of the Russian
mafia.
This month, three scammers were caught
in the Russian city of Yoshkar-Ola. The translator,
computer specialist and psychologist had about 200 victims
- mostly from the US - and were earning an average monthly
income of $30,000.
The scammers used photographs of local
students, whom they paid $50 each to collect the money
transfers that men sent them via Western Union.
But the Russian mafia do not take
kindly to the identifying of their “scammers”. The founder
of the site that I used married a British man herself
through the internet five years ago. She started to
publish the names of women she thought were “scammers”
last year - and rapidly discovered how dangerous the mafia
could be. Two men visited her mother’s house in Odessa
late one night and threatened her. The message was simple
- “tell your daughter to stop blacklisting or something
may happen to you”.
“It’s a very profitable business in
Russia,” says Katya, who now lives in Somerset and
operates the site with her husband. She does not want me
to mention her surname because she still fears for her
mother’s safety.
“The police say they know about the
scammers but are unable to do anything about them.”
If you need proof of the success of the
Russian Brides industry, just take a look in the
ramshackle departure lounge at Odessa’s less than gleaming
airport.
There is just one advertisement in the
whole place, and it is not for vodka or cars. It is for “Fiancée Visas”.
