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An Example of a Scammer Targeting Ladies

jen — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:50:02 +0000

Every single day, we have applications for members to our site from criminals who seek to prey on our members and steal from our members. Usually, we have become quite good at recognizing their applications for membership. And we deny them membership. But sometimes we miss one of these criminals, and by mistake we allow them to be members of the site. Here is an example of one of the criminals who joined our site about 1 week ago and tricked us.

The profile was for “Frederick Bundchen” who claimed to be from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, United States. This is what he wrote in his profile:

I am patient,generous, kind, and loving. I am always upbeat, have a positive attitude about most things and I like to have fun. I like football,movies,swimming,dancing,cooking,singing in the choir at church,listening to music,shopping,taking walks at night and looking at the stars,watching the sunset,eating at a very nice restaurant and going to live concerts,theater, movies and art. I love to travel, and to go sightseeing. I love museums, romantic dinners,…..And I am a fun loving person who loves to laugh and make others laugh. I always try to enjoy the simple things in life,and not take anything for granted.I’ve a naturally curious mind and love to learn about peoples, cultures, and so many other things…I love romantic dinners,

The profile included pictures of a man, a woman, and a boy about 5 years old.

We approved this application for membership in the site. Then the member upgraded the membership by paying using a credit card and began contacting members sending ladies his email address federickbundchen@yahoo.com. When one of our lady members wrote to the man, he responded by claiming he wanted to hire a nanny and was going to help the lady get a visa to the USA to be the nanny. Here are the emails he sent:

Hello Dear,

Thanks for your reply and interest in the job I am really willing to get a Driver and Nanny down to the US soon and I told you that i am going to Pay you 3,000Sdollars a month and that will be for the Up keep of Driver and Nanny to where ever. I have Duplex Building with 8 Bedrooms and 2 living rooms and that is all I Want you to take care of You’ll have a room to yourself with a complete Working system with internet facilities which Will enable you communicate with your friends And Family daily.
The reason why I need a driver and Nanny is because I will be moving out of city due to official duty .Now I have to go on a naval course for 6 months And I need a Driver and Nanny in aupair to take care of my kids I understand that you might not have your Visa processed yet and I have already discussed With the United state Immigration service about My intention to get the service of a Driver and Nanny to Take care of my kids while I am on national Duty…..Since I am a Naval officer and I hardly Stay at home…So this is how I intend to make Everything work…
I will give you the email of the immigration Office as well as my Naval license ID number so That they will know that I directed you to the Immigration office for the processing of your Visa…..I will take good care of your departure and arrival to the US when your Visa processing is Completed…But you will have to pay for your Visa registration fee yourself which cost about $225US.
This is because The Immigration has mandated it that the Applicant will address the Visa Registration fee because the payment Receipt will be attached to your papers and The name on it will be used for the processing of all your Papers….and when the processing get done,it will be sent to you via a courier service.More over alert will send to US immigration,US embassy and POEA in your home country as soon as your visa is ready and you will be call for interview .The reason why you have to pay for your Visa registration Yourself is because the immigration office has made it Compulsory that it is the applicant who pays for Her visa registration because I have once been Cheated by a Filipino whom I paid all her expense And when he got his papers, he did not show up to me…So the thing is this, i am going to help you mak sure that you get your visa at all cost. With my influence……I really need a honest and sincere person to work for me…. I think the registration fee for Asia foreigners hoping to work in the US is 225USdollars so that is all they will ask you to pay and the rest will be my doing about 4,700USdollar …I will check out Philippine Work abroad agencies and i will make sure all is set For you. This is all that I have planned down so if you are OK with it, do mail me back. But if you will ask Me to pay your Visa Registration fee for you, please Don’t write me back.Contact me back only if you are ready for this or Maybe I should just get someone else as this is Very important and urgent…Please get back to Me by email only.. I will be away for 6 months and you Will be the one taking care of my safety.
Mr Frederick B Underway Navy.
US Naval Officer

and also this message:

Thanks for your Kind message and interest to Go further with this offer.Immigration will only ask you to pay for visa registration fee which is $225US,I will be the one to pay for your visa placement and airfare total cost $4700US…now I am convinced that I have someone who Will be able to take care of my safety and my home….I am going to write the immigration office to notify them that you will be sending Application for Visa and other traveling Papers and i will have them linked up with you……
They already provided me with the opportunity to bring in 2 foreigner to the US and they have given me the serial code which I am going to give To you. And you will write to them by email and they will know that you are my client and I referred You to them…
I will give you their email and you will email them And tell them you were referred for your visa processing and immigration licensing From Mr……..of the US Naval force…And then you provide them with your immigrant serial code which is Ref: 3829-44632-us-28891-ph And include your full name and address.You are also going to be contacted by the department of foreign affairs over there in your home town and they will get you the necessary documents…..ok?
I am trying to make sure everything get arranged quickly And soon enough. This is the immigrations office E-mail…..usimmigrationdesk@gmail.com
Contact them as soon as possible.
Take care
Best Regards
Mr Frederick B
US Naval Officer 140 barbara circle,Elizabethtown, Kentucky 42701

We were informed of this by one of our careful members who was suspicious about the email she had received. When we investigated, we suspended the profile of the member immediately because it is clearly a criminal fraud.

As we have written previously many times, do not ever send money to anyone you have never met in person. This applies to men as well as to women. If you ever have any of our members attempt to ask you for money, please write to us immediately so that we can investigate.

Over time, as our site becomes more popular, we know that more and more scammers will seek to break in. We see criminal scammers claiming to be from Philippines, USA, Africa, England, China. We continue to change the way our site works to make it more and more difficult for the scammers to take advantage of our members. We believe that we have the largest percentage of sincere members of any Asian dating site, and the smallest percentage of insincere, scammers, and criminals, thanks to our custom improvements to our system, our dedication to educating our members about these issues, and to our members who immediately inform us when any other member attempts to trick them. If you are curious sometime, you may want to visit and join some of the other dating sites and see for yourself how many criminals there are on the internet trying to fool other persons.

Remember, take your time when getting to know anyone, whether it’s someone you meet in person or on our site or on any other internet site. And never send money to anyone you haven’t met in person.

**UPDATE 8/31/2010**

We just had another scammer who joined our site with a similar “nanny scam” scenario… As with some previous scammers, this member had a profile showing a man with a child. As with previous apparently-male scammers, the user upgraded his membership with a payment, then sent the following message:

Hello,
My name is james evans,i am sorry for contacting you this way but i believed you are good christain.Am a single father with a son named Dennis Evans,i worked as a construction engineer but self employed and i lived in london.United kingdom. So am in need of a babysitter for my son and i will be paying you the sum of 500 pounds weekly as your wages,so if you have interest in helping me look after my son and you do have a valid passport. Send me a message me on my id james_evans00001@yahoo.com for more details of the job and do not take this message as insult if its looks beyond your standard.

James

We have not yet heard of any of our ladies who has fallen prey to any of these scammers who have tried to infiltrate our site. We hope that we continue with that record, and in order to do so we commit to continuing to educate all of our members about the fraudsters who attempt to join our site, and we commit to continue our high degree of vigilance of our members who apply to join our site. If at some time, an honest person has his or her profile suspended, we apologize for this. If this happens to you, please calmly contact us through our feedback form and/or email so that we can investigate closely and fix any error we might make. We do our best to identify suspicious profiles and research them carefully to suspend them as soon as possible. Now after reading some of the stories, we hope you understand why we are so careful, occasionally even to a fault.

What’s Coming Up Soon At Our Site

jen — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 08:26:10 +0000

I hope you’ve noticed and been able to make use of the 5-star ranking system that we have added to our system for your buddy list and other lists.

We’ve also been hard at work developing other new site features. One of the main areas of focus has been a new look for the site. You may remember that we came up with several designs almost a year ago, but we never settled on one that we felt was both intimate and professional enough to represent our community of members. We want to give you a quick sneak preview of the design we are now implementing that we hope you will like.

So, that’s it on the right. You can click the picture for a closer view. The text of the pages will remain about the same as we have today. What’s different will be the layout. For now, we’ve selected a professional photograph of a couple that we may use on the left side. The images in the center, however, will be our featured ladies, just as we now have on our front page. If you have a picture of yourself and your husband or wife who have met through our site and would like us to consider using your picture on our front page, please just send it to us, because we would rather use a picture of some of our members rather than a professional photograph.

Another thing we are working on is a change to the message system between free-level members. We’ve found that there is a lot of abuse of our free-level message system, which has forced us to monitor an excessive quantity of messages in order to spot scams and other violations of our terms of service. Due to this, we will no longer be allowing free-level members to write text messages to other free members. Instead, free level members writing to other free-level members will be able to choose between pre-written messages that we store in our system. Of course, any upgraded member will still be able to edit their own messages, and any free level member replying to an upgraded member will also be able edit their messages.

We welcome your comments about either of these new developments, which we hope will be in place within a few months (probably we will introduce them one at a time).

And of course, we always welcome your feedback on any aspect of our site: just click the feedback link at the bottom of the site’s home page to write to us.

Use Power Search to Meet Our Members

jen — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 06:54:13 +0000

One of our features we have built in to the site is Power Search. You can use this feature to meet other members who meet specific criteria or share some of your interests. You can search by denomination, height/weight, educational level, and even keyword. You can find the right Filipina or Asian lady, or gentleman, by trying out different searches. Just click the word “Power Search” at the top of the page. We also invite you to view the following screencast in which we demonstrate the Power Search features. Click here to view it.

We are always interested to hear your feedback about our search features, so if there are any suggestions for further improvement, let us know!

New Editor Feature for Sending Messages and Editing Profiles

jen — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:39:33 +0000

We’ve made a slight improvement to the window for sending messages. You can now add “rich text” – which means you can use bold, italic, underline, and indented regions.

It’s fairly self-explanatory. If you want to type some bold text, click the “B” letter in the top of the message area, or click “I” for italic or “U” for underline.

We have also enabled this editor for editing member profiles as well – so now you can add a little more character to your text description.

Peter

Preview of New Editor Features

Our Recent January 1 Letter: New Profile And Search Options

jen — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 06:31:08 +0000

Search through tens of thousands of our members with improved Power Search functionality.

Here’s our January 1 Letter we sent to all site members:

Happy New Year! I’m writing to you at this time to let you know of some recent developments at our site.

First of all, in response to requests from many members, we have now added new profile settings and search options. If you have not added your denomination, height, weight, and information about any children you have, please log in and click “Edit My Profile” then use the “Edit Additional Information” tab to update your profile. After you have updated this information, your profile will be visible in more searches.

You can also search based on these features (as well as limit your search by country, when a user joined the site or was last active, keyword, and more) by using Power Search. You can always find the Power Search by clicking Power Search from the top center of every page of our website, inside at the bottom of the QuickSearch Box. Be aware that since not all members have updated their details, that you may miss some members by doing a restrictive search. But please try it!

Finally, I want to remind you to check out our blog. This is part of our site where we share suggestions from our staff and other members, where we discuss new features, and where we update you about any news regarding the site. You can always find our blog at christian-filipina.com/blog, or by clicking on Blog from the left menu of our site. This week, for instance, we have an article presenting some testimonials from people who have sadly been scammed and other testimonials (at the end of the same article) from others who have happily met on our site. Please check out these articles and check in with our blog regularly.

As always, we are always here to answer your questions and happy also to hear any comments or suggestions you have concerning the site. Our goal is to provide a meeting place for mature Christians in Asia, and specifically to be a resource for you, our members. We continue to offer the best prices, the best customer service, and the highest percentage of sincere members of any dating site for Asia. We’re proud that you have helped us to build this community.

Best wishes for 2010,

From site owners of christian-filipina.com,

Jen and Pete

Experimental Video/Audio/Text Chat Launched for Gold and Diamond Members

jen — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:30:05 +0000

We’ve now launched our experimental video/audio/text chat program. This will allow our upgraded members to chat with or without webcam and audio. Our first trial will be to our Gold and Diamond Members. Here’s how it works.

When you view the profile of another person who is currently online, if you are a Gold or Diamond member, then you will see a button to chat with the member at the bottom of their profile.

Chat Online Button

If you see that button, it means that you are able to use the Chat, and it means that the member is online. If you click on that link, you’ll begin the chat session.

Chat Window

Once you login to the chat session, you may have to wait a few moments for the other member to accept your chat request. You may begin typing into the box to the left of the “Send” button at any time.

When you begin your chat session, the computer will prompt you for the permission to use your webcam and audio devices. If you would like to use webcam and audio, you must allow the program to use those devices. If you prefer just to chat with text only, you can reject the request for webcam and audio. The text chat will still work.

If your friend does not appear to accept your chat request, it may be because he or she is chatting with someone else, may have stepped away from the computer, or may not have javascript enabled on their computer. This application only works if you have enabled javascript on your computer and have a working updated browser with flash installed.

There are still a few problems we are working on – remember, it’s experimental! If you notice anything out of the ordinary, just let us know so that we can do our best to resolve the issue.

Within a few months, we hope to launch the fully-functional version for all upgraded members Silver and above. For now, this feature is available only for Gold and Diamond level members.

New “My Matches” Feature Launched

jen — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:31:15 +0000

We’ve now finished our first version of our “Weekly Email Matches” and set it to send all members weekly matches by email. If you prefer to receive an email of your latest matches more often or less often – or even turn it off completely – you can easily modify your preferences by logging in to your account and clicking on “Edit My Settings” from the left-hand menu. At the bottom of the list of settings is the setting for the My Matches mail. If you are not receiving your matches, please make sure that your email address in our system is up-to-date, and also add our email addresses into your address book.

A snippet from a "My Matches" email

Each mailing will include a few of the most recent members to join, as well as a few members who may not be active on the site any more. You can click on any of the pictures from the email to go directly to the profile on christian-filipina.com. And if you’re logged in to christian-filipina.com you’ll immediately see the links to wink and send messages. Don’t be shy. Go ahead and contact any members. Just start a simple conversation in a message, or just send a wink. There’s no time better than the present to say hello.

As always, if you have any suggestions or comments of any kind, feel free to let us know.