Sunday, January 30, 2011

The CHNLOVE.COM Scam

This website (also addressed as chnlove.asia) purports to have many Chinese single women available as potential marriage partners. It's actually a scam to create massive revenues from translation services (which don't seem to do much actual translation) and to a lesser extent, extremely expensive connection fees.

The scam is so good that they even seem to have captured Google AdWords for "chnlove scam", directing you to chnlovescam.com, a site which tries to convince visitors that Chnlove is doing all it can to authenticate the women who publish profiles on their site. While this may be true, it fails to mention the minor detail that Chnlove itself is a grand scam!

First of all, if you've already wasted your money on these crooks, you may be able to reverse the charges if you act quickly, depending on your credit card issuer's policy. And by doing so, you will help to get them blacklisted and drive them out of business. It doesn't matter that you personally authorized the charges. What matters is that they made a substantial and honest effort to deliver the service you paid for. Most likely, you're here because they didn't do that. But you may not even realize that they pulled a trick on you. You may just think you were unlucky in love. I doubt it, because the girls aren't up there to get married, for the most part. Read on.

So the first thing you'll notice about the site is that there is a disproportionate number of sexy, well-dressed girls, which is way out of sync with their relative proportion in China itself. Sure, people tend to dress up for singles' sites photos, but this is way beyond that, as you can see.

The next thing that you'll notice if you subscribe, is that they bill you a few dollars every time you contact a girl, and every time she contacts you. But what's a few more bucks to find the love of your life?  It might be acceptable, if only she were actually interested in marriage.

So... the next thing you'll notice is that the girls reply to you in a very generic and pandering fashion, which shows little or no evidence of having read your message or profile. All the girls replied like this all the time, in my own experimentation.

Logically, anyone who really wanted to get married would get the expensive (and untrustworthy) translation service out of the middle as soon as possible. So if you give her your phone number or email address (which by the way you're paying to send to her), you'll get a reply to the effect of "I need help translating my words" or whatever. This is bullshit. Anyone with trouble speaking English would much rather go to a trusted friend to help them chat with this new foreign guy (you).

So the real scam is obvious here: they get you to correspond with the women extensively, in order to create massive "translation" revenue. But judging from my experience, there is little or no translation which actually occurs. My guess would be that the girls are in on the scam, providing the site with photos and/or the occasional fake personal details to make the emails seem honest. Likewise, Chnlove's partner matchmakers are probably in on the scam as well.

Don't bother pointing all this out to them. You'll just get a shameless face-saving "Dear John" letter back to you, denying all this.

If you still aren't convinced, Google this and see what you find. Don't be one of these suckers who spends $1000 before he finds out what's going on. And remember, CHARGE BACK YOUR CREDIT CARD!

There are anecdotes of people actually connecting with real girls through this site, but if you read the details, it looks like a bait-and-switch scam, in which you think you're going to meet some babe, and end up face-to-face with grandma instead.

If you really want to find a girl in China, then learn Mandarin and go their yourself. Prepare to you have your balls scammed off, especially if you go to Shanghai. (Learn about the tea house scam, among many others.) But there are some decent girls to be found there who are also gorgeous, if you dig hard enough, and bear in mind that their relatives will be looking to rip you off, even if she isn't. Just look in the countryside, away from the pollution and crime of the cities.

Good luck. And don't forget to cancel your Chnlove account!