Complaint Review: anastasia.com - Internet Internet

The great Anastasia date fraud

Keywords: Anastasiadate, fraud, theft, dating scam, wire fraud, obtaining money by deception.

After being seriously defrauded on Anastasia date (AnastasiaFRAUD), we carried out a two year investigation of how the site operates and how it seeks to cover up its fraudulent business model.

How the scam works

Agencies in Ukraine (often run by the mafia) are contracted to supply women for the site. These agencies are paid for each “confirmed” profile and for the number of letters sent and chat minutes. Extra money is paid for enticing men to use the “date me” service.

What we know.

These agencies pay or reward the women for having their profiles on the site and for the amount of communication they generate. AnastasiaFRAUD denies this, but there is plenty of evidence that these agencies operate in this fashion.

A quick search of Google using Russian will reveal adverts placed by these agencies.

Translated:

“Our company works with foreign dating sites, we want to offer you a very beneficial partnership. On the condition that you agree to put your photos on our site, we give you a free professional photo shoot, we give for the registration of perfume or the same amount of money at your discretion. Once your profile is registered you will come expensive and valuable gifts, and you will receive a certain amount per month for the fact that you will be registered with us. The amount will depend on the number of letters that will be coming to your profile. All other details we are ready to discuss with you. We will be glad to meet you !!!”

And another:

“Getting registered in our partnership program you get paid for :

- profile registration – you get $0,75-1,25 for every activated profile (your commission for activation depends on quality and quantity of photos uploaded to profile);

- correspondence – you get $3,00 – 3,70 for every reply from a lady (commission for replies depends on the time it takes a lady to reply a letter and whether she has a video clip uploaded to her profile), $1,00 for every photo sent by a man to a lady or received by a man from a lady and opened by him;

- photo-exchange – you get $1,00 for every photo sent by a man to a lady or received by a man from a lady and opened by him;

- chats and video-chats – you get 0,25 cent for every second of the chat, 0,50 cents per every second of video-chat when one-way streaming is turned on (when a man watches video-streaming from lady’s web-cam or vice versa), 0,75 cent for every second of video-chat with two video-streams (when both a man and a woman have their web-cams turned on wghile chatting);

- organization of conference calls – you get $5 for every conference call with one of your ladies (technical organization and translator are paid by us);

- video-clips – you get $0,12-1 each time a man views video of your lady (commission for video clips depend on the quali6ty and length of a video-clip);

- gift delivery – you get $5 for every fact of delivery, plus earn on buying gifts;

- organization of personal meetings – you get commissions for organizing personal meetings between your ladies and our customers, plus have possibility to earn on delivering interpreter services.”

            We could post over 100 more examples.

FACT: internet dating is big business in Ukraine and Anastasia is one of the biggest players.  Anastasia operates a don’t ask, don’t tell policy about paid daters. As long as there is no evidence obviously available, there is no payment! Defrauded customers are challenged to prove the girls are paid.

AnastasiaFRAUD claim that they fine agencies caught breaking their “rules”. There is an element of truth to this. We have ONE recorded case of an agency being fined (the fine worked out as .12% of their yearly turnover!). This policy exists so anastasiaFRAUD can claim:

1)   They take action in obvious cases of fraud.

2)   That they can reflect the consequences of their fraudulent business model onto the agencies if they are caught.

3)   That they can maintain a thin veil of plausible deniability about the massive fraud. We will explode their claims of plausible deniability in the sections below.

Testing the claims that profiles are genuine

            To test AnastasiaFRAUDS claims that their profiles are genuine we did a simple survey that anyone can replicate.

            Checking profiles

            Over the last 12 months we have tested the validity and honesty of over 8000 anastasiaFRAUD profiles.

Our method of sampling. On 24 consecutive days we pulled up the list of “ladies online to chat”. Using different accounts, we then pulled the details of these available ladies. The reason for this choice of sampling was to ensure we checked the profiles of currently active ladies (there are a number of dead fake profiles on the site arising from girls who have been paid to have their pictures up but are not really interested in dating). We recognize that ladies in chat are mainly those who are earning money by chatting and thus this sampling method might slightly inflate the number of fake profiles found.

Of this sample we can confirm 7423 to be FALSE or fraudulent. 2748 lied about substantive information (children or occupation), 4221 lied about relationship status (we obtained marriage certificates or evidence of a current relationship), 454 were girls whose letters and chats were operated by agency translators (to be fair, a far smaller proportion than we thought would be the case). Only in 579 cases could we not find confirming evidence that the profile in question was false. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. According to our sample, a MAXIMUM of 7.25% of girls on anastasiaFRAUD are genuine.

 On a small sample (23) of the 7423 false profiles we got customers to report the false profiles to be taken down. The AnastasiaFRAUD organization complied in only THREE particularly egregious cases!

How Anastasia date cover up the scam

            We have already mentioned plausible deniability. Below are some quotes from anastasiaFRAUD customer services.

Graham Rowe “Thank you for your feedback. At AnastasiaDate we take all our customer concerns very seriously. Our supportive Customer Service Team is always ready to help you 24/7.”

“We have a simple process for resolution. If anyone feels that any of the ladies on our website has deceived them in any way to contact us. We have a money-back guarantee if any lady on our system has scammed anyone.”

“Customer services”

  We have only two recorded instances of anastasiaFRAUD refunding a customer (one was asked for money, the other drugged, robbed & raped on a date!). We have tracked down other customers who have been defrauded and Anastasia rejected their claims. They ask for standards of evidence that can only be achieved by government law enforcement. What they then do is to develop internal protocols to stop the women being found out so easily. The list of instructions to their agencies is horrifying in its attempts to cover up fraud. Forbidden to make friends on social media is the number one. Substitute girls on a date used to be a classic, Anastasia banned it.

  If communication occurs off site, anastasiaFRAUD refuse to compensate. This is not a policy to protect customers, it is a deeply cynical attempt to keep customers on site so they pay the exhorbitant sums for chat and letters.

“Anti scam” policy “The best anti-scam protection in the industry”

 This is just one giant marketing cover up. Yes AnastasiaFRAUD do compensate obvious frauds. The only two we know of, are a man who was caught in a money for visa scam, and a man who was drugged, robbed and raped on his date arranged through AnastasiaFRAUD. The only reason AnastasiaFRAUD pay out in obvious cases is that they could be prosecuted for being part of the fraud if they did not.

  What happens to the rest of the claims? They are rejected! Even better anastasiaFRAUD ban complainants for technical infringements of their Terms of service.

“So I  filed a claim. Next I got mail from anastasiadate Customer Service Department , and they asked me screen shots of emails, photos of money transvers, calculation how much I spent money to this girl and so on. I looked my inbox and noticed that there was hundreds of mails from this girl and from that one who started this… I thought that easiest way to start this work would be to calculate how many credits I used to this girl. But I was not able to log on my account. I send email to anastasiadate customer service and they told that my account was closed due to spamming.”

We didn’t believe they could be so stupid”

But they are!

Our Test of the anti scam policy

 We were able to find three men who had been scammed and we asked them to put in complaints and see what happened. This reveals what a deeply criminal and evasive organization anastasiaFRAUD is:

1)   Scam victim had been writing to a professional chatter Tatyana Voloshko. The complaint was not acknowledged. Hackers broke into his email and social media accounts. Attempted fraud on his credit cards. We know the complaint was received by AnastasiaFRAUD because we tracked and recorded their efforts to cover up the activities of ms Voloshko.

2)   Scam victim had been writing to professional chatter Marina Pedyash. Claim rejected because there was “no evidence”. Marina is a well known professional chatter who is a big earner for the agency from her “dates”.

3)   recently transferred money to a known dating scammer in Nikolaev (Anna Butuk, aka Anna Patanova). We asked him to put in a complaint to anastasiaFRAUD. At first they did not acknowledge the complaint. Then with a little prodding (threat of exposure) they said they would investigate. After the initial transfer of information was made, they banned him from the site for alleged breach of terms of service (Reporting fraud to anyone other than AnastasiaFRAUD (even law enforcement) is a breach! We have obtained legal advice and there was no breach). Then they said you are not a customer we cannot deal with it. We kept a watch in Nikolaev and Anastasia were busy covering up the fraud.

There is no gentle way to put this, AnastasiaFRAUDs anti scam policy IS COMPLETE FRAUD. It is essentially meaningless. It is simply used as a device to limit liability and gain information so that they can deliberately cover up cases of fraud.

What you can do

  Because anastasiaFRAUD operate through the cutouts of shell companies based abroad, it thinks it has immunity from prosecution. The simple fact is that every message written by a professional dater to a customer in the USA is a case of wire fraud. AnastasiaFRAUD know that the majority of ladies on their site are professional daters.

Report it

            If you have been defrauded on Anastasia date, report it to the authorities!

If in the uk report to action fraud http://www.actionfraud.police.uk

Important to report to the BBB ( Better business bureau) because anastasiaFRAUD operates in NY

http://www.bbb.org/new-york-city/

Also: Internet crime complaint centre http://www.ic3.gov/complaint/default.aspx

Federal Trade commission

http://www.ftc.gov

make sure you report the scammer

http://www.delphifaq.com/cgi-bin/faq_addscammer.pl

The cover up

“Terms and conditions”

            The terms and conditions are specifically designed to prevent customers claiming compensation from anastasiaFRAUD.  This is an outrage.

Flooding forums with fake happy customers

            Anastasia spend three times more on protecting their image on the internet than they do on fraud investigation.

Employing shills to edit Wikipedia

            We have been engaged in trying to get an accurate Wikipedia entry on anastasiaFRAUD. The company employ marketing shills to undo every edit.

Fraudulent court action

From http://www.anastasiadatefraud.com/court-case/

“When Anastasia International (anastasiadate) found my site, did their customer service to contact me to trying to solve situation? No. On the contrary, they began a fraudulent trial, aimed to get the my website out of the internet.”

Anastasia and its sister companies (asian beauties etc) are a complete fraud.  They think they are beyond the law by claiming plausible deniability. They are guilty of wire fraud on an industrial scale

If you have been a victim, report it using the links above

I was very happy to see someone that has done some more investigation into the honesty and integrity of this Anastasia date. You were made sick by this findings, but honestly you laughed did you not about these ladies and their real intention and what they do? I have a lot of information on ladies of this site and what they do, it is on file and is not good. I laugh every time they think they are so smart. Yes there are prostitutes on this site, a lot of them. I almost find it hard to believe also, and I live in Kiev. It is easy for any man to look for them online in other areas. Just type in google translate, prostitutes (kiev) (lharkiv) (Odessa) and so on. There are many webpages with their profile on them, then look for the specific lady that is targeted, I would easily say that out of the ladies on the site Anastasia date the almost 2 out of every ten are in the se trades of one form or another, a lot of sex webcam workers here, this is not as bad as actual HIV spreaders but close morally.

The agency does not care in the least, they are shallow minded, they only see the profits now what they are doing is causing so much self inflicted damage tha they are really going to pay. There is investigation into this agency as well as many others for this prostitution, and human trafficking. It will take a couple of years but there should be enough finger pointing that the leaders or officers of these scam site shall be implicated and incarcerated , yes placed in prison. There s also a lot of taxes and other losses imposed by these ill repute entities that the governments of many countries shall be looking for. They can hide for sometime on the dark side, Russian mafia and so on, but the Russian mafia is powerless against the big Don also known as Uncle Sam (US) on the east coast of the United States. If uncle wants, uncle gets no matter who, where or when. They will be had!) So yes, keep digging up as much as you can, post photos of these ladies and share with the rest of the men and also go to Tony Bochene.com site and post this there, he worked for these agencies and has website against them, post there tell your story, education is one way to cut their throat by leaving them penniless!  Read over the rest of the reports here about this agency, they show photos of the type of ladies this agency love to make money on!))

John rt, keeping it real in the field! Kiev

Dear Sir,

After reading your post here in regards to the twenty ladies you chatted to, it would also be of great importance to post their, the ladies and their profiles here, plus the add from the site that you had found them on selling themselves as prostitutes! This is permanent on file here, this will cause great concern to some people and aid others in other possibilities of future reference. Print and keep their profiles and or letters, print and copy the website of prostitution and keep them, then make sure to post all information here, this will make possible for any man to read of this and also aid in preventing these type women from coming to the USA. It is easy to find if there is more posting of them, especially if you know their last name! Makes things easier for all, especially for future investigations and the real possibility of closing operations in question down!

Thank you,