I think we have all heard the horror stories about online dating/marriage scams, with Ukraine being a fairly prevalent name around the topic. But I'm not here to talk about those scams since there are more than enough resources for you to learn what you need to know to stay safe with the online dating thing.
Instead I'm going to shed some light on a local dating scam that nobody really hears or knows about - not even most Ukrainians!
If you don't know already, I am a foreigner who has lived in Ukraine for a while. If you've read one of my channels here you would also understand that I absolutely love ripping into a scam and exposing it for what it is. I have also recently started getting into the dating scene here. Put it all together and this makes the perfect recipe for a head-on collision!
Pretty quickly I was targeted by a professional dater. Yes! Someone who dates for money. Not that you would realize it if you weren't being wary.
So, I walked into a scam - I didn't know it beforehand but I did quickly come to understand what was going on, and here we go with all the gory details....
How it works
There are programs running here that offer a money back deal of a percentage of the price of the bill at some fairly expensive and exclusive restaurants. All good so far, I have seen and used similar programs elsewhere in the world and it is great to have an amazing meal out while saving some money. However in this case it is not taken off the price of the bill.
This scam is run by one or more organizations who receive a good percentage of the bill amount for attracting business to their affiliate restaurants. While my research has found only one such publicly searchable campaign, I could also only find one of the restaurants I have dined at listed by them, and I am assuming there would be more of them on Telegram.
These organizations incentivize young and beautiful women to date out-of-towners by offering them a fairly decent percentage of the bill - the publicly searchable site I could find listed 20-25% depending on some factors, but I have heard of up to 30% too. They also promote doing this almost as a job by offering further incentives for regularity of visits.
This is also a networking/pyramid scheme - the organization offers a bonus for direct referrals! And why not? It is in their best interests to have more people making them what is basically a passive income.
So these women find foreign guys on dating sites, take them to one of these affiliate restaurants, and (usually) being unaware of it happening he happily pays the bill, not realizing she is pocketing a decent chunk of what he just paid. He just thinks he is dating a lovely woman and having a great time doing it when as a matter of fact she is actually working.
How to spot it happening
From my experience the woman has to speak directly to the staff sometime during the meal (before the bill arrives) to give them her code or whatever it is. So most likely at some point during the date she WILL have to go to the bathroom, and on the way to or from she will speak to a member of staff briefly. Hopefully you are in a fairly open restaurant where you can see this happening.
This isn't really a huge tell by itself, but when it happens over multiple dates at every restaurant, it becomes a bit more of a consistent sign.
But even then, this alone is still not a reliable way to determine you are being scammed.
Another indicator is that she will always organize the dates with a restaurant already in mind. This could almost be considered a good thing if you were a complete stranger here since they know their way around but you don't etc. But understand it is 100% part of the scam because they don't want to waste their time taking you to a restaurant they won't get paid for visiting.
Be attentive to the frequency with which she messages you, and how quickly she responds if you have messaged them. Many of these professional daters are not just targeting one guy at a time, so they will be busy on other dates too, and will seem fairly disconnected until they feel it is time to meet you again at which point they will want to talk to you.
The final thing to watch out for - women who make the first move!
Not a huge deal in western countries right? And it feels almost sexist to even think it from a typical western cultural background, but it is true here. Most of the time if a woman approaches you first on a dating app it is because she wants something from you. I'm not saying 100% of them are like this, but if it happens keep your wits about you no matter how nice she seems!
How to avoid it
Like I said above, always be wary of women here who approach you first on dating apps. Don't rush into a date with them - talk to them online for a while first. Try to learn something about them, something real, not superficial. If they seem to be all just business, stay away.
But if you are like me you are going to ignore this advice - I don't like waiting, I want to get straight to it because I am better at determining someone's intentions that way.
If you do decide to go on a date with someone, always choose the restaurant yourself. Obviously you can't always know in advance if the place you choose is an affiliate of one of these scams or not, but if you choose a place and she tries to talk you into a different place instead, well, you know what is happening there.
Also your chance of picking multiple scam affiliated restaurants in a row is significantly small, especially if you do your research first. These restaurants mostly seem to be upper class establishments with slow business - try to pick maybe an upper-middle class restaurant that sees a lot more business.
Be attentive to the things your date says! Yes, yes, you should always be listening on a date, but in this case it is even more important.
True professional daters rarely like to talk about work (since you are her work), they may just give you some bare detail and try to move on. If she says an industry you know something about, stay on the topic and you will soon learn how little she may know about it.
Also keep in mind the things she has said on her dating profile that may not match what she says. Maybe she says it is her birthday next week, but her star sign on her dating profile puts her birthday a few months away - this is her fishing for an extravagant night out, or a gift, or maybe even both! Or maybe her profile says she has an advanced education but knows very little of the subject she supposedly studied, or just appears to be not so well educated. These tells can help you understand what you are dealing with.
If you found them through a dating site that gives details of when someone was last online, and things seem to be getting serious, keep an eye on it! It may tip you off to the fact that she isn't so serious about you because she is still on the site multiple times a week.
If you are picking up the signs of a professional dater, I recommend you do something about it. Do some research online or read a book about the typical tells of a liar. Then when you are talking to her focus the conversation on something that doesn't quite match in her story, and watch for those tells in her body language. Body language rarely ever lies!
Finally, the absolute best way to avoid these women is to avoid the dating apps they use to target men. Instead just go out to some meetup or language club (there are so many here, at least in Kyiv, that you could spend a month and still not visit them all), and meet some real women in a real situation. You will soon discover the difference between someone who is using you for money, and a real Ukrainian woman.
I'd just like to close by saying that yes, while this article is specifically about female professional daters, please understand I'm not trying to be sexist. For all I know there may be male professional daters out there too, but the one public-facing dating scam campaign I can find specifically targets women, and it is usually the foreign men who are here trying to date anyway. Please understand that there are some amazing real women here too - if there wasn't I would just give up on the dating scene altogether and go back to working too many hours a week.
Finally I must give some credit (and condolences) where it is due. I didn't figure this scam out completely by myself.
I already had a tug in the back of my brain that things were not exactly as they seemed, but they were confirmed by a friend here who was telling me the tale of his ex-girlfriend, who was dating foreign men for money behind his back.
So thanks to him we can crack this scam wide open and hopefully the knowledge will become a bit more widespread.
