Better use X-Treme tape. Have you seen this stuff? Silicone compound based tape, 600 psi tensile strength, self-fusing forming air-tight and water-tight seal, sticks to anything, withstands temperatures up to 500 F. Shuttle crew shouldn't leave home without it.
The idea that they are "forced to prostitution" is what makes it so easy to scam the soft-hearted/soft-headed westerners. If you are Thai and live here like me you know better. No decent Thai girl would ever prostitute no matter the circumstances. They can always make an honest living, simple for sure, but honest. But the ones without any morality see a new cell phone or motorcycle and will prostitute to get it. When lunch at a restaurant costs 30 baht (75 cents), rent of a studio apartment costs 2,000 baht ($50 per) month, making only 300 baht ($7.50) per day as a hair stylist is enough. But when she wants that new Nokia-MP3-video-color-does-everything cell phone that costs 18,000 baht ($450) and she has no morals she will prostitute. Again, that is a very small fraction of Thai ladies, but the ones that are most visible to westerners.
Actually, no sympathies for anybody. Both are using the other in the sleaziest of ways.
My understanding is that the marriage broker can be fined $20,000 per violation. I'm not a U.S. citizen and I no longer reside in the U.S. So I thought about just ignoring the whole thing. However, I set up my banking in the U.S. (I lived there when I started the site). So if they want to make trouble they could take my bank account. I could always keep a minimum balance to reduce my risk. But it is a bit of trouble and expense to set up banking over here, higer fees, etc. And of course they could also deny me a visa to ever visit the U.S. again (family and friends there). So easiest thing for me is just to stop serving U.S. customers.
I didn't know about the TRO. I decided to stop serving U.S. residents and forgot about it. Plenty of European and Australian customers.
Well that is the issue, isn't it? How do you know anything on the internet is real or a scam? I go through a process to screen the ladies. It is pretty easy for me to tell if they are of questionable character, even the "fringe" ones (which is a whole other story). But how can my first time visitors judge if the girls I have taken to time to screen are genuine? I wish I could offer some way for my visitors to satisfy themselves that the girls are genuine. It would help me make a lot more matches. Any suggestions? I'm serious. I would really like be able to give my visitors some confidence.
Another thing. I notice that many of the men who make contact with ladies through my site make very little effort. They send one email, and don't even include a photo. And if they don't get an answer right away they forget it. They don't bother trying to call, even though I provide the lady's phone number. Or write a letter since I also provide her mailing address. So what is up with that? Do they just figure it was a fake profile and move on? Most Thai ladies don't own a computer. They must go to an internet shop to check email, takes time. They probably need some help translating, and maybe help from a friend to reply to an email. It's a big deal for them. How about a little effort from the guys. Make a call (use Skype or something to keep the cost down). You know, it is easy pickings for the guys that make an effort. They practically have their pick of a dozen or more very pretty and sweet girls.
Yes, that is the standard scam. And the really dumb part is that many of those guys that get scammed know the girl is a prostitute (bar girl, go-go-dancer, hostess, etc., any girl who works at a bar in Thailand is a prostitute). Once they get some guy to fall for them they extort him by saying they need money to "stop work", which means stop prostituting at the bar.
The truth is that most of the guys that get into this problem know there is something questionable about the girl's background, either because they took her out of a bar, or because there have been obvious indications from early on. Yet they go on with it. And if they are foolish enough to marry one and get her to the U.S. then they really get taken. I personally know one fool who did exactly this, and just like Anonymous Coward said, the girl claimed abuse and had him thrown in jail within 6 months of getting to the U.S.
The vast majority of Thai girls are conservative, polite and honest. They don't go to bars or even drink. They don't dress sexy. They don't speak English very well. So the average western guy will never meet them because he goes to out partying to the bars when he visits Thailand. The only people in the bars are prostitutes and their customers, not regular girls.
It's a scam because these girls claim they need it for some false emergency, the same false emergency for which they collected money from a dozen other guys. That's a scam, for sure.
And I don't mean that you should "be protected" from it. Everyone should be protecting themselves from it...by using their own brain.
Regarding item 2, it must also be translated to the woman's native language and then provided to her. The burden of doing all this is ridiculous. So I stopped serving U.S. residents. I only serve European and Australian clients now.
Which is fine since Thai ladies and Eurpoean men really like each other. Norwegians and Thais are really having a love affair these days. After the king of Norway came to thank Thai people for helping Norwegian tourists following the tsunami the number of Thai ladies marrying Norwegian men has jumped.
Let me offer my view on this, the view of the owner of an international matchmaking site http://www.asiansweetheart.net/. I introduce Thai ladies to western men through my website. I have a small membership mostly because it is so much work to recruit good ladies. On the other hand, scammers are very active. In fact, one of the biggest scams in Thailand is the army of bar girls (that's what prostitutes are called here) that spend the afternoons sending love spam to all their previous customers after they return to the west after their vacations in the Land of Smiles. Those love spammers are often very organized, keeping careful notes on which guy they asked for how much money for whatever emergency (mother sick, motorcycle broken, buffalo died, etc., etc.). They also have plenty of profiles posted on the free dating sites. So although the profiles are not really fake, their sole purpose is scamming. And they are quite successful, receiving loads of cash each month from soft-hearted suckers in the west.
The problem here in Thailand is not that most Thai girls are bad. It is that most are so nice, and shy, and not very open about showing their photo on the internet, or too shy to actually make contact with a foreigner even if they really want to. The scammers are a small but aggressive and active fraction of the population. So the scammers end up being a large fraction of the Thai ladies meet-able online.
The typical westerner vacationing in Thailand cannot easily tell the difference from a nice local girl and a scammer. But I can spot them instantly as can every other Thai person.
But even without local knowledge the average foreigner can just use their head a little. When that sweet little thing you met online starts asking for money, or plane tickets, or other big ticket items then it is pretty obvious you are being scammed, isn't it? What's the point of yet more legislation?
But we've been doing adult stem cell therapy to treat previously untreatable heart desease in Thailand for a couple of years already. It isn't approved yet in the U.S. so people come here to do it, including some famous people (sort of), like Don Ho (story http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/12/23/D8ELPR3G8 .html)
I too had bad experiences with PayPal. They froze my account when I logged in from Thailand (I didn't know I wasn't supposed to do that) and their customer service people were nasty. I had to use a backdoor to some insider troubleshooter to get it fixed (lucky I found that guy). But I think they suck less since eBay bought them. At least they opened up more countries so now I can login from Thailand without my account getting frozen. I haven't had to call customer service so I don't know if that is any better.
Still I would like an alternative with a low fee structure like PayPal. So if Goog did that I would try it.
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Better use X-Treme tape. Have you seen this stuff? Silicone compound based tape, 600 psi tensile strength, self-fusing forming air-tight and water-tight seal, sticks to anything, withstands temperatures up to 500 F. Shuttle crew shouldn't leave home without it.
The idea that they are "forced to prostitution" is what makes it so easy to scam the soft-hearted/soft-headed westerners. If you are Thai and live here like me you know better. No decent Thai girl would ever prostitute no matter the circumstances. They can always make an honest living, simple for sure, but honest. But the ones without any morality see a new cell phone or motorcycle and will prostitute to get it. When lunch at a restaurant costs 30 baht (75 cents), rent of a studio apartment costs 2,000 baht ($50 per) month, making only 300 baht ($7.50) per day as a hair stylist is enough. But when she wants that new Nokia-MP3-video-color-does-everything cell phone that costs 18,000 baht ($450) and she has no morals she will prostitute. Again, that is a very small fraction of Thai ladies, but the ones that are most visible to westerners. Actually, no sympathies for anybody. Both are using the other in the sleaziest of ways.
I didn't know about the TRO. I decided to stop serving U.S. residents and forgot about it. Plenty of European and Australian customers.
Another thing. I notice that many of the men who make contact with ladies through my site make very little effort. They send one email, and don't even include a photo. And if they don't get an answer right away they forget it. They don't bother trying to call, even though I provide the lady's phone number. Or write a letter since I also provide her mailing address. So what is up with that? Do they just figure it was a fake profile and move on? Most Thai ladies don't own a computer. They must go to an internet shop to check email, takes time. They probably need some help translating, and maybe help from a friend to reply to an email. It's a big deal for them. How about a little effort from the guys. Make a call (use Skype or something to keep the cost down). You know, it is easy pickings for the guys that make an effort. They practically have their pick of a dozen or more very pretty and sweet girls.
Yes, that is the standard scam. And the really dumb part is that many of those guys that get scammed know the girl is a prostitute (bar girl, go-go-dancer, hostess, etc., any girl who works at a bar in Thailand is a prostitute). Once they get some guy to fall for them they extort him by saying they need money to "stop work", which means stop prostituting at the bar. The truth is that most of the guys that get into this problem know there is something questionable about the girl's background, either because they took her out of a bar, or because there have been obvious indications from early on. Yet they go on with it. And if they are foolish enough to marry one and get her to the U.S. then they really get taken. I personally know one fool who did exactly this, and just like Anonymous Coward said, the girl claimed abuse and had him thrown in jail within 6 months of getting to the U.S. The vast majority of Thai girls are conservative, polite and honest. They don't go to bars or even drink. They don't dress sexy. They don't speak English very well. So the average western guy will never meet them because he goes to out partying to the bars when he visits Thailand. The only people in the bars are prostitutes and their customers, not regular girls.
It's a scam because these girls claim they need it for some false emergency, the same false emergency for which they collected money from a dozen other guys. That's a scam, for sure. And I don't mean that you should "be protected" from it. Everyone should be protecting themselves from it...by using their own brain.
Regarding item 2, it must also be translated to the woman's native language and then provided to her. The burden of doing all this is ridiculous. So I stopped serving U.S. residents. I only serve European and Australian clients now. Which is fine since Thai ladies and Eurpoean men really like each other. Norwegians and Thais are really having a love affair these days. After the king of Norway came to thank Thai people for helping Norwegian tourists following the tsunami the number of Thai ladies marrying Norwegian men has jumped.
The problem here in Thailand is not that most Thai girls are bad. It is that most are so nice, and shy, and not very open about showing their photo on the internet, or too shy to actually make contact with a foreigner even if they really want to. The scammers are a small but aggressive and active fraction of the population. So the scammers end up being a large fraction of the Thai ladies meet-able online.
The typical westerner vacationing in Thailand cannot easily tell the difference from a nice local girl and a scammer. But I can spot them instantly as can every other Thai person.
But even without local knowledge the average foreigner can just use their head a little. When that sweet little thing you met online starts asking for money, or plane tickets, or other big ticket items then it is pretty obvious you are being scammed, isn't it? What's the point of yet more legislation?
But we've been doing adult stem cell therapy to treat previously untreatable heart desease in Thailand for a couple of years already. It isn't approved yet in the U.S. so people come here to do it, including some famous people (sort of), like Don Ho (story http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/12/23/D8ELPR3G8 .html)
Still I would like an alternative with a low fee structure like PayPal. So if Goog did that I would try it.