Will sending flowers to Russia with a photo taken upon delivery help to weed out a dating scammer?

Many flower delivery services in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union now offer the option of taking a picture upon delivery and sending it back to you. Will this help to check out the girl you are corresponding with and make sure she is not a scammer?

Well, yes and no. It will certainly help to check whether the girl has given you her correct name & address, and whether the picture the delivery man takes matches that of the woman you are corresponding with. Sending flowers will help to verify these very basic things – or, in other words, to weed out a bad scammer. If the “woman” you are writing to is actually a guy hiding behind a pretty photo, you will get him. You will also get a woman scammer who uses somebody else’s photo or gives out a bogus address. However, the flower delivery check is rather useless against a good scammer.

A good scammer is a woman who will use her own picture, give out her real address, and pretend in every possible way to be sincerely interested in the correspondence / relationship. She will gladly receive your flowers and let the delivery person take a picture of her holding the bouquet with a happy smile on her face. She knows that the whole thing is actually helping her: as soon as you get the photo, you will think, “Hey, she’s for real!”

The only way to weed out a good scammer like this is to learn all you can about dating scams and read very carefully the woman’s letters, watching out for warning signs. What are those signs? We will talk about that in my next posts.