The Pain of Manufactured Love: Inside the Global Romance Scam Industry

One day in November 2024, Kevin Robinson, who was recently separated at 54 and feeling very alone, clicked on a website called Sakuradate after it popped up on his Instagram feed. Sakuradate promised access to a bevy of “beautiful Asian women” who yearned to meet Americans like him. He was 6 feet tall, a Professional Golf Association member and a college basketball coach, but, at 280 pounds, was overweight with thinning hair, and felt spent. The last six years of his marriage had been passionless and painfully unhappy. That he and his wife had never had kids was one of Robinson’s great regrets. Now, alone and increasingly invisible to women, the chances of finding a partner who might bear him children seemed to dim by the day. 

When he saw a stunning young Filipina named Jazmin who said she wanted to chat on the Sakuradate portal, his first thought was, “Probably bullshit.” But, what if? Maybe he wasn’t so invisible. Within minutes, Robinson and Jazmin were best friends, their conversation a rapid back-and-forth. They talked about their dogs, the beauty of the Philippines, how Jazmin had always wanted to visit the United States. After a half dozen direct messages, Robinson was notified that he’d have to deposit $50 to continue the conversation for another 15 minutes. Barely conscious of what he was doing, he charged his debit card. They chatted more; soon he was prompted to add another $100. Jazmin sent him a handful of photos via the direct message function on the site: grainy, low-quality shots that he found disappointing. But then came a video of Jazmin eating ice cream in what he described as “the most seductive, adorable way imaginable.”

Of course, the photos and videos weren’t free. Nothing was. “You didn’t just ‘spend money’ at Sakuradate, you purchased credits,” Robinson told me. A single photo, for example, cost about $10 in credits. By the time he realized he’d spent $250 in less than an hour, Jazmin was typing, “It sure would be nice if we didn’t have to go through all these steps, and you didn’t have to pay all this money just to chat with me. Would you like to leave the website so we can talk for free?”

She explained that a friend of hers — who had married an American she met at Sakuradate — had taught her a system to get around the site’s filters that blacked-out phone numbers and email addresses. It involved using the site’s “letter” system to exchange contact info so as to communicate outside the platform. The letter function allowed senders to attach more photos or longer text, and cost about $5 in credits, roughly double the price of regular direct messages.

“Grab a pen and paper,” said Jazmin. 

A moment later, he received a strange video showing a hand writing the number “6.” Confused, Robinson sent her back a $5 letter, asking what he was looking at.

She explained that she’d share her phone number one digit at a time, and together they’d defeat the site’s censoring software. Soon the country code for the Philippines came through, then her phone number. But when they arrived at the penultimate digit, the videos stopped. “Okay,” Jazmin wrote, “you have it all.”

He looked at what he’d written down. “No, I’m still missing the last digit,” he replied, dinging another $5 on his debit card. 

“Oh, I thought I sent that to you already. Okay, I’m sending it now.”

He waited five minutes, then 10 minutes. His queries got no response. He looked at the clock on the wall. It was late. She probably fell asleep, he told himself. I’ll try again tomorrow.

The next morning, he logged back into Sakuradate. Jazmin was there, waiting — she seemed always to be online, as Robinson would learn. “I never got that last digit,” he wrote her. She admitted that perhaps she’d made a mistake on her side. “Do you want to try again?” Whatever was going through his head in that moment was “purely irrational,” as he described it, because he readily assented. “I don’t know how to explain it,” he told me. “Think about the game at the casino with the worst fucking odds, but you just try it anyway.” 

They tried again, and again Jazmin disappeared at the last digit. Robinson shouted a string of obscenities at his screen. 

Meanwhile, his inbox was exploding with messages from dozens of gorgeous young women. When he started looking at their profiles, he noticed that every one of the women claimed to have a master’s degree. In fact, all of the hundreds of women on Sakuradate had a master’s degree. What were the chances? 

Forty-eight hours after he first signed up, it became clear to Robinson that Sakuradate was a swindle. He kicked himself for falling for it. “Yet even after all this,” he told me, “I still didn’t want to believe Jazmin was an avatar.” 

It made him angry — angry that he was divorced, that he had moved back to his hometown, that all the indignities of age had finally arrived, crystallized in a sordid interlude with people who preyed on sadness, defeat, loneliness. But he wasn’t going to walk away. He wanted his money back and he wanted retribution. The bastards at Sakuradate had to pay. 

His chosen method for exacting vengeance was simple: He would scam the scammers. 

The international online dating industry is a globalized identity-fraud machine, with an identifiable business model appearing across dozens of countries. In Georgia, you have “date-writing” houses, in Kenya “Facebook love” factories, in India “matrimonial” hubs. In Ukraine and the Philippines — which appear to have cornered a sizable portion of the market for online dating that targets men in Western Europe and the U.S. — you have Ukrainedate, Okamour, j4l, Uadreams and Naomidate, among others. The scale is enormous. In the United States alone, the Federal Trade Commission reported $1.3 billion in romance-scam losses in 2022, and around $1.14 billion in 2023. But the FTC has stressed that this type of fraud is underreported by 80% to 90%. If that’s true, the real losses could easily land somewhere between $10 billion and $20 billion a year, and that’s just in the U.S. 

Investigating this industry is relatively new terrain. There has been little reporting by journalists, academia or law enforcement to explain the broad structure of the fraud. Nor is there anything in the public record that explores the key factor that permits international fraud on such a scale: place of incorporation. Companies like Sakuradate thrive only if they can host their organizations at an offshore location with laughable corporate oversight and zero enforcement. That location is Cyprus. Almost every one of the romance fraud websites that Robinson ended up investigating can be traced back to Cyprus-registered corporate entities. 

Sakuradate alone has claimed to have over 4 million members. When counted with scores of mirror sites and rebrands — alongside hundreds of smaller platforms in dozens of countries where regulators are uninterested in pursuing fraud against lazy, entitled Westerners — the total number of victims defrauded over the last decade probably totals in the millions. 

“Nobody is counting the losses,” Robinson wrote me in an email. “Nobody is keeping tabs on the labor force. Until now, no one has connected the corporate structure to what has been happening to men, all over the world, on the screen. What I saw when I went after Sakuradate wasn’t a one-off. I didn’t stumble into a single happenstance that will never repeat itself. What I found was the blueprint for the entire global romance fraud industry.”

The first thing Robinson did to prepare his attack on Sakuradate was set up an account with an app called FaceCheck.ID, which provides reverse-image searches to trace people’s digital footprints. One of the women at Sakuradate he tracked with FaceCheck was “Linra,” a 35-year-old allegedly living in Bangkok. She was “a tall, raven-haired beauty,” in Robinson’s words, her dating profile a mix of modeling shots and professional photos. “I like your smile,” Linra told him. “I heard the letters app on this website is fun — can we try it?” 

When he tracked her down via FaceCheck, accessing her Instagram, Threads and Facebook pages, the actual Linra — rather, the woman who had the same face as Linra — would prove pivotal in helping him understand how the Sakuradate fraud worked and how it exploited not just male clientele but also the women it purported to represent.  

According to her social media, the real Linra had moved to Bavaria and married a German national, a prosperous engineer, which meant she wasn’t sitting in Bangkok. By the winter of 2025, she was proudly sharing stories and pictures of her Bavaria-born baby boy. 

To better understand how the site functioned, Robinson decided to play a game of deception with the Sakuradate Linra. According to this version of the woman, she had never been married, never left Thailand, and — crucially — had no children. He reiterated to Linra, despite her pleading, that he was not interested in the letters option. “I’m only looking for women who already have children,” he wrote to her. “I can’t have kids of my own, and I’d like to raise one.”

Thirty seconds later a new photo popped into his Sakuradate feed. Not just any photo — it was the only one from the Instagram of the real Linra that hadn’t been already copied onto the dating site. The picture was of the woman post-partum, holding her newborn son, barely 6 weeks old.

“I thought you said you didn’t have children?” asked Robinson.

“I thought you wouldn’t like me if you knew,” came the instant reply. 

That’s when it hit him: There had to be a man running this profile. To Robinson, it seemed unlikely that a woman, any woman, would use a baby as bait, certainly not in this predatory way. What a scumbag, he thought. If he could talk to the real woman — the mother of the baby — and explain what was happening, she’d be horrified. And together perhaps they could throw a wrench into the gears of the Sakuradate machine. 

In addition to finding the social media accounts of the real Linra, he dug up her WhatsApp number. He left more than a dozen messages and voicemails but received no response. In a desperation move, he tracked down her engineer husband on a LinkedIn page and fired off a message to the man’s email at the company where he worked: “Your wife’s persona has been misappropriated in an online fraud. I’m investigating.” 

Tenacity had served him well as a competitive golfer. He’d played for almost 30 years, in dozens of tournaments across the U.S., and once, in 2005, finished third at the Hilton Head PGA Championship, his career best. “Competitive golf will turn you into a whimpering mass of nerves in an instant,” he told me. “I played it for the action, the exhilaration and for the self-discipline it demanded. Playing competitive golf is like solving the riddle of your intellect and your emotional responses — and I was drawn to figuring out Sakuradate like I was trying to shoot a low score on a really difficult course.”

The husband wrote back within the hour. He and his wife were aware and had taken legal steps to have her photos removed. Not ideal, Robinson thought, as he was hoping for a more substantive conversation. He wanted to know exactly how the man’s wife had been lured into Sakuradate. At the same time, he was now perilously close to impinging on someone else’s marriage. He backed off. 

A day later, his phone lit up with a FaceTime call from an exquisitely beautiful Thai woman – it was Linra, the woman herself. Her real name was Khajee¹.

Khajee was on edge, a bundle of nerves. She never imagined that something she’d participated in years ago would come back to haunt her this way. Her husband was beside himself, convinced, like Robinson, that some giant organization had stolen his innocent wife’s images to build a fake dating profile. That wasn’t the case at all, as Khajee explained. She’d signed up, willingly handing over photos and videos years earlier, long before she married or had a child.

In the summer of 2021, a woman named Maria, who said she worked for an agency in the Philippines called Tavia Group, messaged her on Instagram to ask if she wanted to make money modeling. Tavia Group advertised on social media as a talent agency, its website displaying photos and videos of the company’s executives with lucky young women treated to luxurious vacations and gourmet meals. Exactly the kind of thing that someone from a poor or modest background would find attractive.

All Khajee needed to do, explained Maria, was join an onboarding call with a few other women, watch an onboarding video and participate in group training sessions with up to a half dozen other recruited young women from across Asia. Then she’d provide 50 photos and 15 short video clips, which would be uploaded to an online platform. Western men, she was told, paid good money to look at photos and watch videos of lovely Thai women. For every click, she’d get a commission. It was easy, passive income.

At the time it felt legit, but after six months Khajee hadn’t made a dime. She lost interest, and told the company to take down her photos and videos. In response, Maria replied with a series of increasingly concerned DMs saying Tavia Group didn’t want to lose Khajee’s “cooperation,” as Maria put it, and claiming her profile was just beginning to get traction. In fact, Maria said, she was about to receive the first of her commission payouts. 

But first, Maria needed one more item from Khajee. “Take a photo of yourself holding a perfume bottle,” Maria wrote. “A man has sent it to you. Once you do, you’ll receive $50. Don’t worry — we’ll take care of the rest with Photoshop.” 

Robinson was aghast. Here was proof of one of the chief angles of romance fraud: Unsuspecting lonely guys who think they’ve finally caught a break and gained the affections of a beautiful woman are cajoled into spending $250 on a bottle of Givenchy perfume that would never be purchased.

Robinson and Khajee talked for 90 minutes, about life and dating (she offered sisterly advice that he “find a good Thai wife”) and about her agony over Sakuradate’s lies and chicanery. She showed him the frantic messages she’d sent to Maria once she realized her material was still being used. In Germany, Khajee had the family life and the financial security she’d dreamed of, and she was terrified of anything that might upset it. 

After the call, Robinson returned to his project of cracking the scam he now understood as a kind of virtual relationship strip club, where you paid for emotional attention with the vague prospect of sexual satisfaction down the line. The difference was that in a strip club, you understand that it’s all a fantasy stoked by alcohol and dim lighting. But at least the dancers are real. You can smell their perfumed flesh and feel their touch. 

With Sakuradate, you had nothing but fragments of a digital relationship that never existed. From Robinson’s perspective, the shame of having to resort to an online dating platform was bad enough. But chatting with and sending gifts to a woman who doesn’t exist, or even being performed by another man — it was all so humiliating.  

Robinson wondered how companies like Sakuradate found people to sit behind a keyboard and ghostwrite as vulturine avatars. “It’s bizarre when you think about it,” he told me, “because if the person writing the letters truly understands what they’re doing, it is a monstrous thing: to prey on loneliness and vulnerability, to take people’s money and leave them with nothing but shame, humiliation and financial hardship.” Only calloused souls could perform such work. 

On a spring day in 2025, on a lark, he found a Ukrainian job board online and spent seven hours sifting through job announcements, painstakingly copying and pasting the text into the translation app on his phone. He was about to give up when he found an announcement that offered good pay for those who wished to work from home for a “marriage agency” — the keywords he’d been searching for.

The details were vague. The job listing mentioned something about “using communication skills to converse with men all over the world.” Robinson sent a WhatsApp message to the person listed as the contact, expressing interest in the position. “The best bullshit name I could muster was Krista Kovalenko,” he told me. “Krista” was supposed to be a Ukrainian American single mom living in Poland.

“Hello!” he wrote as Krista, in Google-translated Ukrainian. “Thank you for the info — it all sounds very interesting! I think it would be ideal for me, since I’m currently at home with a young child and looking for remote work.” Krista added, “What is the name of the site used for correspondence? I’m just curious and want to explore the interface and communication style a little.”

A woman who identified herself only as Oleksandra responded, saying she was employed with a company called the Phoenix Agency, based in Ukraine. The site he’d be ghostwriting for, via Phoenix, was called Prime Dating. 

Between the red flags about international dating sites he’d seen in his investigations so far and the mass of sites advertised on social media, Robinson thought he had documented most of the big names in the business. But Prime Dating was new on his radar. The site was slick and polished, much more so than Sakuradate, Ukrainedate or the like. The landing page, in addition to showcasing profiles of large-breasted Eastern European blonds, featured videos of women who appeared to be talking to men, which gave the casual viewer the impression that it was easy to open an account and converse instantaneously with the ladies. Of course, were he to get the job from Oleksandra, it would be Robinson they’d be talking to. 

Oleksandra followed up with a more thorough description of the required tasks:

I’ll tell you more about the vacancy. You will be working on the Prime site, writing on behalf of a model. You’ll have all her data — photos, videos, etc. You will remain completely anonymous.

The site contains 18+ content. Both models and men can send anything they want. 

You’ll be assigned 5+ profiles, maybe 7 or 10. You’ll need to respond quickly in chats.

There’s an integrated translator on the site, so knowledge of English is not required.

Using ChatGPT is strictly forbidden. There are penalties for this.

If you understand everything, send a “+” and we’ll continue.

Delighted, Robinson clicked the “+” button on his phone’s keyboard “in world record time” and received another tutorial, this one detailing how he was to be paid: “Salary is paid as wages + an advance. The advance is your first payment, available after working for one week.” 

Then Oleksandra shared the training process: 

You’ll get a link to a Telegram bot that includes 6 blocks of video lessons and exercises. You study this independently.

After that, you’ll have a mandatory video call with an admin, who will share their screen and show you how to work on the site.

Training takes 2–3 days, possibly less depending on how quickly you learn and absorb information.

If everything is clear, we’ll move on to the test assignment.

Robinson, stunned, sat in his office in North Carolina. In one fell swoop, he had hacked his way past the firewalls of the romance fraudsters and now was inside.

He was directed to write creative and engaging messages in the woman’s voice, answering personal questions about her, even though he knew nothing about her life. It was telling that all use of ChatGPT was banned. People, not AI, were needed to craft natural, intentional, emotionally compelling letters. For the fraud to be convincing, human-style writing would better manipulate men into prolonged conversations and financial engagement. Worst of all, it was made clear that his salary depended on keeping men talking.

“You’re paid weekly based on activity, and bonuses are tied to performance (e.g. how many letters or chats you handle),” wrote Oleksandra. The agencies obviously didn’t want fast resolutions, but long chains of messages to generate income — the longer the more lucrative. Before Robinson had time to dwell on what he described as “the sheer inhumanity of all this,” Oleksandra sent him a series of internal documents that included the Phoenix agency’s human resources worksheet and a detailed onboarding program. The documents confirmed in contractual detail that the women on the Prime dating platform are never the ones writing to men. Agency-hired ghostwriters do 100% of the correspondence. The documents laid out other key facets of the fraud he would now perpetrate. They described:

• emotive tones to use in writing
• manipulation strategies for how to bait men into writing more
• punishments for “non-engaging letters”
• the quota system, which included running a minimum of seven to 10 “women’s” profiles at one time
• how ghostwriters can end up handling dozens of models simultaneously
• how responses are farmed out to whichever worker is on shift, and how the same models may be represented by multiple ghostwriters, i.e., the men are talking to a team, not a person.

Robinson’s immersion in this clinical language of exploitation of a basic human need — “as though these people were discussing next week’s shipments at a fucking box factory” — left him disturbed and depressed. He hadn’t the heart to go further with his investigation. Ghostwriting to target his own demographic was a sickening prospect. 

In April 2025, some five months after he first encountered her avatar, Jazmin was back in Robinson’s life. “Until then, she had been little more than a ghost, a whisper, a sublimely beautiful Filipina girl next door,” he wrote me in an email, “the object of my tortured affection, and the woman who started me down this rabbit hole.” He found her not on Sakuradate, but buried in someone else’s old Facebook photos, tagged from before COVID. 

Jazmin’s real name was Pearl². She was living in Cebu, in the Philippines, and was recently married with her first child on the way. He messaged her, and, to his surprise, she replied immediately. “She knew exactly why I was reaching out.” 

Pearl had been recruited, like Khajee, by a woman at the Tavia Group, who described a fantastic opportunity that Pearl found difficult to understand. The woman, who said her name was Olya, explained that her photos and videos would be uploaded to a site called LiluClub. She described a series of “mirror” sites tied to LiluClub — which, unbeknownst to Pearl, included Sakuradate — that would attract users and create passive income via commission. But Olya was vague as to how that money would be paid out. 

One of Olya’s colleagues, Trixie, then reached out to Pearl and elaborated on what would be required for success in this endeavor. It was better to send videos and photos at least once a week, but refreshing the content even more often was encouraged, in order to keep her profile stocked with new attractions.

Unlike Khajee, Pearl surmised that something was not right with this “opportunity,” concluding it was beneath her dignity. She asked to have her involvement terminated — but came up against the same problem that Khajee had. Even after repeated requests to have her photos taken down, they stayed in place, Pearl’s Jazmin doppelganger continuing to work magic on men signed up at Sakuradate. 

Pearl was dumbfounded and horrified. She started bombarding Robinson with evidence to be used against Tavia Group in whatever way he could: screenshots of group training sessions, messages about how profiles were monetized, promises of direct deposits once her profile went live and text chains in which she’d demanded that her material be erased from the various mirror sites, including Sakuradate. 

She was outraged that Robinson had been defrauded in her name. She felt used. With the recent engagement to her fiancé, the urgency to clear the slate was personal. She needed her digital double life deleted before she had to explain to him why her false shadow self was still “dating” men across the planet.

Hearing Pearl’s story set Robinson into a fit of rage. “Maybe my patience had finally worn out,” he told me. “Maybe I just needed a break from the investigative paranoia that had consumed me for months.” He was still logging in to Sakuradate to gather information, pinged daily with dozens of listings of those devastatingly attractive, highly educated young Asian women — “exactly the kind of women who, in real life, wouldn’t give a second look at my 54-year-old mug. So, I started taunting whoever the hell was behind the pings.”

Robinson went to the trouble of looking up the most offensive thing he could say to a Filipino man in Tagalog: Putang Ina mo, which translates loosely as “Your mother is a prostitute” and implies that the person being addressed is male. But this particular ghostwriter stuck to the script, unfazed, replying: “What are you talking about? Can’t you see I’m female?”

He tried again, telling another ghostwriter that impersonating a woman was illegal and Interpol would lock him up, adding “Magiging girlfriend ka ng isang malaking lalaki sa kulungan,” which translates to “You will be a big guy’s girlfriend in jail.” There was no response. 

“Bro,” Robinson wrote one day in a state of fury and exasperation to yet another ghostwriter, “what would your family think if they knew you spent your days pretending to be a young woman and having romantic conversations with men thousands of miles away?”

Finally, the ghostwriter snapped at him. “Aren’t you gay too?” 

Robinson laughed — only a dude would respond with such a line. 

Now he began by firing off emails to Sakuradate’s so-called “resolution manager,” who had what Robinson described as “the ridiculously horseshit made-up name” of Sandy. At first, he was polite with Sandy. There were several fraudulent profiles she might want to look at, he told her. He provided screenshots, various pieces of evidence.

He received a prompt and polite response:

In recognition of your time, your honesty, and your experience — and as a gesture of goodwill — I would like to offer you 5,000 complimentary credits. If you would like to accept this offer, just let me know and I’ll make sure the credits are added to your account right away.
Warm regards,
Sandy
Dispute Resolution Manager

Five-thousand credits? He had proven beyond any reasonable doubt that Sakuradate was serving up fraudulent profiles on what is perhaps one of the world’s most heavily advertised dating sites. And the company’s answer was to offer him play money. “What in the actual fuck was I supposed to do with 5,000 more credits — besides burn through them finding even more fraudulent profiles?” 

He asked Sandy that question, phrasing it gently, and concluded his note with a simple demand: He wanted his money back. His swagger then appeared to push matters too far. Another email landed in his inbox. It was a reprimand, and also a veiled threat:

We have identified that you have been systematically targeting SakuraDate members, actively searching for their external social media accounts, and attempting to contact them, their friends, and relatives outside of the platform. These actions were not only unwanted but described by several members as disturbing and a clear breach of trust. Your behavior has caused genuine discomfort among members who did not share any private contact information with you.

A fraudulent platform pretending its fake women had feelings — this was corporate gaslighting of the highest order. 

In his pursuit of Sakuradate, Robinson had reached out to a veteran online matchmaker named Charlie Morton, who ran a subreddit called Mail Order Bride Facts. He wanted advice from Morton about how to investigate the romance fraudsters. “Seriously, you should be careful,” Morton told him, noting that most of these fake dating sites are incorporated in Cyprus — a hotbed of businesses tied to murderous Russian crime syndicates. “A lot of these scammers are connected to the Russian mob.” 

Reading Sandy’s email with this warning in mind, Robinson’s pulse quickened. But he just didn’t care anymore. “I was going to blow them up.” He pummeled Sandy with evidence of one Sakuradate fraud after another. He explained that literally every woman listed on the site who he could identify and find in the real world either didn’t know Sakuradate existed or had been recruited long ago only to later learn, as in the cases of Khajee and Pearl, that their photos and videos were being used to cheat men.

Sandy was unmoved. Robinson escalated. He told Sandy his niece worked for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, that he had learned Sandy’s real identity and also that of the actual owner of Sakuradate through its incorporation filings in Cyprus — none of which was true. Somehow this absurd bluff caused enough trouble at the company that Sandy relented. Within a week, she refunded every cent of the money he’d spent at Sakuradate. The total refund came to well over $2,000.

Strangely, Robinson felt no sense of triumph, nothing like vindication. After the months he’d spent in pursuit of this moment — the realization of vengeance, the demarcation of justice — his main emotion was one of shame. The more he thought about it, the more he realized he was part of the problem. Sakuradate wouldn’t exist without men like him, willing to pay for access to women, most of them young, many in difficult conditions, some in desperate straits, financial and personal. What bothered him most was that he was the unwitting agent of victimization of Khajee and Pearl. This feeling of complicity, of profound guilt, haunts Robinson. The irony is not lost on him that he still corresponds with both women, whom he considers friends. One of them, Pearl, recently became pregnant and sent him a photo of her swelling belly.

1. Note: Her name has been changed to protect her identity, though Linra is the actual name used by Sakuradate to impersonate her. ↩︎
2. Again, her name has been changed to protect her identity. ↩︎