Blacklist - AGENCIES

Here we will be listing all agencies that we believe to be a problem or tend to have a high rate of scams related to them. If you have problems with an agency that you believe purposely scammed you or ignore your complaints and requests for help, let us know. You will have to give us all of the inforamtion and allow us to filter complaints as necessary.

ADDED: May 25th 2002

Well it seems Absolute Agency are never going to take any notice of our e-mails so we have finally decided they deserve a place on our 'Agencies Blacklist'

Below is the latest piece of evidence that they really do not care how many scammers are on their books. They used to have a well known scammer on their front page but after getting a lot of flak from us and many others they finally removed her...only after she had the wonderful opportunity to scam many more poor guys out of large amounts of money by using the credibility Absolute gave her by using her as their front page model.

And so we now have this :


This banner is one of Absolutes and is part of their Link Exchange program. The woman pictured is none other than Katya Strelkova, sometimes also known as Elena Ivanova, see http://www.antiscam.net/data/blacklist_07.htm
for details. Of course we have contacted Absolute but as yet...and not unexpected, there has been no response.

We've said it before and we'll say it again. Absolute Agency are either totally incompetent or a complete scam outfit. In either case..... do you really think it's worth risking your money on an agency with such a reputation?

atb
Saul
saul@antiscam.net

ADDED: August 23, 2001
Updated: January 8, 2002

We would like your help!

We have received a complaint that Ukraine Tours may be one big scam but we need to gather more information. Our initial report has a man trying to visit the physical address of a ladies he was writing to in Odessa. Ladies supplied and whom he was corresponding with him through www.ukrainetours.com. While trying to visit he found that two women did not live where they say they do and at one of the addresses the young man told the visitor that he was paid $10 a month for use of his address.

For now we warn caution with the agency itself as it has also been suggested, with further investigation, that the individual(s) running this agency also ran a previous agency that dissappeared after it was discovered to be a scam (Victoria Tours).

We need to verify this information with others. If you have had a bad experience and feel this report is valid and needs to be escalated to a Higher Priority Warning and email to other boards please let us know immediately.

2nd Complaint registered: January 8, 2002

Now at www.ukrainestar.com

Dear Sir, I want to thank you for having your site and for reporting scams and potential scams. I have a complaint to register against Ukrainian Tours. I met Violetta "Nikita" Lyevko via kiss.com, her address was Nikita_kiev@yahoo.com. She said that she was using Ukrainian Tours (ukrainestar.com) as her agency. For the first two months she paid for the cost of the correspondence, after that I paid. It was only $20 a month, so I am grateful that I wasn't taken in for more. Nikita, if she does exsist, only asked me for money once, $45 dollars for vitamins. In her letters she sometimes would answer my questions, sometimes not. She would ask the same question more than once (i.e., Do I like the winter?). She gave me her address as 17 Zakrevskogo Street, apt.279, Kiev. I sent her a pakage to this address. She said that she never received it. Probably went to someone who was quite surprised to receive a package from America. She recently requested that we meet in Paris for our first meeting. Boy, am I glad that I found your site. I would have felt like such a big fool, as opposed to feeling like a little fool now. Live and learn.

Thanks again. Nicholas..Bblyn5@

3rd Complaint registered: January 8, 2002

After reading your site and reviewing your blacklists, I have this to add about Ukrainian Tours. I responded to a "Marina" on "One and Only". After several letters, she asked for assistance in covering the correspondence costs and referred me to her agency. I deposited some money into the account. After several weeks, the types of letters changed. At first I attributed it to the different interpreters. Then the letters were as if I was receiving them from entirely different people. When confronted with these questions, the questions were not addressed. I asked for flowers to be delivered on her birthday and to have pictures taken. I never received the pictures and never heard anything else. Another warning sign that was present was that they could or would not deliver flowers to another women in Odessa who was using a different agency from the funds that I had in my account at their agency.

Morris

ADDED: December 2, 2001

Complaint:
Steve,
I used the family plus agency to go to yekaterinburg to meet tatiana. They had contacted me from my ad on friendfinders.com. Svetlana had used Tatiana to correspond with me. Svetlana's sister natash zaykova, speaks Fluent english and does most of the letter writing for the girls the Agency books. The agency makes all girls sign a "contract" that Guarantees any money the girls receive from men they correspond with will go to the agency until the girls marry.

I had paid for"correspndence and translations" to the sum of $80.00 a month for six Months before my trip. I sent money to "tatiana" to help her send her Son on a summer vacation ($280.00). I received a nice thank you from Tatiana describing how much fun her son had on his trip. I discovered Later that tatiana never wrote that reply nor many of the letters. When I arrived in yekaterinburg the agency controlled our time together and Provided translators that worked for the agency. The pressure was on to Huryy and get married. We did. The agency did all the paperwork and Plannibg and for a mere $4,500.00 (included the wedding ring/engagementRing) we were married.

I returned to the usa and submitted the spousal Visa paperwork. After six months the visa is approved and my wife decides not to come to the usa. Svetlana hears of this and offers her Services (she claims to be a lawyer and a psychologist). That is how she became involved. Since the divorce fiasco my ex-wife and I communicated with an interpreter here in the us and we discovered the true extent of Svetlan's manipulations. Svetlana had my ex-wife write letters or sign letters she thought contained information she was trying to communicate To me. When I read her some of the letters I had received (the Translator in the usa translated the letters for tatiana) she was shocked to learn of the deception by the family plus agency. Svetlana Deceived tatiana by telling tatiana i refused to pay anything to her for Our divorce. Tatiana had requested $500.00 to help her get along. Svetlana took the $9420.00 (the total amount i paid to have svetlana Handle the divorce and pay tatiana for one year of living expenses). Tatiana never received a penny! The last e-mail address i had for the family+ was familyplus@mail.ur.ru but does not work anymore.

I am attaching an e-mail from svetlana acknowledging receipt of the $7,420.00, the final payment. If I can provide any more information I will gladly do so.

RICHARD O.

From: "Family+" <familyplus@mail.ur.ru>
To: "RICHARD"
Subject: Re: SVETLANA
Date: Thursday, September 06, 2001 11:34 PM

Dear Richard,

We did safely get your money and the divorce certificate should be issued on the 10th of September. I will send it to you shortly after that.

Sincerely and with best wishes, Svetlana

A note from Steve:
Their web site was at www.familyplus.ru then they disabled the forwarding and the way to get to it now is through their IP address of http://212.23.68.242/. Please don't even visit the site out of curiosity. No reason to help increase their popularity on the search engines by paying them a visit.

Please be advised that this is our first complaint for this Agency.
If you have a complaint or additional information please contact us.

Added: January 9, 2002

Please review the full posting for Larisa Kutorgenko which includes the complaint for Westtravel.

We will keep adding to this section as needed!

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Send Info to Saul Hudson