Love is grand,  love is beautiful. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to know and make acquaintance of your better half, in an open, honest and straightforward manner; on the other hand, if you’re not (lucky, that is), you’ll might be paying just for the feeling of being lucky. Which, in most of cases, you gonna be not (lucky, that is).

Often viewed as the “poor relative” of the investigative work, such cases are appearing every now and then in our desk trays; not seen as harbingers of serious amounts of money, cases such as pre-matrimonial verification or brides online are often passed on to other colleagues or downright declined. Not many would do this, but enough; myself I got a good dozen this year, from colleagues who were too busy or did not want this type of cases. While some were clearly undertaken by some of my colleagues using the ubiquitous “we have operatives in zillion countries” thing (which some do not have), many were also clearly discarded as not being considered of value.

I cannot blame them and I’ll tell you why: working on such cases can be a matter of biting more than one can chew. When it comes to private investigations, not many cases deal with the human character at its best or worse, as this type of work does. For someone used to deal with commercial or corporate matters, addressing such a case can prove to be quite an experience.

Anyways, in Romania, such cases stem from the old saying: sometimes you pay for what you get, and sometimes you get what you’re paying for. Or sometimes you pay and get nothing. Or something like that, anyway; you get the idea.

Of course, Romania doesn’t claim to be the only or the top country where the above applies; not by far. This method of extortion and cheating honest people out of their money is right up the alley of a multitude of countries such as Russia, Ukraine, and so forth. S. America and Africa, along with the Far East countries, are a vast playing field for such defrauding activities.

The story begins with a beautiful young lady, almost always a student; damn, she’s so beautiful and that beauty is visibly fragile, unprotected and in need of such. She is a rose which half-bloomed in an adverse environment, where her sensibility, love and joy of life are mercilessly trodden upon by an uneducated society, by tyrannical authorities, by insensitive people (read red necks, usually males) . Oh, if only there would be a way that she can be transplanted on Western soil, where sun shines 400 days a year, where every rain drop that falls is actually 1 euro coin, where civilization is ready to acquiesce her out-of-this-world beauty and gifts…and boy, does she have gifts for you!

She doesn’t ask for money, not at first. Nope. She is a humble girl, coming from a very poor family. So poor, that in fact she cannot afford: the yearly tuition fees or similar education expenses / have a decent holiday / get a decent clothing item / help her fathermotherbrothersistergranny to have that life-saving surgery / have a laptop of her own / get a decent smartphone of her own / get a decent accommodation as student, and the list does not stop there. You can pick ‘n mix or choose from the above. So there you have it: a poor soul, a tormented soul, a soul which appeals to your inner boy scout to save it from the depredations of the Romanian abyss.

And the more you think this is might be a trap or a scheme, the more you become convinced that it is not. How can it be? She never asked for anything; au contraire, she plainly (and somewhat indignantly) declined any financial help. So, when you start to spread the silver onto her, you are convinced it is something you do because YOU WANT TO, not because she asked you to. That’s the trick. And they are very good at playing this game.

I sometime believe that these girls would be a valuable operative to any intelligence agency; if only for how they observe and put into practice the main rule of acquiring and winning over an asset. They choose, prime, and groom their asset, in such a manner that the asset is never aware that he’s a prey (or an asset). Moreover, the asset is believing that he is in control at all times. Isn’t this the old game where an intelligence operative grooms the asset in such a manner that by the time the first secret intel is asked of him, the asset is positively and inescapably caught in a “no return” situation. It takes years and years of educating an intelligence operative to successfully create and manage such “asset acquiring” situations; these girls are natural.

My advice? Well, for what is worth, check her out. You’ll be sparing you and your bank account manager a lot of headache. And you know what? It pays to know who you’re dealing with.

Eurosurveillance CI Romania is specialized in pre-matrimonial verification, Romanian scams and online bride checks in Romania and the Republic of Moldova. Contact us for a free of charge case assessment and service quotation.

Regards,

JT