As I promised, I am doing little by little my benchmarking on dating websites and today I want to share with you my experience with the website of Marmeladies (link). The review I will do is a little extensive, but if you just want to cut the gibberish and get to the point I will say it plain and simple: Stay away from this website!
What is Marmeladies?
Marmeladies.com or lady-marmelady.com is a dating website which is been running since 2007 and is associated with toplop.com. It runs by the slogan “Marmeladies, the sweetest Russian girls”. Their market actually has changed through the years but it targets mainly Russian or Ukrainian women.
What they offer?
Marmeladies is a website oriented to persons who are looking for serious relationships with Ukrainian or Russian women. You can browse through several profiles and then send “kisses” which is a fast note for letting a lady know that you are interested. After this you can either send or receive messages. A little disappointing point is that they charge everything: receiving and opening messages cost.
The good thing they do offer is possibility to change personal information at any time. This means that you can ask for phone number or emails almost immediately, though the same webpage suggests sending a couple of messages before asking this information, as it is highly likely that the ladies won’t be willing to give this information so fast.
My impressions
The website allows you to browse for free in the profiles and therefore I started picking random profiles and making a back-search on the photos immediately. Well, I found for example the profile of Anastasia, a really attractive girl, which turns out to be a model and their profile photos were taken from Barney and Garden.
Or the profile of Luci, a really beautiful woman from Sevastopol… her photos belong to the photographer Viacheslav Baranov and were taken almost 3 years ago.batareykin.blogspot.com … So she’s been in the site for at least 3 years! And single, woah.
After this I decided it was pointless to even register (which is free, but why would I?). And of course, I won’t even go and talk about the prices.
Forums, Attorneys, etc…
The first thing that I found is that Marmeladies and TopLop have been involved in spamming campaigns to attract clients. These date back from 2008, but seem to have been really aggressive during 2010.
The second thing I found were several reviews at JustAnswer in which attorneys tell that he they’ve received several cases of people going serious with ladies from the site and once they arrive to their cities the ladies will not show up. Their theory is that is more like an artistic scam: good photographers creating profiles for girls in order to get money.
Finally I went into the classic forums in which you can find comments about this kind of sites, they were full of comments of how fake is this website. Maybe the best review I found was the one provided by Tag-n Bag at RussianWomen Discussion. He tried this website back in 2010 and in his experience the women will always avoid giving their personal information with excuses like “I have been cheated online before” “We should get to know each other more before…” and stuff like that.
And just to end, a visit to ScamAdviser only shows that is a BIG Scam. Scamadviser provides an automatic “score” trustoworthiness system based on what is been said about the website. An maybe is not 100% accurate but such a low score is no good at all.
Conclusions
There are lots of things that have been said about Marmeladies and Toplop: overall it seems to be one of the biggest scams running around. With an alexa rank around 300,000 the amount of visits it receives is quite large.
A quick look in its traffic estimate shows that in 2013 was receiving around 300.000 visits a day. Good to see that their traffic has quickly dropped to 90.000 per month.
My conclusion is this: Marmeladies is an artistic agency which is selling a product of illusion, and is careless about hurting and stealing in the process.
stay away! Rip off in biggest way!
I received TWO replies,one from Ukraine n one from Russia.BOTH EXACT SAME WORDING by ‘lady.’ Not even one in a million chances of THAT happening
Further to your comments, most ladies on this site do not even know that they are on it! Just under 6 years ago, I was working between
Russia & the UK, I joined Marmeladies site! I picked out a 40 year old lady and began writing letters to her! Sometimes she would write back a couple of times a day other times nothing for a couple of days! September 2010, I wrote to her and told her that I would be arriving in St Petersburg within a couple of days! I booked my hotel & flight! The day before I left the UK, my phone rang, it was the girl that I had been writing too! She explained that she had never ever written me a letter nor had she ever received one, but Marmeladies had contacted her and told her that I was flying over to meet her! A couple of days later we met, she explained, like many girls, she joined the site but had told Marmeladies that she would never write nor was she interested in receiving mail unless they believed the guy to be serious! Today, we celebrate our 5th anniversary together and it was the best choice that I ever made
I hear you, Terry…all too well! What gets me are the ones who say flattering remarks about how good looking in the photos I appear…what photos?? Even more pronounced are those with very well drafted letters , yet claim not to know any English! I see the word reciprocity a good many times… is there an equivalent to that in Ukrainian or Russian? I never came across that term EVER in my life, and I’m a ghost writer/ editor by profession! Not just marmeladies is this way, virtually every site is smoke and mirrors 🤔….
Hi, I don’t know your name, but thanks for your writings. First time I saw your post.
I had similar experiences on Toplop. I wrote to a lady – dentist in Odessa. She was very keen and send me her personal details. After about 5 emails I haven’t heard from her again. I am also registered at other sites and suddenly there was a letter from her wanting me to start corresponding with her. Oh my, how come. She has my personal email address then why writing through a dating site.
This can only mean that she never wrote to my personal email address. What a scam.
A request: Can you tell us more about Dream Marriage…. Russianlovematch…. Fiance. I had a thing with Russianlovematch. A pretty lady – Lilliya (dentist in Odessa) wrote many letters to me with lots of photos. I thought we had something good and serious going. Then From one of the photos I got her work address and phoned. Her sister’s husband also works there and speaks English. He passed on the message with my personal email address, and I waited. She wrote again through the site not mentioning anything.and said her birthday was coming up. I send her flowers via Flowers Ukraine which said that they’ll send me photo of her receiving the flowers. They did. I wrote to her via the site and she was furious. At first she said that she did not receive any flowers – so I send her the photo. She exploded and said that I must not send anything to her workplace or private address because she does not want her family to know she was on the dating site.
I challenged the Russianlovematch and told them straight away that they pay women for their photos and write on her behalf. I received many letters proving to them that they are fooling around and just want money money. The same with Anastasia – they send letters to their ladies using our names, letters we never wrote.
Recommend me a site that is worth signing up with. I’m searching for my future wife – Ukranian/Russian
Thanks
Mike
Scammer : Alisa Shvedova (real name @vk.com)
Marmeladies.com / Nickname : Alisa
Date of birth : January 25, 1993
I agree with this opinion.These people are professionals of lying and playing with feelings of honest men. Everything is false : chats ( they always have the same phrases supossedly women write). I’m sure employes write the messages and not women ( they only show pretty faces and bodies )An authentic shame. These people should be in prison
i have been on this site for four weeks
spent a lot of money
the girls say they want to know me better before sharing info, then when i confront them they say trust me.. when i ask them to start email outside the site they do not have internet..they act like they really like me but there cha times are very early in am .. do not contact during the day as if they really have another life and they go on at a specfic time for the cash payback
i have met one who seems genuine but alwasy excuses about beig hurt before and can not share name address i want to send flowers outside the mareladies site because for the money the flowers if they are not worth the price really worth 20.00 and charge 150. they like to chat but say little and many of the leters seem generic.. i am going to continue a little longer but i am doubtful i will meet a girl on this site.. for me it was therapeutic just getting over a terrible relationship with a very bad woman .. in fact i am finished with american woman as to why i tried this site.
Good review. It would be nice to see many of these scammers land in jail. Most men seeking companions are genuine. Thanks.
I fully agree with you. Pity enough Marmeladies still is one of the most popular and attractive sites out there :/
I am registered to Marmeladies and I am starting to Be suspicious of that website, because the stuff that you have explained looks like what happened to me.
I can confirm, the pictures are great, the first exchanges are p^romisng and then nothing happens, when you propose a first date, the lady has no holidays, no free weekends! let us the way in one month, then wait another month…
the worst is the chat which is very expansive, the translation is bad some times wrong, same for the letters which are cut when they are considered as too long by marmeladies website translator, sometimes they don’t pass the address given during the chat.
Marmel ladies is a pure scam, the ladies surely earn money in writing each day and some time many times a day, in wanting to chat every day, in giving their private email address, but they don’t use it, as if they could not or don’t want. Sometimes during a chat one gets the impression the lady is asking what answer is she able to give?
Once I said I have invested a lot in you, the lady was frightened, I said in feelings she felt better, I wonder if this marmeladies site employs call girls or girls working outside the side for the same shareholders.
It is obvious that ladies are taught to let the men believe in theirs love feeling in exchange they do their best that the men spend as much money as possible in letters, gifts, flowers, chats, and they have got an interest in doing that.
I think the police must make an inquiry in order to know how such a site can be free to be such an obvious scam.