Cherry Blossoms - contact from Russian scammer

Hi, my 1st post here so go easy please

I just happened to look through my spam folder today in my throwaway yahoo email account and was surprised to see an email from another @yahoo.com user placed in there. Anyway, it turns out to be a typical romance scammer from Russia. Apparently he/she saw my very old profile in Cherry Blossoms and decided to send me an email. I'm a little concerned though because this is the 1st time ever I have actually been approached in this manner (1st contact through email). So now for a couple of questions.

I presume the sender of the email is a paying customer at CB or is it free for ladies to send email? If it is a paying customer then how come these people are never tracked down and prosecuted (assuming they pay using a valid credit/debit card)?

Should I be concerned there's actually something more sinister going on and it's possible my email has been hacked? Although the email account isn't used for anything of real importance it would leave me feeling vulnerable about some of my other accounts.

If you haven't seen any other irregular activity, I wouldn't be too worried. Many scammers will try to revive old prospects if they don't have enough paying victims on the line. If you gave your email to any scammers when you were a member (and you usually can't ID the scammers before emailing so I'm assuming that chances are you did), your email was kept by the scammers. A few years later, one of these scammers has some down time, so they decide to send out emails to some of those old addresses using a new female character.

Scambaiters see it all the time. A baiter deals a scammer for a while, either the baiter gets bored or busy and walks away or the scammer gets frustrated, and the bait is dropped. A few days to a few years later, the baiter suddenly gets a brand new scam email--only it comes to an email address that was only given to that one scammer, or the baiter recognizes the scammer based on information given or writing style.

Another possibility is that the dating site sold an old member email list to an outside company...

In answer to your other questions: I don' t know about this site, but with many of these matchmaking sites, the women get free membership, and on some of the websites that are scams themselves (I don't know abou this one in particular), the person corresponding with the men may even be on the payroll.

But even if a credit card is required, scammers are not known for spending their own money to join any site. They will typically use stolen credit cards or phished bank accounts / paypal accounts to pay for dating site memberships.

Hi Dotti, thanks for the reply.

Maybe I should've expanded more on my 1st post but I think the post would've ended up being too long lol. The only reason I actually registered with Cherry Blossoms was because I had a Filipina chatmate who was a member there and I needed to become a member to enable using the advanced search features to locate her profile. As such I never became a fully paid member and have never had any communication with Russian/Eastern Bloc friends/scammers whatsoever. I have however chatted with many Filipina scammers over the years but even those would've been on a different YM account and not linked to the email account in question nor linked to any dating site.

You said it's possible that CB might have sold an old member email list to an outside company. Well I guess it's possible but my new Russian 'friend' clearly stated she came across my profile in CB which in my mind makes that theory a bit of a longshot.

If I read your reply correctly you also suggested a member of staff at CB could be on the payroll?. Horrifying thought but it certainly could fit.

The reason I was concerned about my email account being hacked is because I've been doing a lot of poker related googling over the last month or 2 and landed on a few Russian/Eastern Bloc forums. Whilst the forums themselves seem clean enough who knows what lurks behind the scenes. Whilst I've never registered with any of these forums, I'm not so sure if there is any malicious activity behind the scenes, whether it's possible the forum owners can gather any information from tracking cookies etc?. Other than that then I cant say I've noticed anything else suspicious about my email account.

Anyway, just for kicks I have replied to my new friend, hope her scripts dont become too boring