Questions about a text dating site called mobinect, "is http://mobinect.com real", "what is mobinect" and "is mobinect.com a scam or not" have been asked a lot and we will tell you a little about mobinect.com.
If you follow the link then you will be redirected to www.textndate.com where you are asked to do 4 things. Provide your mobile phone carrier, give the your mobile phone number, agree to a long list of terms of service and agree that you are 18 years old or over. You can read the terms of service for www.textndate.com or even see in the pricing guide on the front page that the basic idea of the service is simular to phone sex, just that you txt instead of talk. They employ actors/actresses that they call "operators" or "models" that would be there to send you txts as if they were actual women interested in you. You pay them for these txts through your mobile phone bill. Is it a scam? In our opinion it is a total waste of money AND you are AGREEING to recieve spam on your mobile phone. This is right there on the front page, "By providing your mobile number you are agreeing to receive new service marketing messages." Also, the dishonest marketing that we have recieved involving "SweetNicole" or "Nicole Lewis" and the attached pictures referencing a FAKE profile really don't impress us. The service is a waste of money and the marketing is full of lies so we conclude, SCAM.
Here is an example of the spam emails we are talking about:
First you get a teaser to see if your email address is valid and to see if you act like a sucker:
from: Nicole Lewis
to: you
subject: Hey there, Craigslist Ad.
** CRAIGSLIST ADVISORY — AVOID SCAMS BY DEALING LOCALLY
** Avoid: wiring money, cross-border deals, work-at-home
** Beware: cashier checks, money orders, escrow, shipping
** More Info: http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams.htmlI am looking for some good sex
If you reply to that, then you get the bait to see if you are gulible or not:
from: Nicole Lewis
to: you
subject: Hey there, Craigslist Ad
Hey, thanks for getting back to me
So I will tell you a more about me. I am kind of shy, I love to get down and dirty though.My favourite sport is soccer and my favourite position is missionary.
I have hazel green eyes and light brown hair, I will attach 2 photos for you.
Hope to hear back from you.
If you are fooled by that and reply again then you get the advertisement to suck you in and send you to the website:
from: Nicole Lewis
to: you
subject: Hey there, Craigslist Ad
Fine, I understand if you dont feel like joining those dating sites.
I found a different place that we can use to talk.
Go to mobinect.com and just put your cell nr in there and they will connect us.
PS I have the same username on there.
We do not recommend that you do business with websites that are plugged via junk emails. Many of them are just cons or scams anyway. Try some legitimate casual sex sites instead.
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I think that the owner(s) of any site(s) that pays commission fee(s) to someone who is obviously running a scam should be shackled and dragged into the disgusting Long Beach Jail. Clearly the owner(s) of the site(s) paying the commissions are involved in a conspiracy to defraud people. At the very least, what you have here is a very serious conflict of interest. They try to call it an affiliate fee, but it is a commission when it gets to a certain level. I can't even imagine how much this particular scammer is making, but I would guess that it is somewhere around $1000 a day.
It is one thing if an organization wants to boost membership and so they give incentives to current members to bring in new members. I.e. a ski club might give a member 10% off next years dues, if a new member signs up under them - ok that's fine - usually there is a limit of one, maybe two "incentives" a person can claim. But these people on the dating sites are obviously using several different profiles (all fake) to generate the traffic, and the numbers of victims they scam is probably about 50 victims a day. When it comes time to send out the commission checks, the site(s) must see what is really going on - that the same address is being used by one person claiming several different profiles. The person getting paid at the end of this must use their real name to open a bank account, and a large portion of the commission checks must be getting cashed through the same account somewhere. It would not be hard for the parent sites to recognize this. Thing is, they don't want to recognize it because they essentially have these people (they are paying) committing the crime of fraud for them - I say they are conspiring to achieve this. Where are the various State Attorney General's in all this? Some of these dating website scams are so obviously illegal. In fact, as I see it, many of the dating websites actually supply enough evidence to support a criminal conviction right in their Terms of Service - Yes that's right... these d-bags have such pompous ignorance for the law, that they actually admit to criminal fraud in the very manner in which they normally exist, and they admit such in the fine print. All you need to get a conviction is a print out of their TOS. Do you job Attorney General.
Instead of simply bitching, I will offer a solution for this. The problem is this: How to we as a people define where the line is that establishes fraud? Like the ski club example... if a person likes something and wants to bring in new members or customers to be a part of the same thing (and perhaps receive a little something in return), well clearly that is not illegal, if it is just one or two people they bring it. However, when a person takes it upon them self to spam every dating website in the world, telling lies about their location, and other lies, etc. to such a degree as to generate huge commissions, well that clearly is fraud and illegal. The exact location of the line where enthusiasm ends and criminal fraud begins would be difficult to put to the test. Any person accused could simply defend the case buy claiming to be the cum swallowing queen of the world - she would claim she's just a real bush pig who wants to swallow loads like santa delivers toys - she could claim to cover the whole world with her skanky self, she'd say she really loves the site and so that is why she sought new members - or some similar defense.
So instead of trying to put a number on it here is my idea: Lets have the Legislature make a law prohibiting dating sites from paying affiliate fees, unless they clearly publish (on the profile of the person receiving the commission checks), the exact number of commissioned sales they have made to date, and the postal zip code where the commission check(s) are sent. Hence, the dating sites could still pay the fees, if they choose to, but to avoid the conflict of interest and the criminal conspiracy aspect, they would be required to supply the sales data for each and every profile that received commissions and the zip code where the checks went. This way if some chick is trying to lure you to give up your credit card to join some site, you would see if she already has like 900 sales to so far. You would also see, that although she claims to live just a block or two away from you, the zip code where the checks for the 900 commission fees were mailed to is in the Sudan in Africa, but you live in LA, well you would know that it is a scam. On the other hand, if you meet a girl who seems to be nice who has received 3 or 4 commission pay outs, but the zip code did in fact match the place where she claims to live (near you), well you might think that this girl may not be such a scammer. Also the local girl would probably be more open to answering questions about the four guys she brought to the site, and the person in the Sudan will only respond with more nude photos. If the commission data was published, people could decide for them selfs if a profile is trustworthy or not. I just don't see any other way around this... Clearly criminal fraud is taking place - this is a given. Clearly there is a conflict of interest with the parent site(s) directly profiting from the fraud, and paying the perpetrators who commit the fraud. So that's it. No more commissioned sales unless the commission data is clearly spelled out on the profile of each person who receives commissions. What do you think? Can anyone think of a better way to stop this horse shit? I for one am quite fed up with it.
Or, you could spend a few days learning to spot the differences between spam vs real women, spend your eforts on real women and get laid a lot more. This does several things at once; it makes you smarter, lowers the pool of fools that are food for the scammers and will get you laid a hell of a lot more than trying to create useless kneejerk legislation. Just educate yourself and others on the subject; does the world a lot more good....
I say that you are very wrong, and it is very sad. Are you really going to defend outright fraud? If you are going to candidly support and defend fraud as something that should be allowed to continue into the future as it does today, and let each new unsuspecting victim who steps into the arena learn for them self how to spot all the many various scams... if indeed that is your view, then aren't you really showing your true color(s) in all this. How can any one trust you (or this site) to supply an impartial valuable opinions about dating websites when you take that nonsequitous attitude? What is written above is actually a very well thought out and defined (in 45 lines of text) suggestion of a way to stop this nonsense. It would still allow for affiliate fees to be paid - it only requires an open disclosure of the numbers of affiliate fees that are being paid out and to which Zip codes the checks are being sent to. That's all. I even concede that it may not be perfect and I ask for additional imput from others.
All you have done is called it a knee jerk reaction, yet you offer nothing at all to say why it is a bad idea, or why it wouldn't work. You also offer no other solution(s). In just 3 and 1/2 lines of text you shoot down a very meaningful attempt to try to bring order to a situation that is out of hand in my opinion. You appear as if you're someone who has never benefited from any sort of consumer protection law(s). Clearly your life and the lives of everyone you know benefit from consumer protection law(s). In just one average day of your life you are likely protected by law(s) not much different than what I have suggested, at least perhaps 500 times a day, and maybe a lot more than that. As you go through any normal day there are at least 500 separate and distinct laws that are protecting you - you just haven't ever thought much about it apparently. The food you eat, water you drink, toothpaste, the electric in you're house, the thickness of the wires, every single appliance you use has been put through rigorous tests and designed and built to certain standards to that it doesn't burn your house down, and even in the worse case there you're protected again because the composite (types) of materials used to build your house are regulated, the price you pay for a house is something kept fair by the publicizing of other home prices. Is this giving you a headache? Pop an asprine and well find some more... from the design of the safty cap on the bottle to the exparation date to the purity of the drug which means uniform dosing, the uncontaminated container, the seal on it. Say you want to make a phone call - totally regulated to protect you from the assuredness / gauranee that you will get a strong signal to the manner in which your bill is itemized. If you call your bank, stockbroker, or Credit Card company, each one will come under hundreds of various regulations to protect you from getting cheated or ripped off. Say you want to go for a ride in the car - again, from the bumpers on the car to the seatbelts, to the gas station, the pumps, the fire suppression equipment - all regulated to protect you. And when you pay for a gallon of gas you recieve a gallon of gas. Would you rather it be that sometimes you only got 1/2 a gallon for every gallon you pay for? That is what used to happen all the time... it was rampant. Some gas stations where intentionally miscalibrating the pumps. Then someone came up with the idea to have a guy go around with a special car that would measure the amount of gas the pumps where giving - to make sure they where true. If any pumps where found to be out of calibration in an amount such as to indicate fraud, the gas station may be shut down for a few days. Repeated offenses could land the owner/operator of such a gas station in jail. After the Legislature voted to have the secret checks of the pumps, it made this crime no longer worth it. To this day every gas station knows that the secret checks of the pumps can happen at any time. So now, when you go to the gas station (you smart mouthed stupid fuck P.O.S.) you don't get cheated. Would you do away with that "knee jerk" legislation? That way it would be up to you to figure out (for yourself) which stations are cheating and which are fair... it that how you would prefer it? You might spill fuel all over your hooker boots.
Anyway, I'm through giving you a free education. You know when I was writing that idea, I actually thought that a site like this might actually praise ideas like mine - put it out there with a big blinking arrow that says "Read this great idea"... so that all could read it.
This brings me to my closing thought... lately I have seen that a bunch of sites (like this) have popped up claiming that they are "sites that review dating sites"... Well I have noticed that often the "review" sites keep sending folks back to the same handful of scam sites. How can people tell if a so called "review" or :"advice" site is really just another scam site? The way you attacked what was a very reasonable idea sort of makes it look like you are collecting "affiliate fees" yourself. Is that the case?
You are strawmanning us when you say we are defending fraud. We thought of a way to help, and have put up this site to educate folks.
Fraud is already against the law so let's stipulate that. People still break the law; sometimes they get caught; sometimes not. Adding a specfic law about reporting zip codes of checks and all of that won't stop the tactics that will get around that. It might help suckers to take the bait harder though, since after all, they can see right there with the zip code that the person is legit.... Really, you don't think
scammers wouldn't set up a profile for every zip code they target? Why can't you see why your idea is far from perfect and may actually be harmful without a long winded rebuttal?
Sorry, try again...
Ok, that is a much better response, thank you. At least now we are talking about the merits of the idea, and I apologies for some of the language I used that was unproductive - I was pissed off. I thought that you would delete my entries and you didn't. I didn't expect you to respond with something useful, but you did and that shows that you are a better person than I thought.
Having said that, if you want to, you can, with my permission edit out the things I wrote that were unproductive. You can also (if you wish) change my words from "you don't understand" to "people don't..." when I go over all the ways consumer protection is a part of everyones life. Also I think it would be very awesome if you put this debate out on the front page - or someplace where it will be seen easier. You can get rid of this section too down to the asteriks and start this entry there - this way new readers can focus on the facts and less on the strawmanning - good word BTW.
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I'm glad you brought up that scammers would just create new profiles for each Zip code used. In a way you're right and/or this is what they are already doing. We see this all the time... a guy joins (for free) a site and puts up a profile and in 10 minutes he get like 30 emails from horny chicks that are just around the corner. I agree that scammers are already setting up profiles for every zip code they target - this is what I am seeking to uncover. Yes you're right, it is all too easy to set up multiple fake profiles, but do you think that a scammer is going to set up a new bank account for each zip code they scam in? No way that they will not be able to do. I was just trying to see if there is a way to follow the money. Perhaps the answer is to outlaw affiliate fees. When the thing for sale is something intangible such as love or friendship, the conflict of interest where affiliate fees are involved is perhaps too great... there is just too much of a conflict of interest. The sites that are allowing a handful of affiliates to generate 1000's of sales are just as guilty as the people who set up the bogus accounts... there using the "affiliates" to do their dirty work and to try and separate themselves from the crime aspect, but they know exactly what is taking place.
What I've read here confirms exactly what I thought about all of the responses I received from my Craigslist ad. I don't think any of the responders actually read my ad or they would not have bothered to respond.
i think you a damn good looking woman if i can help ....i will