Talk:AnastasiaDate

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Talk:AnastasiaDate

Is this a proper wiki or just a PR/marketing effort by the company? Can we flag for deletion?

The Company is the subject of one chapter of the recent book Love in the Time of Algorithms. Apparently company is the biggest international dating site. Internet review indicate considerable diversity in analysis of the company and other related companies engaged in "mail order bride" sites from Russia and other countries. Company clearly engaged in huge publicity campaign to try to "straighten out" or "cover up" their actual business model, this wikipedia page is being edited regularly by company staff to try to remove questionable aspects. Page needs good sources. The recent book seems to be one of the few actually allowable references for this company. Book extimates revenues of $300 million per year, certainly worthy of a Wikipedia page. The question is, what should it say? Should site the book right?

One other source - is this worthy of wikipedia - are tonybochene.com and anastasia-date-scam.com among many other pages (these document the business, by a former employee of the company) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.87.152.13 (talk) 20:49, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

The paragraph about scam doesn't have a proper reference link to Examiner.com. It goes to a website created by a former AnastasiaDate employee who was let go by the company. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Iri2101 (talk • contribs) 19:01, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

Someone (likely representing the company?) continues an edit war on the following -- please explain why this should not be part of the article -- AnastasiaDate was also mentioned in Dan Slater's novel, "Love in the Time of Algorithms: What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating." In this book, Slater followed a small group of men on an unsuccessful attempt to meet women in person who they had met online via Anastasia's AmoLatina website (the women all coincidentally disappeared when the men arrived in Colombia to meet them). He concludes as well that "the staffs of local bridal agencies will often pose as the women in the profiles, responding to incoming messages in order to keep the rubles rolling in".

Anastasia was also featured in a movie Love Translated. http://www.lovetranslatedonfilm.com/. It could be part of the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Iri2101 (talk • contribs) 18:53, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

Merger proposal

I've renamed the page from AnastasiaDate to "Anastasiadate International", so we can actually expand the article with some other business related content. Also this way the page almost doesn't look like an advertisement :)

Merging AnastasiaDate with Anastasia International is like merging IAC and Match.com or SparkNetworks with JDate. AnastasiaDate.com is a website and AnastasiaInternational is a company that owns AnastasiaDate, Amolatina and other properties. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.103.91.39 (talk) 12:00, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

The company has done a page creation / merge without consensus (and has also removed the notice of the page appearing to be an advertisement) along with regularly removing balanced viewpoints, in an attempt to make it easy for them to use Wikipedia as an advertisement. There is clearly a lot of pressure from many IP and named accounts that are all closely associated with the company (not that this is a violation of wikipedia, but just to be aware of).

The IP 91.103.91.39 above which happens to be from the location of one of their corporate officers, as are many of the advertising-type edits, states that merging AnastasiaDate with Anastasia International is like merging IAC and Match.com. This is however not correct and is a formulation they would like to present in order to claim that citations that tend to focus on one of their websites do not apply to another one of their websites. Their well-funded publicity department has now also create AmoLatina; their goal is to play Whack-A-Mole with wikipedia, trying to build up wikipedia with references to articles they have planted in the press, in a type of Steve-Jobs reality distortion as if creating a web of positive reviews can actually cover up the fact that their business is based on fraud. They'd like to be able to call people in the press and tell them that they can trust Anastasia, their proof being - just look at Wikipedia - if it were really a fraud, the Wikipedia page would say that, but it doesn't, etc, etc.

In fact, there should only be 1 article; it should be called Anastasia International, and it should have a neutral point of view that includes a balanced, truthful perspective. Here is the rationale:

1. There is only 1 corporate entity, 1 payment processing system, 1 central customer service staff, 1 central server & database, 1 business model, 1 publicity team composed of a new guy and an old guy who for for living persons we dont need to mention here though they're easy to find, and 1 email list.

2. 90% of the material on the page applies more clearly to Anastasia International, not AnastasiaDate a. History of Anastasia -- which these same publicity officers put onto the wikipedia page -- is not the history of AnastasiaDate, but rather the history of the entire entity. It is an important history and applies to all the "sites" - the "sites" come and go; Anastasia will in fact have to create more, because of all the accurate negative publicity of the current ones is getting around. b. Books & films - applies literally to another website AmoLatina which at this point they've created their own page about - but Slater himself in his criticism quoted above already in the talk page talks about Rubles - this is Russian currency, not Colombian currency. Slater clearly considered the entities all as one fraudulent entity, even in spite of Anastasia's publicity agents attempts to have his book help their cover-up. But the fact is, the book is out, and like the Fortune article, makes clear, that Anastasia's chat ladies get paid to interact with men - which is not disclosed on Anastasia's websites, which instead mislead men into thinking they are building relationships. c. Corporate structure - applies to Anastasia International

3. Regarding the comparison to IAC and Match.Com - in fact this is not an accurate comparison. IAC owns many legally distinct businesses, Match.com is one of them; they have separate executives, separate staffs, technology databases, customer bases, business models, and IAC bought Match.com. In comparison, all the Anastasia sites are one legal entity with one shared history, one management team, one P/L, one business model.

It's quite certain that all the positive spin on all the Anastasia pages is from different employees of Anastasia, or the same one logging in from different accounts. No Anastasia customer would ever post a non-compensated positive review. This is a $100 million dollar company that claims to connect people who get married, but good luck finding anyone who has met and gotten married through their services (go ahead and try) - maybe you could find lets say 10 per year who somehow by sheer chance met just as a publicity stunt - $10million per each one? This is like a pyramid scam, where just a few people actually get a payoff but 99% are deceived into thinking they are actually part of something when actually they are just the suckers paying for the executive's yacht in exchange for nothing. Entyre (talk) 18:39, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

• (Emphatically agree) with merger of AmoLatina (and any others) into this article. The company is notable...the individual websites they have operated fail miserably, and having seperate articles 'diffuses' the relevant information. It actually violates the spirit of WP:BALANCE, and the fact they are the same 'entity' is legally established by them. Redirects to this article (protected if necessary) would IMO be appropriate. Revent (talk) 20:34, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

• If for nothing else than to simplify the BLP issues. Revent (talk) 20:36, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
• Wholehearted support for this merge for the reasons Revent gave. The company is notable, the individual websites are not.

No Merge - I came across the Amo Latina/Anastasia pages a couple of days ago. I have to say there seems to be editing from both sides here, both positive and negative. I feel the biggest issue is Entrye’s involvement, who nominated the pages to be merged, and carried out a number of large scale edits and changed many of the facts about Amo Latina to make it look less notable. As everyone should be able to see, he’s recently been banned for WP:SOC. Sadly looking at his edits, I believe they were made in bad faith, and may have even had a WP:COI.

Firstly, the IP from ‘corporate offices’ mentioned above. The IP is from the island of Malta, which is not where the company has any offices located. Secondly, Entrye mentions – “The company has removed material to make it look like an advertisement”. Looking over the history, I fail to see where this has happened. I fail to see where Entyre has mentioned AmoLatina, which is what the merger should be about.

Finally, I feel the articles cannot be merged. They seem to be two separate companies from what I can see, and I have now updated the Amo Latina page with as much correct information as possible to demonstrate this. The fact Anastasia International was sold in 2011 further adds to this theory. The merger will just create a mess of a page under the corporate header of Anastasia International, and may in theory list websites on their page that they no longer own. Verdict78 (talk) 11:47, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Support

I'm in favour of it staying. The company is big enough - let it stay and wiki-users will ensure that NPOV emerges.

But, it needs a tag to flag it up.

Ok, Tag added as per the above. Bensimo (talk) 18:25, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

This company, Anastasia International, is fast becoming infamous for their fraudulent operations, and now for their false manipulation of the public media. Everyone in the online dating industry is aware that they run websites that are continuously posting women as members who are not real members, or women who joined one of their "agencies" but are unaware of how their profiles are being actively used by the website to fraudulently manipulate the male members into paying truly excessive fees to read and respond to messages written by the site and/or agent employees believing them to be written by a women who are attracted to them.

For the record I am the managing director of one of Anastasia International's direct competitors in the areas of Chinese and Asian dating. As such I cannot claim to be impartial and readers should take that into consideration. (I will refrain from naming our sites to avoid anyone thinking this post is strictly self promotional.) However, frankly, as a competitor I too hope this page is allowed to stay. In fact I hope that Wikipedia will not allow the page to be removed, especially by Anastasia International. Sooner or later, as Wikipedia and the public start to realize the lengths this company will go to to manipulate public opinion by manipulating this page, the more obvious it will become that they simply cannot be trusted.

Our two sites are in direct competition with their AsianBeauties.com, so I will stick to discussing that site as an example of how they operate. I have been personally contacted by over one hundred victims of AsianBeauties.com who are incensed by the manner in which AsianBeauties.com manipulated them emotionally in order to persuade then to pay substantial money for services that were not real and and to meet and fall in love with women who did not exist. These victims generally were taken for in excess of $1,000 USD before reality set in, and one of them reported having spent over $15,000 on AsianBeauties.com without ever actually meeting one real woman.

This fleecing is done with absolutely no regard for the fact that AsianBeauties.com is causing these men to fall deeply in love with the charade they have created. Plans are being made to marry these false fiances, sometimes homes are being purchased in which to house them, flights are bought, weddings are planned, friends and acquaintances are being publicly informed of the pending nuptials, and in the end, hearts are being broken, pride is being stolen, psyches are being damaged (sometimes beyond repair) and dreams are being shattered. And it is painfully obvious that not only does no one in charge of Anastasia International care about this, but that they seem to revel in it. This is a company that either has no moral compass, or if it does, then that moral compass is pointed in the wrong direction.

These men were all desperate to find a forum where they could publicly tell their story and warn the world about AsianBeauties.com, and I can't think of a better place for them (and thousands more like them) to find their voice and achieve their purpose of warning others than to be allowed to add to this page on Wikipedia. Based on common sense and also the multiple complaints about all of their sites that can be found doing proper Google searches, I suggest that it is safe to assume that if AsianBeauties.com is a Scam then so too are all their other dating sites. And based on that, if Anastasia International makes $140,000,000 this year as they predict, then if they average $1,000 per victim there should be about 140,000 angry and hurt victims this year alone ready to add their thoughts and experiences to this Wikipedia page.

But be warned, there likely is no such thing as an NPOV. There is Anastasia International (the scammer and its toadies) and there are their countless victims. There doesn't seem to be anyone neutral.

Posted by JohnatCCCo JohnatCCCo (talk) 06:07, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

Sorry but there are many, many better places for victims to warn the world. Wikipedia is not a good place because as said below we require reliable sources not first hand accounts. If you want to help these people, I suggest you ask them to contact the media and other places likely to publish reliable sources we can use. Nil Einne (talk) 12:30, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

I do agree with some of the points made above by JohnatCCCo. I think the article on AmoLatina should remain live. Verdict78 (talk) 11:49, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

edit war about Slater research

Wikipedia is not here to serve as a battleground for issues between your companies. I have stubbed the article back, removing both positive and negative sections, to anything (a) sourced reliably, and (b) sourced only to primary sources but which is non-controversial. If an edit-war continues, I will simply fully protect the article in this state. STOP IT. Black Kite (talk) 21:44, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

• See also Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard#Anastasia_International. Black Kite (talk) 21:50, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

Actually, on the one side of the war is the company Anastasia International; on the other side, is everyone else including especially thousands of angry customers, as well as any press who did any actual research. However, Anastasia has devoted a huge effort to trying to get the mainstream press to overlook the big nasty truth, that it isn't a dating company at all, but rather a scam - so some press have actually printed the Anastasia press releases without researching. You might want to read the relevant chapter of Slater's book carefully before concluding that it cannot be used as a reference. Slater clearly states in multiple instances that the company is a fraud: the women disappear when the men want to actually meet them, and the explanation for it is that the women are paid. It is a serious piece of research by Penguin, a well-respected publisher. It was certainly vetted by many attorneys before being published. It is the epitome of a reliable source.

Rest assured, that every positive twist in the entire edit history of this article was written by an Anastasia employee. Just trace the IPs if you doubt it. But the "neutral" voices - which you call negative - were written by many people who have learned about the company independently. Actually, the "negative" POV is likely the only consensus apart from the COI employees. The Fortune & Slater research are the most trustworthy pieces about this company and indicate this already. Inevitably over the next year more will come out and show, if not now, then later, what the reviewed and respected consensus is about the Co. Entyre (talk) 11:15, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

• I'm not saying Slater isn't a reliable source - it is. But, of course, quotes can be cherrypicked from it to show Anastasia in both a positive and negative light (even though, as you say, the overall tone is negative). If someone would like to introduce information from the Slater book that gives an overview of the source, rather than out-of-context snippets, then that would certainly be allowed (as long, of course, as it didn't stray into WP:SYNTH). Black Kite (talk) 12:35, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
  • That is a good point about WP:SYNTH - here is a summary of the Slater Chapter, which I claim anything other than a strong negative impression would indeed be WP:SYNTH. From the beginning of the chapter, Slater interviews Neil Bryant, who is described as an alcoholic British executive of Anastasia working in Russia, who says "Oh my God - I can't believe what I do for a living." When asked point blank "Are the girls on your site real?" the executive refused to answer, saying "We're going to let the journalist [Slater] decide."
  • Then Slater gets to the "Romance tour" which the company admits is a "publicity" stunt but which takes up 80% of the chapter (although Slater states that the vast majority of the men who interact with Anastasia's sites are only engaging with the website and never manage to actually meet anyone -- which the company executive rationalizes as being because the men are "Keyboard Romeos" and Slater points out that these men never actually even knew they were scammed. Slater's summary of the Anastasia position: "Therefore, much of the scamming goes undetected by Anastasia's users - no harm, no foul.")
  • Slater begins this by pointing out that almost every man on the tour has stories proving how he was scammed through Anastasia's sites. Even the very rare men who actually meet women via Anastasia find the women are some kind of scammer or another: "For every Western man looking not for a wife but for quick sex abroad, there is a woman looking not for a relationship but for a free night out in her hometown, shopping for shoes at the mall, and eating at restaurants that she and her family could never afford. As for explicit scamming, it's well-known among Web site users that the staffs of local bridal agencies will often pose as the women in the profiles, responding to incoming messages in order to keep the rubles rolling in. Nearly every man on the tour has a story of chatting up a beautiful woman online and then offering to fly down, only to be told, suddenly, that she'll be out of town or busy working during those dates. Two of the romance tourists on this trip came down specifically because they'd been corresponding with women they wanted to meet. In both cases, the men explained, the women were away doing a modeling tour and couldn't meet up."
  • Then he goes on to point out how a translator mis-translates intentionally. Then Slater tears apart the fake success statistics provided by Anastasia, showing that the only 1 example of a real "marriage" is even overplayed: "An alcoholic with a seething, hostile energy, Bovey comes across as a psychopath even to the tour's more fringe figures. And yet Bovey's marriage to a woman who cannot understand a word he says is Amo Latina's biggest success story."
  • Slater concludes his chapter by implying that Anastasia is not the only shady operator in international dating. In fact, he doesn't even mention a single one that he would recommend.
  • For Slater, his entire investigation of Anastasia can be summed up as it is a fraudulent player in a fraudulent industry. The only good part of it seems to be the justice in it, because in his eyes it appears that the men who go on the tours are such low-class belching, alcoholic, sex-crazed fools that they deserve to be scammed.
  • In this summary, I have not cherry-picked negative examples, I have summarized the entire chapter. Black Kite, If you provide me your address I will send you a free copy of this book for you to read yourself.
  • Unfortunately, Black Kite, you are in the unenviable position that a $100+ million dollar fraud operation would like you to allow them to use this page to try to create an impression of legitimacy. Apparently what happened with the Slater book is that they tried to get yet another journalist to gloss over their scam (they wanted him to go on the trip), but it backfired and he saw through it; rest assured they are trying to get him to backpedal what he said but it seems unlikely as he broke the unwritten agreement to give them a nice fluff piece in the first place. Now they are desperate to try to do damage control and would very much like to erase any history of the Slater investigation. If you can provide the names and addresses where I can send 10 copies of the Slater book so that all the Wiki administrators can read the chapter and figure out what is NPOV based on this most-in-depth analysis by any reputable journalist, I will send it. Entyre (talk) 19:13, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

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• I came into this 'randomly' (the page popped up on 'Check Wikipedia' for some syntax error, but I chimed in a bit (points at edit history). NPOV requires that the reliable sources be accurately and fairly represented...but, in this case apparently the only reliable non-first-person sources are negative. I looked up and filled out the citation the rest of the way, and the paragraph needs work. Badly.

For something like this, the 'Slater info' definitely needs to be in the article, however it needs to be very specifically sourced, to pages and with quotes. Saying "somewhere in some un-named chapter of this book, this guy says" is not acceptable. WP:BLP applies here, especially to 'defamatory statements', which is apparently the entire chapter.

• BTW, Penguin is an 'imprint', not a publisher...when citing a book, the best way to get the 'real' bibliographic info is to put the LCCN or ISBN (w/o hyphens) into catalog2.loc.gov or www.worldcat.org (the first is better, but less inclusive)...it's very common, for example, for the 'printed' date that people use to be the copyright date, not the publication date. This can make it /really hard to pin down what edition of a book someone is citing.

The exact came thing applies to the court case. We can use the 'news coverage' of it. We can use, with care, specific brief quotes from the actual court filings to illustrate the actual claims.

We can't cite the news story, and then only quote parts of what they were quoting that someone else (AI) wrote in a court document. Well, we can, very briefly, but not entire paragraphs that are 'unproven' defamatory statements by AI vs. someone else. This completely violates WP:IMPARTIAL. You would have to give equal weight to the defense filings, and TBH neither one (as they are 'first-person) is a RS for anything other than 'this was in a court filing'.

Given the way the court system works, what's in the asssertations of a civil lawsuit like this only has a very vague legally defined relationship to the truth. They aren't stating 'facts', or even things they claim are facts. They are saying, explicitly, "These are a list of the 'causes of action' we believe we can prove to a 'civil standard' (i.e. preponderance of the evidence, not the criminal standard) that are specifically listed in the law as allowing us to request 'relief' from the court."

It's the difference between the O.J. Simpson criminal trial, and the later 'wrongful death' civil lawsuit. Revent (talk) 19:45, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Lawsuit versus EM Online Ltd. dba Elena's Models

Here are 2 references for Anastasia vs Elena's Models court case. This was also deleted by Black Kite. I think it, or a summary, should go back.

Anastasia International on May 1, 2013 filed a suit versus the Australian company EM Online Ltd. dba Elena's Models, in US Federal Court in New York. The complaint resolves around the sites anastasiadatefraud.com and ruadvadventures.com, allegdly owned by Elena's Models, which according to the complaint, have fabricated negative testimonials, and used the trademarked name AnastasiaDate illegally.

"The anastasiadatefraud.com website purports to show extracts from e-mails written by women with profiles on Anastasiadate.com. The e-mail extracts all have a common message - the women featured on Anastasiadate.com are not truly looking for a relationship with United States men, but instead are contract workers paid to correspond with Anastasia customers and break their hearts. These allegations are false, and the emails from the women appear to be fake. Anastasiadate goes to great length to ensure that the women featured on the website are real people who are genuinely interested in dating and marrying United States men."

"The ruadventures.com website, while pretending to be an independently produced forum for the exchange of information about international dating services, in fact is only selecting and publishing negative information about Elena's Models competitors (including Anastasia) and positive reviews about Elena's Models service. The website contains false information about customers' use of the Anastasiadate service which ... has been fabricated by Elena's Models," the complaint states.

"CourtHouseNews Service by Rebekah Kearn". Retrieved 2013-05-06.

Add'l cite: http://dockets.justia.com/docket/new-york/nysdce/1:2013cv02919/411265/

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— Preceding unsigned comment added by Entyre (talk • contribs) 2013-05-11 -- Please sign your comments. Thanks. -- 19:53, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

BLP policy

Please specifically review WP:BLPPRIMARY and WP:BLPSPS before making further edits to this article. Court filings are essentially 'self-published'... though printed by others, they are specifially allowed to make unproven claims. Revent (talk) 20:02, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Merge Removed

I've boldly removed the merger based on the information given above on this talk page Verdict78 (talk) 14:31, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

I've reverted your edits as they do not seem to be NPV, nor accurate, nor consistent with the consensus of the talk page, nor in accordance with the direction Revent pointed out above. Alexis418 (talk) 08:30, 9 August 2013 (UTC) — Alexis418 (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.

The talk page is attempting to merge a company into the page of a company that no longer own it. Also there were numerous objections to one user's rants who was a sock puppet and was banned. This is why the merge was removed. Verdict78 (talk) 10:42, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I've reverted the edits again, as all evidence on the company's sites (such as anastasiasites.com) and all other references indicate there is no such 2011 business transaction, and on the other hand that actually the sites do continue to run as one unit. I just used Skype to call AmoLatina's number from their front page 800 844 3978 and a man with a Russian accent answered. I asked if my Anastasiadate site account would also allow me to login to AmoLatina, and he assured me that registering at any of the family of 4 sites would enable me to login and engage at any of these 4 sites. I am not claiming this is a valid reference because it is 1st person and not published, of course, but it's the common-sense test. Can you provide sources to backup your claim that these are completely different companies that do not have a common operational or entity basis? Alexis418 (talk) 08:52, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

A sykpe call is a good way of checking this, however just because the membership allows access to all the sites, doesn't mean Anastasia International own all 5 sites, including AmoLatina. From what I can see, the couple founded AmoLatina, but there is no mention that the site is owned by Anastasia International anywhere. Entyre pretty much destroyed this article singlehandedly, and the only reason the merge was requested is because of the work he's carried out. He was a sock puppet acting from what I can see with a WP:COI. Finally, I believe AmoLatina.com passes notability. How the company is setup is irrelevant. Therefore there's no need for a merge, and the article about Anastasia International should be improved. This is something I am trying to do, but you keep reverting my edits. Verdict78 (talk) 11:03, 10 August 2013 (UTC)