Elena F From Russia

We recently received this e-mail from our dear Elena F. from Saint Petersburg.

Gmail marked this as spam, but we knew better.* Serious relations, youth, low-end-of-normal BMI? Music to any 32+ years of age single human’s ears! And she included this beautiful picture, too.

That’s when we knew it was meant to be. We wrote back, hearts all a-flutter.

But she never returned our message. Alas, alack, heartbreak and sorrow! We will never know why.

*It totally is spam. Report or delete messages like Elena’s. For more information, see the U.S. embassy in Moscow’s guide to internet dating scams, our list of Five Ways a Dating Site Might Deceive or this man’s mysterious tale (perhaps not usual or illustrative, but very interesting).

UPDATE 2/26/14: We heard back from Elena, but we’re still suspicious. For one thing, she always writes her height and weight, but they’re not always the same numbers; in one e-mail she’s 5′ 5,” 110 pounds, and in another she’s 5′ 7,” 124 pounds. It’s true she could lose weight or grow taller, but it seems unlikely in the span of a few days or weeks. Some more Internet searching based on her responses has also led us to a forum complaining about e-mails from this same address, and the emails and replies people say they got from Elena are the same as the ones we received, word for word. Additionally, her IP address is in Germany, which doesn’t necessarily mean the email is being sent from someone in Germany, but is another cause for pause. Stock responses, inconsistency, fuzzy location—not exactly romantic, right? Our recommendation for caution stands.