One persistent type of spam-advertised Internet scam is the so-called 'Russian bride' scam. The basic form is simple: the scammer sends out messages that claim to come from lovelorn young Russian women seeking romantic partners in the West. 'Elena' (or 'Katerina' or 'Natasha') paints a picture of herself in broken English as a sweet, sensitive (but sexy) young girl who is disappointed with Russian men and hopes to find her true love elsewhere. 'She' explains that she "saw your profile on that dating site", or got your email address from a friend. The messages typically include a picture, and a contact email address where potential suitors can contact the sweet young innocent.

The bride scam is a form of advance fee fraud, except that the mythical 'small package of value' that the sucker is hoping to receive isn't the wealth of a Nigerian general but a sweet, sensitive (and sexy) young woman. Once contact is made, 'Elena' will reveal that she needs money - for debts, for sick friends, for air tickets etc - and will string the victim along, always inventing one more pretext for needing money or delaying a face-to-face meeting. Interestingly, not only are the scammers not women, sometimes they're not even Russian. In 2005, an American man named Robert McCoy was jailed for scamming victims out of more than a million dollars.

Spam emails advertising Russian bride scams tend not to be very high volume, but recently rates have spiked sharply. The new emails have one significant difference: instead of giving an email address, they give a link to a website.

The website link typically points to one of a number of .info domains (dzhnana-yoga.info, diet-macho.info, dom-lechebnik.info etc, hosted by GoDaddy) and contains an argument 'idAff', which presumably is meant to indicate an affiliate ID. The ID appears always to be 136, so either that argument isn't actually meaningful, or affiliate #136 is one very busy little spammer.

Visiting the link bounces you to another site (dances.name, hosted in China) where there are pictures of wistful Russian women and a message welcoming you to "The best Russian brides online dating site". Click the 'contact me' link under one of the girls' pictures and eventually you'll find yourself face to face with a signup form that asks for your name and email address.

In the interests of science, I set up a new webmail address and signed up. The site displayed a message that said it would tell me how to contact the ladies, but for three days nothing more happened. Then, suddenly, my test mailbox started to fill up with messages from the site marmeladies.com, telling me that I had messages in my Marmeladies inbox (from 'ladies', of course) or that someone had 'sent me a kiss'. Without doing anything at all or giving any information except my (invented) name and email address, I was suddenly a popular guy.

I followed the link to my 'inbox'. As promised, it was full of messages, each one accompanied by a picture of the sender (sweet, sensitive, sexy), and a short teaser ("I am a cat woman" ... "______, listen to your heart!" ... "________, Let us take a risk together!". These girls wanted me, and they wanted me bad. I clicked the first message to open it.

Oh no! A warning appeared telling me that I could not open the message because I did not have enough credit. But that's OK. The warning included a link that I could click to buy credit. I dutifully clicked the link and learned that two credits - enough to open one message and send a reply - would cost me $13. That's steep, but if I wanted to buy fifty credits in advance, the price would drop to under $4 per credit. With fifty credits, I could exchange letters and kisses to my heart's content with all the imaginary vixens on the site ... until my credit ran out and I had to buy more.

I'd be curious to know how heavily automated the site is. It wouldn't be very challenging to generate random profiles and random messages (they're careful enough not to give the game away by accidentally sending the same message twice or assigning the same photograph to different girls). Writing replies to messages that are convincing enough to keep the mark coming back would be harder to automate. Reading between the lines of a report at aboutus.org, it sounds as if replies may be authored by real people rather than bots. It's a pretty safe bet, however, that the authors aren't the smiling women whose pictures are displayed on the site. They're much more likely to be either in-house staff or at-home pieceworkers.

The genius of the scheme is not that it permits automation, but the way that it lowers the barrier to entry. In the traditional Russian bride scam, 'Elena' has to ask for relatively large amounts of money - for air tickets, college fees or whatever. 'She' can't keep asking for the price of a pack of cigarettes. The danger is that the size of the sums involved may frighten away some potential suckers, so the scammer has to put a lot of work into building up the relationship with the mark before 'she' asks for money. It's a classic long con, involving lots of work and a (relatively) big payoff.

marmeladies.com drops the price of admission radically. Someone who believes that beautiful Russian women really want to meet him now only needs to pay $5-10 a time. And once he's hooked, the operators can keep him coming back, getting a few more dollars out of him with every exchange. The more the victim has already spent exchanging money with the 'ladies', the more he will buy into the fiction.

Is Marmeladies a scam? It's hard to know for certain, but everything we know about it suggests that it is. There's no reason to believe that the 'ladies' are any more real than the affiliate who is allegedly sending all that spam. If that's the case, the people behind it may have just done something remarkable. They may actually have succeeded in commoditizing advance fee fraud.

Update: The ever-diligent I Kill Spammers has also done some investigating and points out that this outfit also does business as lady-marmelady.com. I'm guessing that the names will continue to change over time.