This site is part of a family of scam sites branded as Safe and Single. They use a series of different URL’s with the exact same web page design. Freehookupmembar.com is an attempt to get your money through a “get verified” online dating scam. This one attempts to sign you up for porn sites, and can cost $130 if you are not careful. Let’s see how they do it…

Note that this is not a mis-spelling. This is the real name of the site. There is also a site Freehookupmember.com. This is owned by the same person. Read on to learn more.

The Setup

This follows the typical pattern, is that you respond to a personal ad, and in the response, they ask you to send them a note to a different email. The response email is often full of copy-paste remnants and grammar errors. The target email address is monitored programmatically, and the responses you get are automatic. The common term for this is ‘bot’, short for robot.

When you are in the cycle of these bots, you literally can say anything. No one is reading the response. What will happen is that you will receive a few emails that are designed to simulate conversation, and escalate interest. Eventually you will receive an email that directs you to the “get verified” online dating scam site.

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Scam Site

The site touts that it will verify you, and make sure you are 18 and not a sex offender. There is no fee for this, it is free. You just need to provide a credit card so they can verify you. First you enter some basic information, pick a user ID a password, a location, and give them an email. Next, you are presented a page that requests your credit card.

Here is what is really happening…

The freehookupmembar.com site displays the credit card entry page shown here.

Thru use of a web programming command, known as IFrame, you are typing your information in another site, without you knowing it. I have detected two different behaviors on this site. Sometimes, freehookupmembar.com uses the website uetrk.com; sometimes it uses safedatingverified.com Sometimes it uses freedatinginvites.com to redirect you to yet another site – localsdiscreet.com. This last site presents the webpage where you are typing. All without you knowing.

Uetrk.com and Safedatingverified.com

This site acts as a kind of controller, and click generator. It displays content from, and directs your input to, a rotation of branded dating billing sites. By going to the source code of the web page, and clicking directly on the uetrk.com link (that you can’t see), I was able to determine the actual sites, and see the full content. A very small sample of these branded dating billing sites include:

mdbfskym.com – Married But Frisky Matches
nevrve.com – Nature Lovers In Love
lcllv.com – Locals Find Love

Each of the sites has terms and conditions that reveal the credit card charge. However, because the way the freehookupmembar.com page uses the iframe command, you cannot see this charge – it is blocked below the green button. You can see the real website content in this picture. This is the hidden content:

Your access to Dates.Hookup includes a 2 day free trial promo to (name of branded site). If you choose to remain a member of (name of branded site) beyond the trial period your membership will renew at thirty nine dollars and ninety nine cents.

The site does not say this, but no doubt the $39.99 is a recurring monthly charge (like other sites of this nature).

LocalsDiscreet.com

This site has terms and conditions that reveal the credit card charge. However, because the way the freehookupmembar.com page uses the iframe command, you cannot see this charge – it is hidden. This is the hidden content:

Any charges made to your credit card will appear under ‘PMTROUTE.COM’.
Upgrade to Platinum Membership – FREE +
(**) Your free lifetime access to CammeetupHD includes a free 2 day trial to Premier Passport+++ that renews same calendar day at a fixed $39.95/month after the trial period ends unless cancelled.
Any charges made to your card will appear under ‘PMTROUTE.COM’
+ Your Platinum Membership Details++: – EroticDvdsOnline.com – 7 Days Free Trial, membership renews same calendar day at a fixed $39.94/monthly, after the trial period ends unless cancelled.- XXXHDVault.com – 10 Days Free Trial, membership renews same calendar day at a fixed $49.95/monthly, after the trial period ends unless cancelled.

Let me summarize that for you

39.95 / month for Premier Passport
39.94 / month for EroticDvdsOnline.com
49.95 / month for XXXHDVault.com

That’s nearly $130 a month!

Since the iframe command doesn’t show thecontent, you have no idea that these charges are, and you are likely not to know about it until you receive your credit card bill. By then, the trial period has passed.

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You do not know where your information is going

The owner of the freehookupmembar.com site is Mamun Ali, who reports his location as Dhaka, Bangladesh. LocalsDiscreet.com, FreeDatingInvites.com, and PMTROUTE.COM, are registered anonymously. If that makes you feel uneasy, it should.

This rabbit hole goes even deeper…

The branded dating billing site has a corresponding branded dating site, such as GolfersNeedLove.com. Underneath these sites, is a white label dating company, which handles the credit card charges, and delivers the “dating” content to the corresponding branded dating site. You can read more about the how this network of scams works, in this post Get Verified: Tinder, Badoo, and Craigslist – Matrix of a Scam.

freehookupmembar.com is a Get Verified Scam

It is not a legitimate site. It is not a legitimate ask to verify yourself in any site like this. It is easy to see how they are making their money. An entrepreneurial fellow from a far distant corner of the world has set up a website, that leads you to a place where you are signed up for a dating site. Then the money flows back from there. They are no doubt counting on the fact that enough people will be happy to get the recurring charge stopped, and walk away, maybe only out $130.

If you have been snagged by this sort of a scam

What you need to do is call your bank, and dispute the charges. You should also send written notice, within 60 days after the charge appeared on your card. Please feel free to refer to this post. Any fraud investigator at a bank will be able to take the information I have posted here and verify it. Chances are the bank will just reverse the charge as deceptive or fraudulent, and that will be that. Note that you also need to cancel your credit card. You cannot be sure who has your credit card number.

More Clues to the freehookupmembar.com Scam

Faking Location

The website is designed to make you think that your date is nearby. The way they do it is by using a java script code from Geoplugin.net. Geoplugin is code that determines your general location by looking at your IP address. The scam website takes that information and makes it appear as if your “date” is in the same general area as you. If you go to the site from California, you will see Anita near you as well.

No Home Page

If you go directly to the URL freehookupmembar.com, you will see a very simple directory structure, no home page content. A home page not needed for how they use the site, which is sending direct deep links to pages underneath the home page. A deep link is when they go to a specific page on the site; it would have some appendix on the URL, such as /Anita.

Avoiding a search engine

OK a little webmaster 101 stuff here. When you set up a site, you take steps so that the site can be found by search engines. In principle, you want people to find your site. In order to do that, there are some basic steps, such as providing a title and description of the site in the code, technically known as meta tags. The meta tags help the search engine find the site, and describe its’ contents. It only takes a minute or two to put these on your site. (The next time you do a search, look at the search results page, there will be three things, the URL, the Title, and the Description).

Typically when these sites have a home page, they do not have any meta tags, and in some cases take overt steps to prevent the site from being indexed by a search engine. Google will simply say that they cannot provide a description for the site. You can infer from the lack of a site description etc. that the scammer doesn’t want your average search to find their site – that would only draw attention to them. They are content with spamming and scamming to get traffic to the site.

The same ole pictures

The picture on the website, is our friend Elise, from safedatersverify and other get verified scams. It’s a small world after all.

Of course we do not know where this picture originates from; the lovely Anita/Sophie/Elise is not who is behind the operation. We do know that if you see this picture, it will be a scam.

Freehookupmembar.com Owner

Creation Date: 2016-03-18T18:25:22Z
Registrant Name: Mamun Ali
Registrant Organization: mamun
Registrant Street: Shukrabad , Dhanmondi -32  
Registrant City: Dhaka
Registrant State/Province: Dhaka
Registrant Postal Code: 1207
Registrant Country: BD
Registrant Phone: +880.1920188561
Registrant Email: jonypk64@gmail.com"

Freehookupmember.com Owner

Creation Date: 2016-07-15T18:13:46Z
Registrant Name: Mamun Ali
Registrant Organization: mamun
Registrant Street: Shukrabad , Dhanmondi -32  
Registrant City: Dhaka
Registrant State/Province: Dhaka
Registrant Postal Code: 1207
Registrant Country: BD
Registrant Phone: +880.1920188561
Registrant Email: jonypk64@gmail.com"

Online Dating Scams

Freehookupmembar.com – get verified scam