My friend Raoul is a highly intelligent, cultured man with a background in theater and radio who recently suffered a marriage breakdown. He called me up to ask me about whether it was safe to pay for stuff on the Internet using his credit card.

Naturally, I gave him the usual spiel about safe credit-card use on the Internet being pretty much the same as in the real world: just as you may trust a waiter in a restaurant to take your credit card away to the back and bring it back to you with your bill without having copied the card, you may trust an Internet vendor to the same degree if you have grounds for doing so.

In other words, trustworthiness does not depend on the technology but on the nature of the vendor. If you have a reason to trust someone doing business on the Internet, you are no worse off than doing business with the same person without the Internet. Check references, look for complaints, and avoid the known cheats.

However, years of doing technical support drove me to find out what the larger picture was. I’d hate to provide an answer that could lead someone into trouble because I didn’t understand the context. I asked, “But what is this about? What are you buying?”

Raoul said he was interested in paying for translation services to communicate with Russian (actually former-Soviet-Union, but I’ll just write “Russian” for convenience) women. Alarm bells immediately went off in my head.

I explained to Raoul that mail-order brides and introduction services are a classic scam for taking gullible men’s money. Criminals use photographs of attractive women to induce men to correspond with people claiming to be those women; profits come charging for introductions, billing inflated rates for travel arrangements and even charging for dates (hmm, why travel so far for an “escort service”?).

Sometimes, Russian women actually marry foreigners, especially Americans, move to the United States, gain citizenship based on their marriage, and promptly divorce their hapless victims as soon as possible - with a nice divorce settlement to boot.

Worse still, the women in such situations may actually be victims of human trafficking rings. Prof. Suzanne H. Jackson of George Washington Law School summarized the situation in her July 2004 testimony before the Committee on Foreign Relations of the U.S. Senate. Jackson pointed out that the premises of the “international matchmaking organizations” include assumptions that the women being advertised are all generic, stereotyped products of their cultures - homebodies, docile, traditional and also sexy - who are devoid of individuality and will gladly become wives of anyone who applies. “Select one, she’s yours!” suggests a typical service.

M. E. Kabay, PhD, CISSP-ISSMP, specializes in security and operations management consulting services. CV online.