A site known as CharmDate.com focuses on helping men find partners from Russia and the Ukraine. The site claims to eliminate language and cultural barriers to facilitate matches. When dealing with a matchmaking site that involves traveling thousands of miles in order to meet in person, it is important that you conduct a more stringent level of due diligence than when dealing with a run-of-the-mill hookup site.

We reviewed CharmDate.com, not only to evaluate its overall performance, but also to provide you with sufficient insight so you can determine if it is a proper investment of your time and money. Here is our full CharmDate review.

CharmDate Review Results Popularity - 48

Value - 24

Features - 39

Quality of Members - 33

Safety - 71

Customer Satisfaction - 38 42 Final Word on CharmDate Based on our testing, we regret to report that we found CharmDate to be a complete disappointment. Not only does it not pass are basic sniff test for a standard dating site, when you take into consideration that it is intended for international matchmaking, we are only left with the option of rating it as EXTREMELY POOR. It is just too costly to determine the real profiles from the fakes.

— Pros and Cons —

Pros

Simple registration process

Android app available

Voice and text translation available

Cons

Convoluted payment structure

Full of automated chat bots

Too many fake profiles

— In-depth CharmDate Review —

Finding love in another part of the world is nothing new. Mail order brides had popularity as far back as the 19th century. In the modern day, the internet has provided a platform to create renewed interest in this style of matchmaking.

CharmDate.com is a long-distance matchmaking site operated by the Qpid Network. It is part of a large group of dating sites, each one focused on matching Western men with women from different regions of the globe. In the case of CharmDate, it focuses on women from Ukraine and Russia.

— What CharmDate.com Promises —

On the welcome page and promotional material for CharmDate, the site emphasizes two key sets of features. One involves the elimination of language and cultural barriers. The other involves providing a layer of elevated security and protection.

CharmDate claims to eliminate language barriers by offering different types of translation services. The simplest of these involves translating email and text messages for the two parties involved. That means that the men do not have to speak Russian and the women do not have to speak English in order to sustain conversations.

CharmDate also offers advanced translation services in the form of simultaneous voice translation. In order to accomplish this, CharmDate provides a mechanism for members to participate in a telephone conversation with a translator on the line.

In terms of security, CharmDate offers data protection and privacy features that are in line with the industry standard. They also offer a sort of “concierge” service designed to book travel packages. This involves CharmDate helping to organize and book travel to either the Ukraine or Russia with the purpose of having both interested parties meet in person. By offering these types of arrangements, CharmDate explains that they provide a safer environment for the initial meeting. Additionally, they mention that they only retain the lodging and travel services of reputable companies. This, supposedly, shields users from potentially unscrupulous travel vendors.

— Registration —

Registering on CharmDate is fast and easy. The site uses an expedited front-end registration process. That means that the amount of personal information required to establish your account is minimal. All that is required is your full name, the gender of the partner that you are seeking, your birth date, your location, and your email. You can even skip entering all of that data by accepting to link your Facebook account to CharmDate.

Following your initial registration, you have the ability to create a personal profile inclusive of images. This follows a pattern that is commonly found on other Qpid Network sites. The focus is placed on the initial registration and not much on fleshing out profiles.

— The Flaws —

While the concept of seeking beautiful women overseas is very tempting, the method in which CharmDate tries to bring it about is seriously flawed.

To begin with, from the moment that you first enter the site, you are targeted to receive a series of automated messages. These messages are constructed to appear to come from legitimate female members on the site. Unfortunately, they all come from chatbots.

When you open the profile of the supposed women sending these messages, you are redirected to a fictitious profile. The terms of service of CharmDate clearly stipulate that they use automated messages and fictitious profiles for marketing purposes.

Even though this practice is fully disclosed to you, it still results in a very negative user experience. During our tests, the number and frequency of these automated messages seemed to increase each time that one of our testers logged into their account. For some of our testers, the frequency was upward of 25 such messages per hour.

Such aggressive upselling efforts could have been forgiven if not for the fact that the majority of the female profiles were fake or inactive. When you couple sneaky and aggressive upselling tactics with a user base that is comprised of fake profiles, you’re going to get a lot of pissed off people.

— Available Platforms —

There are three platform versions for CharmDate. The most reliable version is the one intended for desktop browsers. It also has an Android app that is available on Google Play.

When our testers used the Android app, those using Android Lollipop experienced some minor issues with the app freezing.

The least reliable platform for CharmDate is the one intended for mobile browsers. This was practically useless when trying to use any feature. The most that you could use it for was to browse through other members profiles.

— Cost of CharmDate—

Technically, CharmDate does not charge a monthly subscription. However, in order to respond to private messages, in order to send an email message to another member, and of course to use any of the translation services offered, you have to pay in the form of credits.

Two credits have a cost of $3.99. Each of the features and services has a cost that is priced in fractions of credits per minute. As an example, engaging in a video chat without a translator will cost you 0.6 credits per minute.

In our opinion, the entire pricing structure is designed to be convoluted and confusing. Since automated top off of credits is the default setting, it is easy for a member to run up a very high bill in just one or two conversations.