The rule that matters more than the rest
No advance payment. Not to hold the time, not for her taxi, not to show that you are serious. A request to send money before you meet is not caution and not an agency policy; it is the only purpose the whole conversation had.
A real arrangement rests on a time and an address, not on a transfer. As soon as a card number, a wallet or a transfer service comes up before the meeting, the conversation can end, whatever is said afterwards. This is worth knowing in advance precisely because you are new here and cannot tell a local custom from an invented one.
Photographs that belong to someone else
The second most common problem is a listing using another person's pictures. It is easier to spot than people expect.
- Every shot is studio quality, in one style, as though from a single session, with no ordinary phone photographs at all.
- There are traces of cropping: someone else's watermark, a cut-off logo, different quality and visibly different years.
- A request for a recent photograph with any condition attached, a raised hand for instance, goes unanswered or is met with irritation.
- The replies are boilerplate and do not answer the question you actually asked.
Checking takes a minute
Put a photograph from the listing through a reverse image search. If the same pictures have been sitting on a dozen sites in different cities and countries for years, it is not her.
A short voice or video call settles it more reliably. A refusal is not damning on its own, since plenty of people guard their privacy, but a refusal together with anything else on the list above tells you enough.
The badge on this site does the same job in advance: it means she has confirmed that the photographs in the listing are of her, and that is the one thing we check. It is not a recommendation or a rating, and what it does and does not promise is set out in what the verified badge means. Those listings are collected on the verified listings page, which is a sensible place to start on a first visit.
Middlemen a visitor runs into
This is the version aimed specifically at people who have just arrived. A taxi driver, a doorman or someone at the hotel offers to arrange the evening for you, and it sounds like a local service because you have no way of knowing that it is not.
What follows is predictable: the price is set by him and is higher, the person who arrives may not be the person described, and there is nobody to raise it with afterwards. Anything agreed through a third party stops being an arrangement between you and her. Arrange it yourself, in writing, with the woman whose listing you are reading.
The conversation before the meeting
Five minutes of messages tell you more than the whole listing. Ask something that is not in the advertisement: how it is easiest to get there, what time suits her, how long she is setting aside. Someone who genuinely runs her own listing answers specifically and asks questions back.
Write plainly and in short sentences. English is common in the centre but it is nobody's first language here, and a misunderstood arrangement causes exactly the problems you are trying to avoid. Being hurried is the one thing that should make you slow down: pressure exists so that you do not have time to think.
If it happens anyway
Write to us. We take down listings that use other people's photographs or ask for advance payments, and we do it on a single report. Nothing has to be proven; screenshots of the conversation are enough.
That is in our own interest. The site works only as long as its listings can be believed, and one listing like that costs us more than ten honest ones bring. You can also reach us through the questions and answers page.