PrefaceThis will be long, but I offer it for what it’s worth.
I suppose that a few members of UKP with a particular interest in the subject will read it. Others may skim-read, or skip to the sections at the end where I discuss the scam in detail. Many will doubtless roll their eyes and move straight on.
IntroductionAbout three months ago a girl I know told me she’d joined the sugardaddy.co.uk website. I’d never heard of it, but decided to take a look.
I had of course heard of Seeking – formerly Seeking Arrangements – because it is widely discussed on UKP. Some members of UKP seem to have done well on Seeking. Others have found it frustrating and a waste of time and money. Either way, I long ago decided that the Seeking way of doing things wasn’t for me – even though such escort-type activity as there still is seems to have abandoned the desert that is Adult Work, and moved towards the greener pastures of various sugar daddy type sites.
However, just for the crack (as it were), I thought I’d give the Sugar Daddy website a go.
As others have recently pointed out, the Sugar Daddy website is simply a duplicate of the Secret Benefits site, which has been discussed on a long thread on UKP. Apart from the different colour-scheme, the sites are identical, and any girl who puts her profile on one of them is automatically listed on the other. Indeed to all intents and purposes
External Link/Members Only and
External Link/Members Only are simply two links leading to the same site.
When I first started taking a mild interest in the Sugar Daddy site I couldn’t find any reference to it on UKP, so it appears to be the less-used version. Some of my experience will repeat what others have written about Secret Benefits, but some of my comments will be new.
What’s Good about the SD and SB WebsitesThey’re well-designed and simple to use.
What’s Bad about the SD and SB WebsitesEverything else – because, since the sites are mainly a scam, the site-owners’ priorities are not to make things convenient for the male members, but to rinse them of as much money as possible.
The sites work on the basis that you buy a bundle of credits, priced in dollars. The price varies depending on whether you buy a small number or in bulk. If you buy a small number, each “activity” costs you the best part of £5. (The price you are charged for each activity can vary. On Sugar Daddy I am currently being asked to pay 12 credits to unlock a conversation – it was 11 credits a few weeks ago – per activity, while on Secret Benefits I’m currently being asked to pay 10 credits.)
The core “activity” on the sites is to reply to a message you’ve been sent or, alternatively, to try to open a conversation with a girl you like the look of. Once you’ve paid to start a conversation, you don’t have to pay any more to continue the conversation. So far, so fair enough (or it would be if all the profiles were genuine).
Beyond that, there is endless frustration and annoyance. The site is run in such a way that almost everything you might reasonably expect for free once you’ve paid to start a conversation in fact costs extra.
Here are the main annoyances (excluding for the time being the scam element itself):
1. The messages you send and receive are neither time nor date stamped. This is massively inconvenient. I suppose the site does this so that no message ever appears stale. Also it muddies the waters. But it’s incredibly frustrating.
2. When you send your first message to a girl, you see this: “For just 10 [or 11 or 12] credits BOOST your message and we'll highlight it in [name of girl]’s inbox.” Does anyone fall for this nonsense?
3. You’re also offered this: “See when your messages have been read with read receipts, just 10 [or 111 or 12] credits per conversation.” Outrageous! Adult Work does this for free. Once you’ve paid the best part of a fiver (less if you’ve bought in bulk) to start a conversation, it should be axiomatic that you can see if your messages have been read.
4. The pointless secondary (“secret”) galleries also cost 10 (or 11 or 12) credits. Unlike on Adult Work, the girl gets no financial benefit from the second gallery. The one girl I have met from the site was surprised and indeed aggrieved to learn that the site was profiting from her in this way – and indeed that men had to pay around a fiver simply to open a message. In other words, any genuine girl on the SD / SB website who messages a lot of men fairly randomly has no idea that she is luring them into spending a fiver. Of course a fairer system would be that opening a message is free, while replying costs you 10 / 11 / 12 credits. Then the man, having read what the girl has to say, can make an informed decision as to whether she has any serious intentions before he spends any money. But such a system would disrupt the huge profits the site makes from the many fake profiles there.
5. If you read back to the top of a conversation that’s been going on for a while, you find that the site has automatically deleted the early exchanges, with “For your privacy, messages are erased after 28 days.” In the unlikely event that I want to protect my privacy by erasing old messages, I’d like to be able to have a choice in the matter! As it is, it’s very inconvenient to be unable to look back to (for example) the all-important start of a conversation.
6. The profiles don’t give the date the girl joined the site. It is possible to get a rough idea by clicking on the “Recently added” option for sorting the profiles and scrolling down the pages and searching for the name of the girl you want to find out about.
The ScamThere can be little doubt but that SD / SB makes most of its money from the scam element of the sites.
If you put the search term “secret benefits scam” into Google, you will find numerous detailed reviews on various message boards in which male users of SD/ SB outline their experiences – which are very similar to mine and to those of most of those who have posted on the UKP thread about Secret Benefits. (It can safely be assumed that the majority of the glowing “reviews” on the various message boards are written by employees of SD / SB.)
As already indicated, male members of SD / SB have to pay up to a fiver simply to read a girl’s message – which may (and indeed generally does) consist simply of a generic “Hey, how are you?” or similar.
Like most UKP members who have used the Secret Benefits site, I almost never initiated a conversation on Sugar Daddy. On the other hand, if a girl has messaged or “favorited” you, it’s reasonable to suppose that she would welcome communication from you – particularly if she’s also viewed your profile (this information is available). So why do you almost never get a reply? Or, if you do get a brief reply and then respond amiably, why does the conversation then almost always dry up?
Now you might assume that the reason I got almost no replies is that my messages included something that is in some way off-putting or that I was “coming on too strong”. But that is certainly not the case. All my replies were friendly and courteous “conversation-openers”. I didn’t mention sex or money. For all the girl knew, I might indeed be the kind of “mentor” most of the genuine girls seem to be looking for – in other words, a rich, kind, generous man who will pay them shed-loads of money just to have them sit smiling sweetly at them over a dinner-table two or three times a month while he gives them wise advice about their lives.
Nor were my replies “generic”. They always included amiable references to things the girl had written on their profile.
And don’t forget that in almost all cases I wasn’t writing out of the blue. If I had been, the girl might look at my profile and decided that I was not for her. But no. I was mainly messaging girls who had – or should have – read my profile and, as a result, had messaged and / or “favorited” me.
Soon after joining Sugar Daddy, I experimentally joined Secret Benefits under a different name, and from a different browser. For reasons that will become clear, I don’t think the sites’ bots “know” that my SD profile and my SB profile relate to the same person.
The text of my two profiles is very much along the same lines – neither is more interesting nor more boring than the other.
Refunding of CreditsLike a number of UKP members who have used Secret Benefits, I wrote to Sugar Daddy customer services to complain that many of the girls’ profiles appeared to be fake, and was promptly given a fresh set of credits.
Others have commented that Secret Benefits’ customer service is excellent. Of course it is! Its role is to try to keep to a minimum the number of members who go on the internet to complain that the site is a scam. Refunding a few credits here and there is small change compared to the masses of money the site makes from fake profiles.
The “Proof” of the ScamWhile most of the evidence for the SD / SB website being a scam is strong, it’s only indicative. But there is one piece of evidence that is, in my view, conclusive.
On Sugar Daddy – where I paid for a set of credits, complained and got my credits refunded – messages from new girls long ago totally dried up. I don’t think I’ve received a single new message for at least two months. In other words, SD’s bots know that I’ve paid once; that I’m disgruntled; that I’ve had a refund; and that I’ve almost certainly decided that the site is a waste of time. So there’s no point in expending bot-energy trying to milk me for any more.
On my profile on the Secret Benefits version of the site, however, the messages just keep on coming in. Two or three a day, every day. Week after week.
At the moment I have unread messages from 68 girls – but since messages “drop out” after 28 days, that figure probably represents about a third of the messages my Secret Benefits account has received over my three months or so of membership.
Popular boy, aren’t I? Or at least I am on Secret Benefits. Not on Sugar Daddy.
Why the difference? The answer can only be that I have never bought any credits on Secret Benefits, and therefore the site’s bots keep on trying to get me to become a paying customer by sending me messages from alluring girls.
How Does the Scam Operate?This is what puzzles me. I simply can’t work this one out. Perhaps others more internet-savvy than me – or better at lateral thinking – may have theories.
I have, however I’ve been studying the “behaviour” of profiles in my area with some care – particularly the regularity (or not) of the profiles’ logging-on, so there are pointers.
The first thing to say is that, while the people who run SD / SB may be scammers, they aren’t fools. If the “pattern of behaviour” of all profiles was similar, it would of course be glaringly obvious that something wasn’t right.
Surely we can rule out the possibility that the girls are complicit in the scam? In other words, that girls are paid a proportion of the money their profiles earn in exchange for letting their photos be used? If that were the case, some of them would surely have blown the whistle. No?
So one of the central mysteries is this. Where do the photos come from? Clearly the site can’t use photos without permission.
Among the profiles in my area, there are a few girls from ethnic minorities, but most are white. The white girls certainly look like British girls, but I suppose they could equally well be from (say) the USA, western Europe or Australia. They’re certainly not the Vivastreet type – professional quality photographs of model-gorgeous girls who bear no resemblance to the girl who will encounter if you’re so misguided as to take a trip down Viva Street. Again SD / SB are too clever for that. The photos are the kind of everyday photos that normal girls take on their mobiles – selfies in the mirror and so on. Indeed, although most of the girls are very attractive, they’re very rarely “fake model” types.
Also, while the SD / SB site is clearly hugely profitable, running the scam must be very time-consuming. Some of the work must be done by humans, surely? Creating profiles, making them all look a bit different, and so on? I suppose that once a profile’s been done, the bots can send out messages, regulate the frequency with which the girl is active and so on. But creating hundreds of brief profiles without repeating the same look can’t be easy.
ConclusionAs I’ve indicated, I’m far from sure what’s going on and far from claiming omniscience. Some of my deductions may be spot on. Some may be wide of the mark. Nonetheless my unshakeable conviction is that there is a massive scam element to the sites.
I would be very interested to see whether other UK members have any theories – in particular about how the scam works.
The girl I know who joined the SD site – and alerted me to its existence –- hoped that the “exchange” she got from the men who replied was going to be money for dinner-dates, and she quickly got disillusioned. All the men who messaged her made clear that they expected sex to be involved. The approach was more “measured” than on Adult Work – in other words, there would be dinner first – but the deal was ultimately the same.
In other words, the “mentor” figure – and I doubt if many members of UKP will drop their coffee-cups in astonishment at this revelation – simply does not exist. Or, if he does, he is vanishingly rare.
My guess is that, anyway at the younger end of the scale, 80% of the profiles on SD / SB are fake, but I dare say that the proportion of genuine profiles increases with age.
Since there are a number of genuine profiles among the fakes, some users of the sites – particularly those with endless patience and perseverance – will have had very satisfactory outcomes. But the generality of internet feedback suggests that most users’ experiences have been similar to mine.
