Beware of BuffinNeighbours.com! They are engaging in fraudulent activities. Be cautious of their reviews from January 2024.

The landing page of BuffinNeighbours.com is not particularly appealing. But perhaps our judgement is biased by our experience with this operator. The various rip-off sites we have already tested in the past follow the exact same design. However, to be fair, and to see exactly what users can expect, we signed up for a free profile. We carefully read the site’s terms of use, just as the landing page “strongly advised” us to do. This is what we found out.

The following note is from the terms and conditions

5.2. buffinneighbours.com has entertainment as its goal, it is explicitly not the purpose of buffinneighbours.com to establish dates or meetings in person.

5.3. Midsummer Online B.V explicitly reserves the right to send calls on buffinneighbours.com through self-created profiles. These are fictitious profiles with which no physical agreements are possible.

Fictitious profiles

Midsummer Online BV, the operating company behind this website, based in Deventer, in the Netherlands, could not be more specific about how the scam works. All new users will be contacted by these fake profiles, which are created by company employees. The most inexperienced or naive might be tempted to believe that they suddenly became wildly successful. But they will soon realize, that while they can read the messages, they cannot respond to them, unless they buy “credits.” This is a virtual currency used for paying for sending instant messages in the chat.

An equally effective and dishonest way for the operator to absolve itself of any responsibility for this scam, is to specify in the Terms of Service, that the fake profiles are marked with a “heart icon”. However, to understand that such an icon truly means that the profiles are fictitious, users must read and understand the entire terms. Unfortunately, very few people do.

Credits are a scam

Not only is dating impossible on BuffinNeighbours.com, but the price of the credits, which are required to chat with fictitious people, is beyond reasonable. It is utterly absurd. Each single message will cost a minimum of £1.00. But if users are ready to pay £300, the price per message increases to £1.25! Not only are these crooks bad at English, but they are also obviously bad at maths.