A white label company provides website operations, content, and billing services in a generic fashion for a branded dating site.
A branded site is a front end to a white label service company.
The owner invents a theme, and works with the white label company, which puts up a façade website, and connects it to a white label company operations on the backend.
The white label company collects the money and pays the branded site owners when new members sign up for the service.
You might be familiar with the term ‘private label’, which is commonly used in consumer goods. Company “A” puts their name on the product; Company “B” makes the product and ships it to the stores. It’s the same concept – There are white label dating services and white label adult services.
It all adds up to a very complex network of facade websites, multiple middle men, a front/shell company that shows up on your credit card statement, and the white label company that takes their share of the top, and distributes the money back down the chain.
In this simplified example, a person started with a plan to meet someone. It could have been on Tinder, PoF, SkipTheGames (or anywhere – scammers are everywhere). Without you knowing, you are directed to a half gibberish sounding site like rhsfty.com which is the sign up and billing site for Lets Shine Together.
Underneath Shine, is the white label company.
The white label company has a large database, that provides content (members). The white label company has the infrastructure to deliver the content, and manage the membership. This includes sign up, billing, customer service, and of course paying the branded site owner.
The branded site owner, pays the next site upstream, like in the picture above.
Built in to this complex network is plausible deniability. If any one of the actors in the chain does something they should not, then they can sever the relationship with the upstream scammer.
As Always, I encourage you to judge for yourself. Here is the home page for JoinCheckout.
Of course for the scammer, setting up a new website takes about half an hour. ABC website copies their scam content to XYZ, gets a new affiliate number, and they are back in business.
It’s a rockin deal.
So What’s The Problem
In theory, as a person interested in dating, this would give you access to a larger population and potential dates.
Reality
- The sites I found in my investigation use fake profiles. Called Hosts or Love Stars, they are intended to stimulate conversation. You can find this disclosed in the fine print of terms of use of the sites.
- The sites have wide varieties of themes. You might have signed up for a True Romance site, but can be connected to someone who signed up for a Fling Tonight site.
- While there are companies in many places across the world, most of the transactions are directed towards shell companies in Cyprus
- It is difficult to get traffic to a dating site, so people resort to unethical means of signing up members.
- These are small shell companies, with unknown operations – I do not know what companies operate the white label sites.
- They typically do not take responsibility for the security of your personal and financial information.
So in theory, this sort of arrangement should be just fine. In actual execution, the customer has placed their personal and financial information at risk, with little to no benefit.