likes the outdoors, more the open air of the beach or the desert than the woods. She would love to live somewhere away from it all. She is bright and funny and full of life and while she has little direct experience with the opposite sex we have made sure she is aware of everything she needs to know to be a good wife and mother.

Just a quick note that you say that the site is a hoax (which it may or may not be, I have no opinion) because it has google ads - you are aware that -your site- has google ads?

LOL

John

I do believe that the custom of bride price, while common elsewhere (maybe), is unlawful in the USA. This may not be a hoax but a scam.

John, you overlooked part of what I said: "a site claiming to be a legitimate business."

I'm not claiming to be a legitimate business. Far from it, in fact.

if you make it so the page has 'no style' you can see words such as:
rape, mail order brides, etc near the copywrite.

>>anon
actually highlighting the page has the same effect, or viewing the source does just as well.

Under the copyright in tiny font is the following:

marriage arranged Russian Philippines mail-order bride matchmaker forced child slave prostitute hooker whore escort sell teen sexy sex childwatch naked abuse pervert wife preteen sex toy buy money sold traditionally tradition history marry obedient price parent young single own horror polygamy sex rape slavery American husband hot blonde brunette redhead 13 14 15 16 17 underage save stop illegal teenage delinquent juvenile family money need foreclosure losing virgin escort looking shopping child diet "weight loss" slimming nutritious

Those extra tags are for so they come up as hits on search engines, generally for people looking for porn. It's an old and quite common practice among less trustworthy sites. Legitimate sites don't (always) have to resort to such devices.

This alone would label it a probable scam.

I just posted this in the forum, but for those who don't visit there:

Even if the site is legit, which seems incredibly unlikely to me, the central premise is flawed since in most states you can

This MUST be a hoax, but obviously a lot of creative work has gone into it. The faux "profiles" read like they have been submitted by different people.
It's an impressive piece of work!

It says on the link you gave Kathleen that in Massachusetts a girl can be married at the age of twelve with parent's consent! Wow...

"Just a quick note that you say that the site is a hoax (which it may or may not be, I have no opinion) because it has google ads - you are aware that -your site- has google ads?"

Yeah, and one of these ads (on the top of the page, to the left) tells us that HIV/AIDS is a myth...

I've worked at legit businesses that have had google ads on their site...

Problem with that reasoning.
1. I saw no Google ads (and I don't have adblocking)
2. I would be surprised if they DIDN'T use a proxy server, especially if it was real.
3. I (and others) noticed no slow loading times, plus I fail to see how that would be an indication.

Also, I know people like this. I grew up with people like this. This sort of thing happens all the time in many parts of the world.

Snopes.com has a page on it and they're even up in the air about whether or not it's legit. They say the site raises some red flags, but on a site such as this, some of things that are to be expected.

So, it may be, it may not. Who knows until the FBI gets in on it.

Unless the FBI are in on it...
Sting?

Regarding the google ads as sign of hoax - I just happend to stumble in on Columbia Records and those pages are littered with them, except for the title page. http://www.columbiarecords.com/artists/index.html . Who knew Columbia Recs was a hoax? Damn, I knew them hiring Rick Rubin was too good to be true...

The Cornell table on marriage laws is only accurate if you read all of the sub notes and examine the individual state codes as provided.

The site is obviously a hoax, because it says that 13 year olds can marry in the U.S. with parental consent.

There is no national marriage age law. They are all state laws and they all vary.

The youngest age just with parental consent is Texas at 14. Several states have no minimum statutory age; but they all require parental consent AND the approval of a judge below a certain age.

However, NO state allows those under 14 to get married just with parental consent. A judge's approval is required for 13 and under in every state. So the website is flat out wrong, making it a definite hoax or possibly a federal site fishing for pedophiles.

the google ads are down as well as the search engine text "hidden" in the footer. from what ive read the site was pretty amateurish but now it looks halfway decent(in page layout, not content haha) also the site is now responding perfectly. because of that im sure this site is either a scam or a sting.

also the site is registered through a godaddy subsidiary, and yet the owner somehow managed to upgrade their bandwidth in less then 5 hours to be able to handle the traffic that digg sent its way.



and why not ask their PR guy if its a fake:
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Again, no comment on the reality of the site, but since when does having the ability to get more server capacity on-line quickly make something seem suspicious? I mean, if my business website kept having server overload problems, I would add capacity as quickly as possible - wouldn't you?

For that matter, the site could be performing well simply because, per your date stamp, -it's after midnight- and a lot of people would be asleep.

As for the keywords being removed - those keywords are a standard "traffic driving" group. Since the group's presence on the site was upsetting people on the web, what business -wouldn't- remove it?

As for the legal matters - the site says

"Within the United States girls can marry as young as 13 years old with parental permission"

While it's true that they would in most cases also require a judge's permission, the parental permission would have to come first. And "as young as 13" doesn't mean "you can get married at 13 everywhere."

The site layout hasn't changed.

So again, the site might well be a hoax, but the reasoning as to why seems weak.

Anybody check out the meta tags on this site? If it is real, then you know exactly the kind of sickos they're trying to reel in via the search engines. If it isn't real, then it may very well be a law-enforcement front to collect data on individuals who are seeking this kind of thing.

Brace yourself; here they are:

preteen, virgin, sex, teens, marriage, marry, slave, matchmaker, bride, mail-order, underage, young, money, naked, child, kids, daughter, teenage, juvenile, escort, buy

They never said that the reason the site was fake was because it was loading slowly. They listed two reasons, and then underneath them as an afterthought wrote "The site is loading very slowly, so you may not be able to access it. (Thanks to Farx for the link)"

There was no bullet point stating it as a reason, in fact, it was on the next paragraph.

Everything looked questionably legit at first, until I read the testimonials. It has to be hoax.

"Our 15 year old daughter . . . did nothing but mope around the house bringing everybody down, so we decided to marry her off through your site. Now our house is a lot cheerier and we love our new swimming pool and Jaccuzi!"

Every testimonial is equally outrageous - it has to be a hoax.

I went to this site and, agreed, the testimonials were outrageous. But I did take the time to email the PR man with a legitimate email asking for info and included my snailmail address (a PO Box, mind you). I'll post any developments as far as that goes.

Arranging marriages isn't against the law, it's just not commonly done. So it would be weird for law enforcement to use something that is legal as a front to target any illegal behavior.

I found the site yesterday, and spent about 10 minutes opening and closing my mouth in confusion and horror... tooled around the site for a bit and came up with the conclusion: Hoax.

It looks fairly real, until you get to the testimonials page, in which 14 yr olds talk about their new husband being "ok" and proud that their parents could buy a new car and parents saying that they finally married off their rebel 15 yr old and got a jacuzzi out of the deal and couldn't be happier.

That added in with the profiles themselves, many talking about "everything she needs to know to be a wife"... because, well, if I wanted to creep people out I would use clean language to insinuate my 14 yr old daughter is totally ready to start having sex with some old man who purchased her and start makin' babbies. In fact, you can submit your daughter with a profile, so I did. "Jezebel" was 13 and going for a mere $7,995 because as a godly parent I understood her husband was going to have to teach her A LOT about being a good wife, and therefore would get a price break. No response from the website yet. No requests for money (the %5 down of "bride price" they request upfront) or ways to upload her photo.

Hoax.

BRILLIANT one. Loved it.

When I first saw the website my impression was what the hell. The keywords make you wonder just who they are marketing to.

there was a news article saying the following:

"Contacted through MarryOurDaughter this morning, Mr. Ordover quickly conceded the page was a parody aimed at drawing attention to inconsistencies in state marriage laws. States consider it a crime for adults to have sex with minors, but they allow kids as young as 12 to get married with parental and sometime judicial permission."

Basically he was trying to stir up anger in people to get laws changed. Which has worked BRILLIANT!!!

The rest of the original artical read:

The site is a prank. Thank goodness.
But not everyone is in on the joke. The site has gotten 20 million page views in the last two weeks and now elicits around a thousand, mostly angry, emails a day. In the last few days, the site

It's a fake. The NY Times did a story on it, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/please-dont-marry-our-daughters/?hp

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/please-dont-marry-our-daughters/?hp

Basically, the guy admits its satire.

This website url has changed. it is now:
http://marryourdaughter.org

All I can say is I wouldn't be surprised that due to the keywords found in the website that it's one set up by the government to help investigate child pornography & lure pedophiles.

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