website thubmnail of InterPals.net
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California
12 reviews
90 helpful votes
Follow Carol E.
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I get stonewalled, no communication after 3 to 6 messages. There is much sexual harrassment and it's basically turned into a cyber dating site, even a cyber sex site.

A friend of mine told me give them another chance this Christmas. I tried to make friends with some men and women. The women often act very abusive and catty (my experience) and the men are often married and looking for outside companionship without letting me know until we have communicated more than once.
I find that extremely disturbing.
The last person I talked to there was married with a daughter and did not write me after 5 communications. He got me all hooked on him (grooming and befriending) and then dumped me. I suspect that his wife caught him; this has happend before on another site, too.
Please try another site and be careful. Especially if you are underage.
Review update 1-19-17

Date of experience: February 21, 2014
Hungary
1 review
5 helpful votes
Follow Rob R.
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As for mid 2023 reality:
Interpals heavily rely on "automated system" which have an extensive authority: suspend accounts, send template messages, autodetect keywords, etc...
Their system is poorly made and very low quality.
Also bad by base (not fit for purpose) because very similar for the ones which operates on low quality dating sites.

But have close to 0 human presence/ oversight.
Some reviews do talk about moderators - I did seen only bots with human names, who send template messages, and autodetect files/ data, like: is the user attached/ uploaded picture?

To ask for ID vertification via automatic template messages after auto suspension is more than ridiculous also insecure. Also they "forget" to consider that people may NOT wanna use their platform for dating.

Update:
After checking most of the reviews (here and other places as well) and also the people who done multiple reviews seems to have a contributing pattern here above the poor quality automated system:
Certain (usually former) users* who "make their business" to:
- mass search/ report profiles for whatever
* Most have female names.
When such combined with auto-systems which do suspend profiles after like 2 reports = sabotaged unusable platform.

Date of experience: July 21, 2023
Indonesia
1 review
20 helpful votes
Follow Rosse a.
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I joined interpals one month ago. I met friend there. His profile name Danilescott 45 yrs old from Switzerland. First sound like good person. But finaly he was not. I suspected the pictures of him on interpals are not him. This profile operated by someone who part of cyber crime. Because they will ask money and pretend to fall in love bla bla.
They connected to network crime as immigration officer etc. Please beware

Date of experience: December 25, 2016
Spain
1 review
2 helpful votes
Follow Shelagh M.
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Sold out, Over and Out!
October 24, 2022

Have used IP for 13 years, but not at all for months. Disillusioned. I get a message saying I am on a warning for Harassment and Threats! I am a 64 yr old widow, who have I been threatening? Especially as I have only used the site about twice this year. It used to be good when it was voluntary, now it is some money making scheme run from Texas and it has just sunk. I used to report scammers, until I got told I was reporting too many! Err,, I was doing Your job? They might be a joke to you little nerds, but they have wrecked people's lives. I suppose it easier to bully older people.My crime was 'Offending 'someone (I made an innocent joke about something in someone's profile) so I wrote,'well You have Offended Me, now who do I report You to?' In the early days I made good online friends there, some of whom I still contact regularly, but not on Ipals! We rarely use it anymore. Once I would have given it a glowing review, but now it is just Sad. No decent moderation, no interest in standards and seems to be being used mostly by dull Americans and Arabs/Africans looking for a way into the West. Plus the ever present scammers and sex pests. If I was starting now, I would give it a miss.

Date of experience: October 24, 2022
Oklahoma
1 review
12 helpful votes
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LEAKS INFORMATION
February 21, 2021

I used this site to find new friends but what I found was my information like name, address etc. being leaked on the dark web. I know this because I have Norton360 with Lifelock. Do not trust this website with anything!

Date of experience: February 21, 2021
TT
149 reviews
1793 helpful votes
Follow Omega R.
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This is an online penpal site that connects people from all over the world for the purpose of learning different languages firstly and secondly to meet new friends and even form relationships.

There are thousands of people on this site from many different world locations such as:

Africa
Asia
Europe
North America
Australia/Oceania
South America

This site even offers online chatting so that one can chat with different people from different countries as well.

One can even choose if one wants to keep in contact with friends either by snail mail or by email. This site really is a fun experience as well as a learning experience and if you are interested in meeting nee people and making new friends as well as learning about different cultures and new languages then here seems like the place to do it.

Date of experience: November 14, 2011
Ohio
1 review
21 helpful votes
Follow Nicole M.
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I joined this site to practice a language, because I've been struggling to find websites where I can type in the language to other people. My inbox was immediately filled with men who don't speak the language I'm looking to learn, so I figured "okay, if I keep blocking them, EVENTUALLY I'll have gotten everyone". I even had a few nice conversations, despite some Russian guy continually accusing me of being fake because I didn't want to speak with him.

Then I got banned for no reason. Maybe because I was using an adblocker? Maybe because the 200 guys I had to block reported me as a scammer or something? I don't know, they won't tell me. I was incredibly disappointed and felt like I wasted my time trying to wade through that cesspool.

Date of experience: June 27, 2019
Florida
1 review
21 helpful votes
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Waste of time
January 26, 2018

I first discovered this site around late 2012 early 2013. It actually wasn't so bad then. I made a few friends from Europe and was able to visit them. I took a break and came back around 2014. It was a little worse but I was still able to connect with a few people. Starting around 2015 the site just went completely downhill and got worse with each year. It's almost unusable now as it is full of horny males looking for sex chat, wives, or girls to date in countries they want to live in. Because of these pests it has made these women angry and when normal people like myself contact them I am met with ill tempered nutjobs looking to argue/insult. This website is more of a comedy site now and something I am using less than 30 minutes a week. I know if I want a laugh I can login and read the message of some lunatic. It's nothing more than time killer now.

Date of experience: January 26, 2018
North Carolina
2 reviews
29 helpful votes
Follow Kris B.
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My account was suspended after I refused to skype with this random man. The Moderator suspended my account after this random guy demanded me to skype with him for sexual purposes of course. I sent them a message and they said that they would review my account. Is this site run my perverts? I was looking to meet people from around the world and not to hop in the sack with these random guys. My question is why did this website Moderator listen to this pervert to suspend my account? I'm looking to expose them for the kind of website they are.

Date of experience: December 17, 2019
Georgia
1 review
2 helpful votes
Follow liana r.
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I've just joined recently and so far I've met a few nice and interesting people. There have been a few people that are flirtatious but when I told them I wasn't interested and joined for a penpal, they were very respectful and understood. Of course I'm not going to say there aren't any bad people on the site but that's pretty expected from any social media of any type. Overall I like the website so far but I wish the website was a bit more proactive about taking inappropriate users off.

Date of experience: May 12, 2016

Overview

InterPals.net has a rating of 1.8 stars from 127 reviews, indicating that most customers are generally dissatisfied with their purchases. Reviewers dissatisfied with InterPals.net most frequently mention fake profiles, language exchange and genuine people. InterPals.net ranks 361st among Forum sites.

service
21
value
19
shipping
6
returns
5
quality
15