Hello everyone. I'm a respectful person therefore, I will continue to be respectful as much as possible concerning Interpals.net. I went back onto the site after being off of it for a while. What a HUGE MISTAKE. For a long time, I was in communication with someone on a different platform and they turned out to be a fraud/catfish. This went on for a long time until I said, "Enough is Enough!" No more was I willing to continue talking with someone that never wanted to come on video call and show their face; no way. I did that for a long time with the person because I understand that there are many reasons as to why someone won't show their face on camera and therefore, I tried to give the person the benefit of the doubt and just let it be but finally I asked if they would just message me from their actual, real Instagram account because in that way, I would know they were indeed who they had claimed to be and I knew which Instagram account it would have been coming from. No matter if many people make fake accounts of other people, I already knew that real, legit account to receive the message from - But no. They still Refused to even do that. Tell me something? Why would you not want to come on the camera or prove who you are at all if I found you from a Dating App in the first place, with your picture profile on it?

So, I know the above is a long rant-like speech, but I just wanted to point out that this is why I went back onto the Interpals website. I "knew", I was going to get away from the fake person. But lo and behold, I went back on Interpals and guess what? The same person's picture was up there; several pictures of the person was up along with hundreds of the same pictures of scammers. The reason I know this is because I saw mostly all of the same exact photos on Interpals that I saw on the FAKE Dating app.

I brought this issue up with Interpals. I cannot tell you how many times I emailed them; both from the site directly and from my own email account. You know what? I received NO MESSAGE BACK at all. NONE. But when a guy on Interpals was being fake and I reported him, he had me "flagged" for Harrassment!
Seriously? And then Interpals immediately informed me that if I was reported again that my account would be banned! What a Joke. I was already in the process of Deleting my account before any of the crap happened but when I tried to delete it, it kept telling me that I had to wait for 7 days before my account could be deleted to keep fake people or thiefs or something from entering the platform?

Whoever reads this long message, please know that unfortunately, Interpals along with a lot of other PenPal Sites are now a SCAMMER'S Paradise, it seems. ---- What a Sick Sick Shame.

I used to be a member on the Interpals for more than 8 years, during which I have made many online friends. I could have professional or simply human chats, with people of all ages from all over the world. The moderators were quickly banning scammers, trolls and perverts. This changed however in the last couple of months. I noticed that many profiles dissapeared, the profiles of genuine people. I learned not so long ago why is this happening when my profiel got deleted without warning, "suspended due to suspicious activities". I signaled this 4-5 times in a time span of three weeks ( because I kept not receiving any reply) until an email came that my profiel was delete for spamming. This is a completely dishonest and unprofessional attitude, because I was never spamming ( I was contacting people with personalized messages, where my introduction was similar indeed, because I am myself in all my messages, and my life experience and interests are not being changed from a message to another, but the reason why I am messaging someone is always different, because people are different, having different interests). Actually, it is very hard to spam, because tehre is a time limit between sent messages, and also, you cannot snd the completely same message twice, one after another, this is how the system was set, back in time, when the management of the site was still professional. And even if it was so, an old profiel of a genuine person would deserve a warning first.
I advice you to not make an account on the Interpals till this abusive and dishonest moderation is there, because you can be deleted for no reason. Probably the site is sabotaged from the inside, cui prodest, I don't know. But for sure, its policies changed for the worse.

Yes- Interpals has it´s odd moments.
Yes- Interpals invites people you may can´t stand.
Yes- Interpals isn´t a safe space
Yes- Interpals app doesn´t make it better but worse.
Yes - it´s dynamics will force you to adapt or vanish.

It´s like a community brunch in a youth hostel. Everyone brings to the table what she/he/it can find and wants to offer. The provided cuttlery you better give a second clean and the plates are chipped no matter what. Tea and coffee is free, anything else is BYO (bring your own)
Take a seat, grab a chair or claim your couch.
The host is nowhere to find and guests are mimicing to run around on busy missions.
Some are talking, some are shouting, some are sitting in a corner saying nothing. Some are dumb, some eccentric, some search for world peace via google. Some have a hard plank in their trousers, some just got burned on facebook, some just enjoy their cornflakes while others already dressed up for a flirt. Some are players, some are woke, some seem still sleepy behind shades, some turning their heads for the new arrivals and some are listening music and pop a beer already... uh, right they are sitting over there, in another timezone.
But ring the porter bell and point out a scammer; by the time you grabbed your next coffee the problem will be gone.

Let´s have a look at the stickers at the entry door and have a glimpse on House Rules, Delivery-Service Menues and Questionairs laying on the counter.

You can try to search a partner for language exchange and tandem learning.
You can set age restrictions and block individuals as well as entire nations and continents.
You have to overcome the sensation of being called intolerant.
You are invited to overthink your perception and expectations of others continuosly.
Don´t bring bedbugs, don´t be a bedbug and feel free to report bedbugs.

As it doesn´t matter how thoughtful, odd, fun or silent and most of all sincere your idea of making new friends is... someone will ask you to sit next to you at one point. You can say yes, no and change seat with your "Will just grab another coffee, be back in a sec!".

And here my little comparrison ends.

Like almost everyone else I'm bored and stuck in lockdown, so I thought I'd supplement my social activity by signing up to IP. This isn't my first rodeo, I've been here before but in the early 2000's-2010's it was far more active then. I'm surprised that there aren't more users given the pandemic! As per usual though, there are tons of fake users to drown any real people out. That's always been a problem here. They've made some small changes, you're now unable to view profiles and search members without logging in and being a member of the site. I prefer the old way because it at least let me see beforehand if anyone was even online! It has a fresh looking log in/sign up page, but that's it, they haven't modernized any other part of the site and it's not mobile friendly which is ridiculous in this day and age. I am a woman, so I locked in my restrictions for women only, of any age. For some reason my account is still visible/searchable by men? Likewise, I can view accounts of women who have restricted me from contacting them due to my age or my being female. Why not filter these out? If I can't contact the person I shouldn't be able to see their profile, it's a complete waste of time sifting through all of them, and sift you will, because if you're not 17 or the "smoking hot foreign man" of their dreams, you're unlikely to find another female to correspond with. And no, I'm not from some kind of questionable country, I live in Canada, so that's not throwing people off of my account. I've visited several real accounts (at least I think they're real), none of them visited my account in return. I'm an average, inoffensive looking woman, the only way you'd know if we socially click is by actually viewing my profile, and yet after being online for 48 hours straight on a weekend, only one woman viewed my page. I wrote her an intro and an ice breaker but she's not been on for a day, and judging by the complete lack of activity on the site, I tend to wonder if she'll even bother coming back. I'm sad because I really wanted to connect, if only on a casual basis with someone but there's no one really actively looking on this site. At peak hours there are 6000 users online, 3000 of which are female, off peak (which tends to be night in North America) there are maybe 3000 online users, only 1000 of which are female. Filter out restricted and spam accounts and that's probably 500-1500 women, world wide, buried underneath it all, that you could maybe converse with if you're lucky enough to find them and they're not totally lazy. Ironically, many of the women online actually describe themselves as being lazy, misanthropic, or don't like to talk much(?!) avoid these like the plague, or better yet, just skip the site entirely!

Since 2018 I had been an Interpals user on and off until 2020. It goes into many directions and mixes it all up which is a big part of why the "date seekers" get mixed up with the penpal and language exchange people. Many people are commenting it's not a dating site - but it has that options in the profiles, though their site name is misleading. People have the option for seeking: relationships (yes it's on there), flirting only, friendship online, penpals, snail mail penpals and language exchange. As many people have said in their reviews, people on Interpals do not read profiles! Which is why people seeking marriage/relationships bother people looking for friends or language exchange. The name of their site indicates penpals (friendship) so they should just stick to that and get rid of the flirting and relationship seeking options.

There's scammers everywhere including here. Some I had developed a friendship with told me about several scammers on there who bothered them but all sites have them. If you dare to use the site even after all the warnings here and on other review sites, just be vigilant. People that post only "model" type photos and have a very generic profile tend to be fake or people who like to troll. Put your wall to private if you don't want creepy men and women leaving comments that inappropriate or links to questionable outside sites.

Like any site, the quality of people vary, but for the most part, this site seems to attract a lot of narcissists, hypocrites and people that seem to have quite a few skeletons in their closets going by their secretiveness on their end but wanting to know everything about you (red flags!). We all have our preferences in conversations but considering a majority of people say the same thing: people don't seem to reply - it makes me wonder why so many people on that website who are fairly new claim to get "100s of messages" each day or week so write more than a basic "hello" or "how are you" because it's "not creative enough" for them want to write you. They think very highly of themselves that they are so special compared to everyone else, a hello is offensive and not good enough. The hypocrites come in when they claim they are looking only for friendship or language exchange and will write anyone if they write but only respond to men/women who look like models or are under 30. Didn't realize people can only be "friends" with or "learn a language" from models. Clearly they are looking for more than this. If you write "NOT seeking a relationship" in the request section and don't select the relationship/flirting option, people will still write you and after a few exchanges ask for your number or social media name or flirt with you and when you tell the person you don't want to because you have someone or just not interested, they get angry or they stop talking with you because they wanted more. Really, don't waste a lot of time writing a long profile, it more than likely won't get read, people go off your photo only and age. Also, people that claim to drop them a line, they write anyone back and their account is active - most of them lie and again, if you're not young and beautiful they won't write back. There's also a lot of people on there that see if someone has a married status will purposely try to flirt and get sexual exchanges of various types with those people just for fun. Some people appear to be nice and after talking will start to ask to send naked photos and when you say no thanks, they say ok and start to talk about it anyway and sometimes even send them after you say no or tell them you have a relationship. So if you're in a relationship and using this not to cheat but just talks and language, beware of giving out social media messengers or whatsapp numbers because photos may be sent to you that could strain your relationship. People are just obnoxious.

I never reported anyone on there because I just blocked people, but so many people on many review sites say if you report anyone for lying in their profiles or being inappropriate, they person reporting gets blocked. So if someone is saying they use the site for language but is seeking a relationship and harassing you, report them and you can end up being suspended or warned for reporting. Meanwhile that person gets to go on bothering people. If you allow everyone to message you be prepared to get a lot of flirting messages, marriage proposals and inappropriate comments from people from certain areas and I don't write that to be prejudice or racist no matter what anyone thinks, I've experiences and so have other people (both men and women). Of course not everyone from these areas are like that, but too many scammer messages or rude comments are left from there. And if you you block certain countries because of this, you have the people who will say you're a bad person and discriminate and won't talk to you. Also, hate speech is not allowed yet there is a ton of neo-nazis on that website and promote their ideology and their profiles are never taken down. That right there should say everything about their site. The site is just a mess!

This covers about everything from my personal experiences and other friends of mine. If you're looking for a language exchange sites, there are several other really good ones what are strictly for that, they don't use profile photos because they realize it doesn't matter if that's what you're reallying seeking. Less scammers use those sites and their admins don't punish the victim of hate or harassment, they deal with the person causing it.

I wouldn't touch that site again with a 10-foot pole. Enter at your own risk. You've been warned!

Moderators only work in their favour, so, it is pretty obvious this site is meant for them. Do not join this site if you are an honest person, not for you, but for perverts only. And scammers are no exception. Here's the categories:
1. The perverts: if you are a woman, no matter what's your age, you will be harassed constantly, day and night. You will be insulted in your dignity from these creepos after one thing only. You will receive an enormous amount of sexual requests and the amount of time you will have to press the blocking bottom will be constant. They will make you feel sick.
2. The inactive (still very active) users: you won't be able to block them and report them: you will only find out one of them posted insulting, racist messages on your timeline, cowardly hiding behind the screen.
3. The scammers: do not provide anyone on this site with your email address, they will send you a virus the seize of your screen.
4. The fakes: people on this site, will do anything to attract your attention, I still remember and laugh at the Fabio Cannavaro football player picture used by some man in order to attract women. Obviously, all Italian people, were banned and could not contact this oddity.
5. The "daters": be sure, even if you are not interested in dating, you will get the opposite reaction: you will be harassed constantly. And even blackmailed by some horrible men, of the kind "I took the trouble of writing a message, you have to answer" (!) and many more perverts lurking in the "dark".
6. The jealous women: none of them will get in touch with you if you are looking for friendship. They will nose around your profile and this is it. The odd racist or unpleasant comment may be posted on your timeline.
7. The language... "Non exchangers": language is English, and this section gives racist people and perverts the excuse to get in touch with you.

A total waste of time, make something better of your life. It is too short and not to be wasted towards strangers you will never dream to provide with your personal details in real life, especially if you never met them. You won't invite a perfect stranger to your house you meet down the road, so, think twice before you act. After you reach a certain age, you find out you need peace of mind more than anything else, you value your freedom and stability, your health if you are lucky to be healthy, do not put everything upside down cause of this horrible website. Value what you have, and spend time wisely, find your stability and give it the right value. This site is for perverts, and moderators work for them only

Interpals. What can I say? How long have I got? It seriously bad. I hated it while I was a member. The best thing I did was delete my profile & get the hell out of there.

So many bad experiences, I can't mention them all here. The majority of men on there don't know the difference between a penpal site & a dating site. If I had a $ for every man who asked for my hand in marriage, wanted to meet up with me to $#*! me, told me I was their soul mate (in the first message!) - I would be a seriously rich woman now. Hahaha.

I did do a lot of messenging on there. This is the one good feature about Interpals. They allow you to do messenging. But having said that, when I was a member, the conversations I had while messenging were very hit & miss. I'd send a bunch of text to someone, & they wouldn't get all of it. This happened time & time again. Over many months. It nearly did my head in. Was very frustrating for me & the person I was talking to. In the end, we just exchanged emails & chatted that way. Was much more successful.

A lot of times I couldn't log on when I wanted to. Being 15 hours ahead of the USA here in OZ, was the problem. When I wanted to log on, it was the afternoon here, & the early hours of the morning over in the USA. Interpals told me I couldn't be connected as they were doing "maintenance". I notice they never carried out any maintenance in daylight hours USA time. Not being able to log on often, to answer messages, was very annoying. I couldn't do anything about it. Just had to go with the flow & put up with it.

I had to put up with some very abusive men. The things they said to me! And they didn't even know me! I wondered what sort of an abuser they were in real life, & who was the poor woman putting up with them in real life.

One nice thing that I will say for Interpals is that they allow photo albums to be displayed. As many albums as you like, & each one can contain about 40 photos. Good for showcasing where you live to others around the world. I did like that feature, & I posted a lot of pics for people to view.

I am surprised the site hasn't been shut down by now. There is a "moderator", but I seriously don't think he/she exists, & if they do, they aren't doing a very good job! Its just a bloody word, if you ask me. Knowing that there is a "moderator" makes members feel as if they are being looked after, when they really aren't.

Ladies - I would advise you to run a mile, rather than sign up to Interpals. I'm going to have a look around & see if I can find the names of people that I blocked. I'll add them here if I can find them.

Interpals is nothing more than a meat market. Every man who likes to flirt & wants sexual chats is on there, for sure. When they asked me if I was up for some "fun chats", I told them I'm too old to bloody care! Hahaha. That got rid of them, quick smart. Hahaha.

I describe Interpals as the toilet of the internet. Wish I could rate it with zero stars on here. One star is just too many.

I'm going to preface this review by saying that IP was never perfect to begin with. However, there's an obvious decline in both the activity on the site and the quality of its members.
I've been on and off IP for probably ten years. In the earlier days when I was on there were still scammers and pervs, but I could find a pen pal very easily. I would always have several people that I could carry on conversations with, nothing deep or long term, but satisfying none the less. I would have so many offers that I had to decline a few just because I was already busy with other pen pals.
Flash forward to today and my age (I'm in my 30's), coupled with the decreased number of *real* IP users, and a month of waiting, I didn't get so much as a single message. Mind you I was quick to lock in my filters, these filters allow you to block individual countries and select age and gender restrictions. It would perhaps be easier to select the countries you do want to hear from because sadly so many of them are flooded with fake users. That being said, I wasn't so restrictive that I blocked everyone, just the men.
This site, I believe, favors the young. The older you get, the fewer members you have to choose from. There are plenty of young users here. Many users are actually fake, they're fairly easy to spot, they often choose English speaking countries for their profiles but they speak in broken English about generalized topics. They like to steal photos from iStock or off of social media, a quick image search usually reveals whose faking.
There are many scammers looking for sex/nude photos, money or to give you a virus (the forums are apparently crawling with them). There are also weird people who want to marry you, push their religion on you, and one elderly woman even claimed that people were asking her to adopt them! Damn.
There are easily 20 profiles faked every hour, that adds up to a lot of users, so don't be fooled by the numbers when it comes to how many are "online". There are twice the number of men on the site compared to women, perhaps this is why so women feel hounded on IP? Do men no longer talk to other men? The majority of people pefer to speak to Americans, the British, or the Japanese (apparently no one gives a damn about Canada lol). A lot of countries aren't considered desirable or popular, which I'm sure is a drag and might feel a touch isolating.
Sadly Interpals has become more of a dating site with most *real* users looking for love and marriage. Others use the site explicitly to boost their social media followers by linking to every imaginable platform including Etsy.
Aside from all of the above, the site is glitchy, my profile would disappear from search engines and then reappear for no rhyme or reason, which didn't help for being found by anybody. I also had very few people visiting my profile, and only ever when I was logged on. I never had offline views, and maybe averaged about 2 profile views a day (whenever I was online which was fairly frequent).
If you're interested in using Interpals make sure your pen pal requests are clear, set your restrictions, speak fluent English (enough to converse) or simply speak in your own language. Set boundaries and do not share your personal information! And I guess most importantly... Cultivate patience because it may take awhile.

I have been a member of Interpals since the early days - 10 years in fact, so I think I have a fairly good picture of what the site dynamics are like.

In the early days, it was a great place to meet interesting people around the world. I met many good friends who I am still in touch with to this day. One of those people became my current partner of 6 years, so fair play - it has its moments.

At least it used to.

In the past 5 years, I have made zero meaningful friendships through the site, and I have not changed my approach at all since I made 5 very good friends in 2007-2012. And yes, 4 of those 5 people noticed the same shift in the site around the 2012 mark and either left of abandoned their profiles.

The community has become a vapid cesspit of pervs, narcissists and scammers. As others have noted, the response rate to messages is low. In my own experience, my messages (polite, thoughtful, interested in their hobbies) have a response rate somewhere around 20% on a good day. And that's including the ones who chat with you for the day and then pretend you are dead.

So if you are a "good" penpal who writes long, well-thought-out messages to people who you believe you could become friends with, I'd advise not to bother. The simple fact that half of your messages never even get read, and of the ones that are, you get a response to 2 in 5, makes the whole exercise a colossal waste of time.

As for the language parasites that others have referred to (albeit more politely than I), the struggle is real. I have had dozens of people who I have been helping with their English for months or years (during regular conversation):

- Demand that I write an essay for them. That's right - they see you as a paid tutor (?)
- Become extremely angry that I was not available to proofread their report before submitting it, despite having no idea what their schedule is (and a life of my own offline).
- Completely ghost me as soon as they no longer need help with English. Some of these are people I considered good friends, so it sucks when they just don't want to give you the time of day once you have served your "use" to them.

Not worth the mental anguish that it used to cause me, where I wondered what I had said or done to deserve being dropped like a molten rock for no apparent reason.

To even have a shot at improving, the Interpals team would need to figure out a way to restore the community to what it used to be, because ultimately, it isn't the admins' fault that the people have turned sour.

Can it be saved? I don't even know where you would begin to fix it. In my opinion, the horse has well and truly bolted.

I've been on and off as an Interpals member. I was active several years ago, tried returning, left, then came back more recently. Honestly, it hasn't changed as a site nor as a community, which is good and bad.

I'll start with the bad and try to sweeten it with the good.

CONS:

As a woman, I can tell you that other women can and will be spammed by 80% middle easterners, Indians, Africans, some obscure countries you've never heard of, all male, with photos that often look like mug shots (they aren't but I'm talking about the quality). Am I putting these countries or people down? Not at all. This is a rough estimate based on personal experience. During my first and second time trying to use the site, it was mostly middle eastern males. At the time, I actually did have photos up, and ironically it's middle eastern men and indian men roughly around 50 years old and above. Sorry, but I don't want someone the same age as my dad or grandfather hitting on me. I also had guys from various parts of Africa and the Carribean Islands sending me friend requests with no message. Like Facebook, that's just odd if you haven't sent me a message telling me why my profile interested you. Just the picture? Hell, I don't even think I'm average-level attractive.

In my current and probably last attempt at using this site, I chose not to upload any selfies. The sheer fact that I listed myself as female made the swarm show up. I only had middle eastern guys show up this time, but I preemptivly blocked certain countries from contacting me after one guy sent me a bunch of unsolicited videos. Just youtube and nothing bad, but what the hell can't someone just be normal and say hi? I blocked him and his country.

PROS:

It might sound like there are very little pros. However, after you configure your settings and filters, you can finally start sifting through the dirt to get to the gold. One thing that really, really helps is to write out a decent About Me section. Tell just enough about yourself and what you're looking for without offering up seriously personal information. There's a box labeled Requests. Fill this out and be specific about what you don't want people to do. A lot of people are actually dumb enough to use this site as a dating site. I thought this was a Penpal site, not Tinder's Rejects. Anyway. It is possible to make friends and find people willing to be friends and help you learn a language. The key is that you learn how to properly screen profiles and get that gut feeling for when something seem 'off.'

Now, if you want a more independent, alternative review, this Reddit thread is pretty open about more of the dark side of Interpals. https://www.reddit.com/r/interpals/comments/4gnfzs/interpals_review_why_you_should_and_shouldnt_use/