InterPals.netReviews 142

I tried to give it another shot today, but I got this sick message of a Turkish dude wanting to eat my $#*! for 600 euros. He actually offered me the money. That is so freaking disgusting I reported him, blocked him and left the site again. Seriously... no way I am going back again...

There are two types of people who frequent this site.
Those who are genuine about exchange language and interacting with people in an honest way, and those who prey on those with good intentions.

The latter unfortunately, make up the majority of users on interpals. The genuine people quickly get driven away by nuisance messages from people who want to 'be friends' but cannot even be bothered reading a profile to get to know a person, scammers, people who want a free english tuitor and those who want a free peep show or an internet fling because they lack the social skills and/or personality to be able to go out into the world and form meaningful real relationships... or they want a meal ticket into your country by way of 'falling in love with you' after a three sentence exchange (does this method ever fool anyone? Really?)
Also there are those that use this social platform to advertise how physically beautiful they are.
Enjoy it while it lasts, because once that fades, you'll have nothing. And fade, it will.
If you value your time and you're a good person, stay away from this site. It is pure unadulterated garbage that attracts and retains filth.

I have never seen so many angry and violent people on one site. I was shocked by the aggression of people when they figured out that I don't want to have any sexual relationships. I just wanted to speak with a German native speaker for practice, but I got threatened and abused instead. And I haven't spoke German, because there are only a few German-speaking persons there! If you want to practice any foreign language don't go there, that's a scrap-heap.

I have been on this site for over 12 years this time around. It has always been a good site for learning and helping with languages. This site went down hill when they added flirting. After that every pervert in the world comes to this site and some try to say they are from countries they are not from to scam people. Most of us are wise to these African scammers and get them shut down real fast only to have them come back again claiming they are someone else. It's more of a game than anything else. There are still good people on here that want to learn languages but it's not the same. Years ago people didn't use age designations for who they wanted to learn from as long as they were learning from a native speaker. Now I think there are other agendas for many people rather than language learning. Oh well, such is life and life goes on.

I am speaking from my point of view as a woman living in a quite rich country. Interpals is mainly consisting of two groups of people: 1) scammers (fake US soldiers in most cases) 2) men from North and West African countries looking for an easy way to start life in a rich country. When you live in such a country you are overloaded with mails from guys age 17 to 60 who are quickly in love with you, tell you they seek their soul mate and so on. Some of them also beg for money (for sick mother, sick father, "schooling" even when they are 30+...) or for a "simple" paper to bring them to your country. Most of those guys are lowly educated and oftenly start talking in an offensive way or start talking about sex. You may find a few people who you really can talk with in a serious way, but this is the exception. It is a waste of time. I am happy that my account was suspended (without warning from moderators) because now I have more time for useful things.

I have not been on this site in a while but its not because its not a good site, but instead because I am not much for social sites. I tend to keep to myself a lot more these days so hanging out on dating sites or sites where you need to be active a lot just isn't my thing.

InterPals.net is a great please to meet new people, make new friends, and even to learn a new language. There are tons of people on this site & the only negative opinion I have about it is the script that makes them look like the have more users online then they do by making multiple copies of the same profile appear often in searches, and its done so badly you can easily notice it when you see the same face like 20 times on 3 different pages of searching. But this is not a good reason to avoid them because they actually have a lot of members who are real people with real profiles & their own pictures & content.

Would I recommend this site to others?
Yes, and I have for many years now.

The platform is a waste of time for the majority of people who expect genuine connections. Here's why.

Ladies get over a 1000 messages upon a few weeks of creating their profile, especially if they are attractive. I was told of this fact a few times and I have reason to believe it is true. This gets the majority of the messages unanswered whether its coming from a guy or a girl. So, if youre a narcissist, this is your place to be to feel superior. From the guys perspective, it would be very discouraging to write any meaningful message since you almost always never get a response- however, at the same time, the few responses you may receive might create a craving for a dopamine surge and reason to continue the cycle.

It is extremely rare that you get a response or a first message if youre from a non western country or from a selected few eastern asian countries (Korea and Japan in particular). Your profile may get looked once or twice a month, and even most of the people who would bother to respond to you will not look at your profile (a sign of not interested). It is not for the rest of the world.

You almost always see in profile descriptions that they request you write in a certain fashion asking not to start conversation with hi or how are you? And other trite demands when contacting themanother narcissistic example.

Overall, this is like a dating site. The best proof is to browse through profiles and see who appears in their friends list. 99% of the time, it is people from the opposite sex. If youre a guy, this makes it awkward to write to another guy (who has all lady friends). This platform is designed like any other social media platform based on dopamine-driven feedback loops. It is designed to keep users stick to the loops without giving exactly what they are looking for- meaningful relationships - once formed which would make users not continue to use the site.

If youre genuinely interested in finding pen-pals, I suggest using sites which do not operate like social media sites with elaborated profiles with pictures and links. Chat sites specifically designed for language exchange are also very good for this, which would actually make users interact and form relationships.

Interpals is awful. You create an account and then you start making friends and then WHAM---your account gets suspended by a moderator, but no one, no one, will tell you what youve done or why your account was taken down. Even when you are doing nothing, and I mean absolutely, nothing wrong, your account will get suspended if there are enough horny or creepy males who put a compliant against you, because you wont sex chat with them or send them naked pictures. It is disgusting how moderators on this web site will suspend your account without even giving you a chance to plead your case or ask for your account to be reinstated. This site is pathetic and a bunch of losers. Do not, I repeat do not, use this website. There are far more better ones out there that dont suspend your account on whims that dont make sense.

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.

Tbh I disagree with most reviews here, the problem is not the scammers, as they are expected on a site like this, not to mention you can so easily block them, it really doesn't matter.

However my main problem is that seriously almost noone joins this site to find a penpal! Wouldn't that be the point of the whole thing?
It seems to me that for all people this is a damn frikkin dating site. Not sure why would anyone date with someone half a continent away... but sure... Not one who can hold a decent conversation, not one who is actually interested in what the other person does and such. Even though half of the profiles are full with introductions like "looking for long friendship, deep conversations etc etc" they NEVER actually look for that. If you are a girl, you will mostly be contacted by guys, which should be fine, I have plenty of male friends, but these guys are certainly not looking for that!

And what else can I say, men who think they are otherworldly gods and they won't be go so low to talk to you if you are not a goddess or just idk not their type.
I also wrote to women saying they are not looking for relationships, thinking that hey maybe that person indeed just wants to have a nice conversation. Turns out wrong, their friendlist is also full of men, only men, and they won't reply to you.

There are also loads of people who are only looking for an English teacher, hence if you are not native speaker they won't talk to you.

Lol, I think the whole site is ridiculous, it is good for some occasional causal chat, that would only last 2-3 days, but honestly nothing more. I kinda lost faith in humankind. I am sure there are genuine people there too, like I am, but it's like finding the needle in the haystack...