Internet makes it easy for men to find wives from exotic foreign locations. Though there are no official tallies, an estimated minimum of 4,000 men find brides through the mail-order bride industry each year.
It is estimated that some of those marriage and dating services make as much as $5,000 to $10,000 per client, with some agencies claiming to serve as many as 15,000 clients per year.
Brides entering the United States currently come from Ukraine, Russia, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Central America. In the last thirty years over 131,000 Ukrainian and Russian women have left their country to follow their partners, with nearly half of that number going to the United States. No statistics tell how many of these couples met via the mail-order bride industry. While estimates on the numbers of companies that engage in the mail-order bride industry vary, one source claims that in 1995 up to 500 mail-order bride companies may have been operating in the United States.
The laws of supply and demand, as well as the efficiency of the Internet, have prompted many newcomers to enter the industry each year. The industry is international. Many companies target women and men in nations spanning the globe, though some focus on exporting women only from particular nations. A person who wants to start a ukrainian dating and marriage site needs only a few contacts with
ukrainian women, a computer, knowledge of the Internet, and, possibly, the money to advertise in a publication that American men are likely to read. ukrainian and russian agencies claim that they are not in the business of trafficking women across national boundaries. However, catalog descriptions of the women the companies market do not differ much from a department store's listing of merchandise.