ALBANY, N.Y. - Michael Puzulis will tell you the American dating scene drove him to it.

It was the mid-90s. His first marriage had ended in divorce, and he was convinced the women he subsequently went out with were only after him for the money they thought he had.

He was well into his 40s, living alone in a tidy split-level. He worked nonstop: a full-time day job topped off by bartending and landscaping on nights and weekends. He'd soon built up savings, enough to start planning for the family he desperately wanted.

But by then, he hadn't had a real date in three years. No dating meant no romance, no first kiss, no marriage, no family. Or did it?

A simpler, more efficient option greeted him within the pages of the spring 1997 issue of Anastasia magazine, "The Russian-American Connection," an intercontinental matchmaking agency run by a former mail-order bride now living in Maine.

Puzulis grabbed his pen, and his credit card, and he went a'courting.

Like thousands of American men each year, Puzulis was banking that a foreign partner - a "mail-order bride" - might be able to give him the life he thought he deserved.

Eventually he found Svetlana Bogomozova, an attractive geologist from Volgograd - formerly Stalingrad.

Today, Svetlana, 37, and Michael, now 51, have two young daughters, Valentina and Michelle. Svetlana, who recently got her driver's license, handles the household - cooking, cleaning and children - as well as helping to maintain the couple's thriving backyard business: breeding and selling Bengal and Siamese cats.

The term mail-order bride is technically a misnomer, since most couples exchange letters, talk and meet face to face - which, incidentally, is required by law in the United States - well before wedlock.

But whether for love, or green cards, or both, the business of international matchmaking for profit and wedlock is a controversial one.

It is an industry that traffics in stereotypes and oversimplifications, and that feeds on hope. It is the puff plot of romance novels and the sinister story behind the headlines. It is undoubtedly the source of many happy unions and fulfilled lives, too.

"There are nice love stories and there are some gross abuses," said immigration lawyer Jill Nagy. "I think it's hard to tell, for me, and sometimes for immigration officials, what is a legitimate relationship and what isn't."

Perhaps the only aspect of the issue that's beyond debate is this: With the growth of the Internet, the industry is booming. In the last official tally, in 1999, the since-renamed Immigration and Naturalization Service found more than 200 such matchmaking agencies operating in the United States. Today, more than quadruple that number claim to help pair American men with women from mostly Third World countries, most frequently China, Southeast Asia and the nations of the former Soviet Union.

And they're doing mad business.

Though there's no official word on exactly how many women were brought to the U.S. through the efforts of matchmaking services - in the 2003 fiscal year the United States issued a total of 25,304 fiance(e) visas to foreign nationals, giving them 90 days to tie the knot here or return home.

Of those, 6,627 went to citizens of Vietnam and the Philippines.

The biggest growth in numbers over the years, however, has been seen in fiance(e) visas to citizens of the former Soviet Union. In the last fiscal year, Russian nationals were issued 1,559 U.S. visas for the expressed purpose of marriage, compared to a mere 228 in 1993 and a whopping 5,000-plus in the two years before the post-9-11 border tightening.

Foreign nationals can obtain permanent residency status after marriage, and then, after three years of wedlock, can seek American citizenship.

Given an Internet connection and a few keystrokes, American men of any age, shape and all but the most scanty income level can view catalogs of potential brides from all over the globe who offer "traditional" values, who are, according to one West Indies-based matchmaking agency that specializes in Eastern European women, "unspoiled by feminism"

and who are eager to cater to every masculine need for only the smallest of returns.

"The Russian woman's attitude about herself is feminine. She expects to be treated as a lady, she is the weaker gender and knows it," extols Chanceforlove.com.

For 38-year-old Fred McNeill, a soft-spoken, divorced father raising a teenage daughter, international matchmaking was a last, best hope.

In March, McNeill and his 13-year-old daughter, Stephanie, traveled to the Ukraine to meet Luba, the 40-year-old woman with whom McNeill began corresponding the previous year. McNeill proposed two days into the visit.

Today, he and Stephanie are awaiting the official OK to bring Luba to the States.

"I was really excited, and was really happy he found her," said Stephanie, who's looking forward to helping her future stepmom learn English. "We're probably going to be doing things a lot different, the three of us, but I'm really glad it happened."