Status: Dating service scam
Match.com, an online dating service,
has been accused of sending some of its members bogus romantic emails in an effort to get them to renew their subscriptions. But even stranger, it's also been accused of sending Match.com employees out on phony dates with subscribers:
The Match lawsuit was filed earlier this month in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles by plaintiff Matthew Evans, who contends he went out with a woman he met through the site who turned out to be nothing more than "date bait" working for the company. The relationship went nowhere, according to his suit. Evans says Match set up the date for him because it wanted to keep him from pulling the plug on his subscription and was hoping he'd tell other potential members about the attractive woman he met through the service, according to Leviant [Evans's lawyer]... Leviant said his client found out about the alleged scam after the woman he dated confessed she was employed by Match.
If Match.com really was paying a woman to go out with this guy, that would seem like an incredibly expensive way to generate a very small amount of publicity. It seems more likely that the girl made up the story about being a Match.com employee as a way to dump the guy.
Comments
"If Match.com really was paying a woman to go out with this guy, that would seem like an incredibly expensive way to generate a very small amount of publicity."
I had the exact same thought, Alex. It just doesn't seem cost-effective to me. Match.com has many thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of members; how many fake dates could their employees go on? Even if it was a few hundred, would that really result in sufficient publicity for them to make the effort worthwhile?
The fake emails I can believe, but the racketeering seems unlikely.
With the typical price of a subscription, it however would not be worthwhile at all to employ a fake date with an actual woman, I think.
It seems so ludicrous to think that they are sending people out on dates to keep customers. It just doesn't make financial sense. You have to send a person out on the town for a few hours to keep a subscription that is about 30 dollars a month? I don't buy it.
For fairness: I met 3 women on Match, had good relationships with 2 of them, and I married the third.
When yahoo was accused of posting fake profiles, their dating site became inaccessible for several days. They probably needed to pull the fake profiles off the site.
eharmony is another site that most people are unhappy with.
It's probably high time we support the Free dating sites. http://www.oasisoflove.com, and a few others are phenomenal. With free dating, there would be no motivation for fake profiles. All the big companies are motivated by greed.
Now Match is saying that they've gotten the employee to sign an avidavit that she was never and employee. Yeah right.
Isn't that too easy. If anybody brings up an allegation against a giant like Match that seriously damages its reputation, do you really believe that all Match would do would be to get the person to sign an avidavit? No way, it'd be more like suing the pants off that woman.
The case of her signing an avidavit just means she's been bribed with a few millions to keep her quiet. Scams will never end. Support the free sites and end the greed.
I'm getting more and more convinced by the day that probably about 20 % or so of the total, and about 60-70% of the attractive profiles on both sites are fake, and exist only to rope more dopes (like me).
Some of my favorites include:
The 'ladies' who live in Chippamacqua,MA (or some other town in the US no one has ever heard of (or on Wall Street,NY...), but turn out to 'live' in Ukraine, Ghana, Costa Rica, Philippines....or perhaps just cyber space.
The already mentioned 19 year old super models looking for guys from '18-90' with 'any' attributes....
The short notes - often peppered with strange letter combinations - by 'members' without pictures and/or odd .uk or Yahoo addresses who tell you you're 'hot'....
The alleged 18 year olds who open the conversation by describing their moral openness and physical flexibility.
So far the best may have been the 'letter' I got from this supposed girl who said she was from the US, but with international parents, and was being held 'prisoner' in a Nigerian hotel room, because she lacked the funds to pay the bill....priceless!
Or how about those who tell you the picture you saw on Yahoo was actually someone else's, but you can see 'better' pictures of them if you subscribe to an 'adult passport' to a 'neglected housewives' site.....
With all the zillions of warnings about the Russian dating scams, isn't it about time someone went and seriously investigated Match and Yahoo (and others) stateside?
Well, turns out that it was a guy 1500 miles away, who had long hair (listed as one of my turnoffs) and no profile. Now I tried to wink earlier but my profile was invisible and I could not, according to them, until I made myself visible. So how does a guy with no profile manage to email a generic letter that was too cheesy to respond to?
I then got a wink from a guy, also from the same area (1500 miles away) who according to his profile has not logged in for "over 3 weeks".
After a week, I got ONE wink from someone whose profile was so full of contradictions he got a "not interested" right out of the gate. So I paid 60 bucks for ONE wink? Wrote and winked at several who did not bother to write back (I paid 2 bucks for the ability to see if the emails were read...only one was not.)
They are indeed scamming the public, and I hope they lose their shirts.
So, just this past weekend my membership was going to lapse again. A few days before, I get a wink back from a girl from a town not far away. I figure what the heck and send her an email. She responds an hour before my subscription is up. Hmmmm. It doesn't prove anything, but it sure seems suspicious, doesn't it?
I won't be renewing. Going to try the freebie sites for a while.