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Online Daters Sue Matchmaking Web Sites for Fraud
BBCWatcher writes "According to Reuters, Match.com and Yahoo! are the subjects of separate class-action lawsuits from 'frustrated online daters.' Yahoo! Personals is accused of advertising fictitious profiles in order to make the service look more popular. In the Match.com case, 30-something professional Matthew Evans contends that Match.com sent a female employee as 'date bait,' hoping he'd tell others about the attractive women they could meet. 'The relationship went nowhere, according to his suit,' which claims Match.com violated the RICO Act."
I signed up for a Mate1 account, and suddenly I'm getting emails every day from 18 year olds in all the states of the union who want to chat with me (I'm 34). But you have to pay to even look at mail sent to you. Obviously fraudulent.
Match.com has millions of people on the service. In order for this to be a policy, what size work force would they need to create positive word of mouth? Further, would people say positive things if they dated someone for a time or two and then never heard from them again - or were strung along? Please. I'm not buying it. Sounds like someone pissed off that his fairy tale fantasy didn't come true.
I've tried a one month subscription to match.com and Yahoo personals.
Results weren't too bad, really. Met some friends.
Anyway, on both accounts, when the time was about to expire, I got a message from someone that was way above average in terms of looks, with a great, detailed profile. Its a good thing I'm already used to dealing with cons like this (AIM/yahoo messenger spam to be precise) and I put in the 'why did you cancel?' field that I don't like to be scammed.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I belong to Match.com here in Los Angeles and I liken it to shooting fish in a barrel. If you have a decent tech job and do not have the inclination to hide heads in the freezer or stroke a rabbit's paw and call it "my precious" you will score.
The amount of decent looking people out there that just want someone that is 'normal' is dumbfounding. The majority of men in LA either have an ego that you need to help through a door or demands that even Stalin would shy away from. You also get your small bit of crazies, but I really enjoy those because it actually gives me a reason to blog.
I'm suprised Yahoo and Match are doing this. Its no secret that a lot of other big "adult" dating sites do this -- which I would have expected to land in legal trouble well before this. Not to mention the thousands of dating sites out there filled with fake profiles, or hundreds of foreign bride sites populated by flat out con artists (if you think losing $10 a month is a big deal, try getting conned out of thousands.) I know all of this, and I've never even used an online dating service or site once.
There is no doubt Yahoo and Match have the money, and thats were the lawsuits go. Great, another case of "here is your $15 settlement payment and one free month of service, while we collect our $5 million lawyer fee from the defendent."
There's also sites like OkCupid.com, which is IMO the best in terms of fun features, and actual real profiles, unlike all other sites (no exceptions) where you have to pay, none of which I will name them here, since they don't deserve any advertising.
Then there's meeting sites like MeetUp where you can find groups of people with similar interests.
General rule: don't waste your time and money on any paid sites, no matter how good the reviews (most likely written by the site staff) make them look.
Ok, Ok, that was an easy one. Here's another that I heard of recently.
Luddate: Someone you are going out with who does not understand your obsession with technology.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
idea for the /. crowd.
Why don't you single folks set up you OWN site:
dating.slashdot.org comes to mind. Imagine the fierce competition for any woman who dared post herself on it.
I'm not kidding about this either.
I met my girlfriend on Match. She's very attractive, but more importantly, she's very smart and drop dead hilarious.
I've met a lot of other attractive women on Match as well. I'm sure those women could just go to bars and find guys, but they chose Match instead. Perhaps because a lot of guys who hit on women in bars tend to be jerks (at least that's what I've been told.) The ones I've met use Match as a screening service to weed out the jerks.
I actually met my current girlfriend on Yahoo. I have to say I am very pleased with the results. I am a divorced man with 2 kids. I don't want any more kids. I wanted a woman who can take care of herself because sometimes I am going to be distracted with my kids. I like rock music but prefer classic rock. I despise rap. I don't like to dance but I do like to go to concerts. I like to have my own space. I definately do not want to break another woman into marriage. Cause lets face it there is alot of learning going on in a marriage just not about each other but about the way marriage really works. It would be nice not go through that whole thing again.
So as you can see I have some pretty stringent requirements for a mate. Well along comes my girlfriend. Divorced with no kids and cannot have kids but likes kids. Likes Iron Maiden and Def Leppard.
Here previous husband liked anime and played video games so it no big surprise to her that I do and in fact likes to give me surprise games like Doom3 and Half-life 2 annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd a 40GB iPod.
SO thank you yahoo. I never would have met her without your service. Totally worth the money I spent and I would have spent more knowing the results.
"To Err is Human To Forgive is Divine neither of which is Marine Corp Policy"-My SNCOIC
Mod parent up. RICO statutes actually DO apply agianst the so-called "escort" services. What Match.com and yahoo.com is doing, the regulations do swing agianst them in favor of the plaintiff.
They really need to be more careful about that kind of stuff.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
My friends who are dating have tried Yahoo and some of the pay services, and they say Myspace works much better. It's free, and it's cool that it's kinda centered around music. For me at least, finding someone with similar taste in music is at least a good starting point.
;o)
I use Myspace to promote my band, and there are a ton of hot chicks that are on my band's friend list. But my girlfriend is the other member of my band, so it's kind of a catch 22.
She may not have been a shill. I'm actually guilty of doing what you described, and I'm a guy who did it to a girl. I had a profile on Yahoo Personals, but wasn't a paying member so all I could do was send those freebie winks to women. I was bored out of my mind one night and sent winks to about 100 women, one of whom sent me an email back. I really wasn't attracted to her at all plus she was about 10 years older than my normal dating range, so I just blew it off thinking no big deal. Well, she sent me another email about a week later telling me what a dickhead I was for sending her that wink, because she had paid to subscribe just to send me an email reply to that wink. I felt like such an ass that I didn't even reply back to that email either.
Guess I'm just saying that sometimes you get clueless people (like I was) who screw around and send out those free winks without really thinking about what would happen if they got a response.
And yes, I've since learned my lesson and don't send winks/emails to women unless I really dig them.
Hmm let's see.
:-)
Started off with IRC on Undernet and a few flirts. Met my first love on Playsite whom we have never exchange pictures with over the course of two years, which made meeting her at the airport a little difficult (meet the flight, estimate whom she might be based on age group/ethnicity etc). Met a few girls on Yahoo!, SocialNet, and Match.
Interestingly, those whom I've dated tended to match me on more than one site. For instance, one girl was at the top of my list across two e-mail newsletters. She later showed me her inbox where I was at #4 spot in both. That was a surreal experience, but we did have very fun times. Some of the girls I've met would be considered out of my league if I'd approached them offline. One flat out told me that I'd see her distinctly different from a block away and was right about that.
I guess my profile was sufficiently different not to match your typical fake ads.
With all this online dating experience, I find it ironic that eventually I found my wife offline.
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
Ok... But, SlashDate.org has a much better ring to it. ;)
On the flip side, I would say that in Britain the prevalence may have risen with the recession of nobilities as the dominant economic force. Prior to that, a few people had vast power and there was no legislative way for the lower class to attack them. The lower class had little, so there was little value in them quibbling with each other.
In the United States, we initially had a colonial life that was hard and there was not a great economic disparity between people. It did not take long for that to change with the robber barons and the vast wealth of the industrial empires that emerged, and you had the same pattern that had already existing in Britain. But then we went through a similar economic process where the middle class became a dominant economic force with considerable means.
That meant that there was a large pool of people that had less than the very rich and were motivated to seek the wealth of rich people and each other. It also meant that the poor had a huge number of middle income targets to strike at, and thus the rise in prominence of insurance. The truly rich rarely need insurance. If you look at the typical personal settlements that occur in the millions of dollars range, a truly rich person can afford extremely good legal protection and can remunerate without a thought.
Insurance protects the middle class from squabbles with each other and with the poor. These things are interconnected, but at the heart, you need class separation and legal recourse. It is the rise to economic power of the middle class which motivates the creation of mechanisms (insurance and new laws) to do this. I do not think it will ever be otherwise in any society with a middle class that has considerable economic power.
Actually, I find this lawsuit interesting for a couple of reasons. First, I'm surprised it's taken so long to hear about such a thing. And second, it's interesting to note which companies are involved.
Like some other people here, I've "dabbled" in meeting women online ever since the "glory days" of the BBS in the 80's. Back in the BBS era, you just didn't find many women online, period. I ran my own fairly popular BBS though - and when the odd woman did call up and check it out, I found there was an extremely good chance she was going to be fairly compatible with me. I've never been into the dance club or bar scene, really. I always wanted a bit of a "geek girl" who would take it upon herself to learn a little about computers and technology - as opposed to the gals who claim an interest, but it's all based only on what previous boyfriends taught/told them. And she'd have to be above-average intelligence, with an interest in both reading and writing, and not shy away from the occasional good/heated debate. That would usually describe the type of female would would venture into the world of the BBS in the mid to late 80's. So I actually had a little bit of success way back then.
When the net became popular, I got into IRC chat and had quite a few dates (and even more new friends) from that. Sites like Match.com appeared somewhere in the middle of all that, but I never paid any attention to them. I couldn't see the need, when it was possible to meet people for free just by having online chat conversations. But instant messengers really took their toll on IRC, making the "city-based channels" on big networks like EFNet or Undernet sort of a "thing of the past". No longer did you have 40 or 50 locals congregating in a channel named after where you lived, all trying to organize a "get-together" for the weekened. Instead, people just put their closest friends in a "buddy list" and chatted with them one-on-one, giving up on IRC.
Considering my current situation (divorced and raising a 3 year old kid pretty much by myself) - traditional dating isn't much of an option for me these days. So I took another look at the idea of "online dating". It seems to me there are people raking in serious money on "dating sites" that are almost complete scams - such as anything "adult friend-finder" related. I would think THEY need to be sued long before Match.com. It seems they fill their sites with fake profiles and photos of women, just to reel in suckers who think the site is filled with women they'd really like to meet. Once they pay for their 6 month membersihp or whatever, they're stuck writing to people with non-existant email addresses, or who mysteriously keep ignoring them.
I tried Yahoo personals real briedly, because I supposedly got a "free month" with them as part of my SBC Yahoo Internet package. But I cancelled after the first week, due to an utter lack of interesting women in my city on there. They proceeded to bill me for the month anyway. (Gee, thanks Yahoo!)
I had a little bit of luck on Craigslist actually, where they let you post free personals. Only problem is, Craigslist seems to be unusually full of singles who act interested, correspond with people daily for a while, and then just vanish. (Both men and women complain about that on there quite a bit.) I think a lot of people just don't take it very seriously since it's free. They're just "fishing" for Mr. or Mrs. Perfect and if you're 80% of what they'd ideally like but not 100%, they "throw you back in the water" and try again.
I think okcupid.com is pretty cool too. But I haven't yet met a woman from it. (There's one gal who emailed me a couple times just to talk politics, since we had that in common... but no interest in actually meeting.) I'm just impressed with how it does the "compatibility scores" and testing, and offers so much for free. It seems like it's *got* to work for somebody.
The only service I actually paid anything for was Lavalife, and I'd say it was another waste of money.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A few years back I met someone who worked at one of the largest dating sites, and they mentioned that a lot of employees create false profiles in order to fulfill the requirements of people they want to bone.
Apparently some of them have a great deal of success.
It could definitely be considered a perk of the job.
I've been on match.com for a couple years now. I met some very nice women there, including my current gf (who is both very cute, and very smart). It took a lot of emails, and a long time, before I had much success. However... they don't tell you this, but when you contact someone, they censor your emails to remove contact information, in an attempt to force everyone to subscribe. Now, I understand their motivations, but the unfortunate side-effect is that a lot of women don't subscribe to the service; they can send a "wink" but they can't send email. So many times, I'd receive a wink and send an introductory email but never get a reply. I'm sure some of them simply weren't interested, but I have no doubt that many simply couldn't respond and weren't willing to subscribe. It was perplexing, until I learned about the censor and worked around it.
I think I managed to avoid the mental cases by posting a profile which is perhaps more serious than the norm... plus, I have pretty good intuition about people.
When I first learned of the censorship, I was pretty angry about it... I wonder if there is a possible class-action lawsuit there? Though probably not, as I'm sure their legal team has checked it out.
Match.com may have lots of "members" - but many of them can't or won't respond unless you know about (and work around) the censor. Also, a lot of their "members" are not active; and when you take your profile down, they keep it for a year.
Match.com is useful for meeting people if you live in a big city. But if you're not in the middle of a major metropolitan area, then the pickin's might be slim (but then again, maybe you like them slim!).
You're right. However, if you use it as a way of getting dates with down to Earth people that aren't your typical bar flies, it's a great tool. I met one girl on Yahoo Personals back in early 99 and we had a four and a half year relationship. I met a girl in December of 2003 and we lasted over a year and a half. Those two girls were unlike any I have ever met and chances are, I wouldn't have met them in real life. The first was a Physics and Astronomy double major and attractive on top of that. The second was one of the most intelligent women I have ever met, an amazing artist and attractive. Heck, her name on Match had "42" in it and come to find out, it most certainly was a Hitchhiker's Guide reference! I mean, come on. That's a pot of gold!
The downside is that it's kind of depressing when I go out and meet girls because they're usually shallow, immature and still looking for the jerk because they can't see past the games. Guys can be even worse since we can get a hard-on and make excuses in our head for some pretty serious character flaws when faced with a good looking girl. It seems like a lost cause as you waste each night out, ending up with a one night stand at best. When I do go out and have a clear head, I find very few real women and they're usually taken.
Alternatively, on these matchmaking sites, I'll check out the profile of a good looking girl. If I see the scribblings of a 6 year old, I immediately hit the back button without giving it a second thought. In 10 seconds or less, I managed to move on without any uncomfortableness. If her profile is well thought out and doesn't come off as being desperate for a warm body, chances are that she's tired of the bar flies as well and ready to meet someone at her level. Even better, you know in advance with almost absolute certainty that she's single!
I was on match.com for 4 months. I met 5 girls and not a one night stand or blow off among them. Each lasted a few weeks and the last is my mate. Best $50 I ever spent.
Oh yes.. because its so hard to find booth babes for the thousands of floor shows being held every week? Hooters seems to be having a hell of a time finding girls to work for them too.
Fact is there are plenty of pretty women willing to make a living convincing men that they have a shot with them to sell a product.
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Same thing has happened to me. Ice breakers are free, and they can say yes, no, or blow off. So why after sending literally hundreds of friendly messages to girls, they don't even reply with a free icebreaker? And why when my membership expires then I finally get an icebreaker? Also another big issue is that many of the profiles are really email collector bots, who later spam you or send a link to their webcam pr0no page. They are typically the really hot girl with only 3 sentences saying generic but nice stuff and always online. Also be careful, I've tried another site, forget which one, it turned out that the other person had to be a paid member also just to read the message you sent. That brings your chances down a lot since I think a very low percent ever actually pay.
I'm not sure who inhabits it though. I have a friend who tried it a while ago. (Which is why I'm posting anon) She's smart (science PhD, college prof), funny, athletic and while not Naomi Campbell is at least a 6. You'd think there'd be a hundred guys who'd respond, but she said she'd had almost no luck- a few guys contacted her, but nobody she hit it off with.
If a geeky female can't get a date on a science dating site what's the world coming to?
Remember, they're not in the business of making dates. They're in the business of getting people to pay for the prospect of a date.
I know from personal (and other friends' experiences) that just as a membership is about to expire, a "perfect" woman repsonds to your ad (after nothing for the entire subscription) - in a way that does not appear to be a bot. Of course, you can't respsond until you pay for another subscription. Then you never hear from hear from her again.
I don't work for Match, never did. I was just another guy looking but without much success. After a while I began to wonder if anyone knew how to do it better. So I created a shill.
Match occasionally offers free trial subscriptions. I used one of those. I went looking for photos on the net, stole one from a model who had her portfolio online, wrote a profile, and waited. I got lots of replies. I got to see what my competition was doing.
So, yes, there are women on Match who seem too good to be true, and who won't answer you because they don't really exist. But Match might not be responsible for any of them. I know that they aren't responsible for at least one, because I am.
BTW, I'm not a great fan of Match. Indeed, I despise them. I got to see how they discriminate against guys. When my male profile had tech problems, it took forever to get them fixed. And any minor transgression of their rules brought instant anonymous rebuke, for which there was no appeal.
But my female shill was treated like a princess. Tech questions were answered instantly. She could break rules and was forgiven. ( most notable was when I forgot to remove the copyright notice on her photo, which was an explicit violation of rules, and they posted it anyway )
In spite of all this, I perservered, and learned how to write a good reply from reading my duped competitors' replies to my shill. You can learn a lot that way. When I began writing better replies, my success rate trippled.
By chance I finally met the woman of my dreams. We are engaged to be married next summer.
PS: If any of you readers are ones I duped, I appologize. Really.
I've dabbled with online dating since there was an "online". My first experience was on The Source when I started chatting with a customer service rep and we developed a rapport online. She eventually flew down to stay with me for a week, and later I went up and stayed with her in Virginia. We ended up being friends for many years.
Since that time, I've tried most of the online services, in between dating women that I met out in public or through friends. I've had plenty of ups and downs. I even turned one experience into a published story on the "classified dating" scene when I set up an experiment, taking out five different classified ads, written in five different styles, and analyzed the results. It was quite amusing. I had a funny ad, a serious ad, a romantic ad, a sexy ad, etc., and I kept a diary and a spreadsheet of the women I met and my experiences. If you think men are "players", let me tell you I ran into plenty of women who "played" men. A common thing I discovered is how much women BS guys virtually. I was contacted by several women who responded to several of my ads at the same time, not knowing I was the same person, telling me, "your ad was the only one I responded to." Some women I met turned into really weird stalkers, while others were obviously looking for free meals and guys to pay for stuff and entertain them and had no intention of getting involved. Later when I started dabbling with match.com, yahoo.com, lavalife, matchmaker.com, salon personals, and others, I discovered that the same M.O. applies. I know some female friends who actively do the online stuff just to get a chance to go out to eat more often without paying.
That's not to say I didn't have some positive experiences. I've met many great women through the online services, and many who are still great friends. I had a few serious relationships, but by far, the women I met online were generally much less emotionally stable than women in real life. This is probably due to the ease with which someone can pretend to be someone they're not online. But you find out soon enough. It's still very eye-opening to find out how totally psycho some of these women are. (I've heard similar stories from my female friends about men they've met too.)
In the last 4-5 years I started to notice a pattern of diminishing returns from the online dating services. When sites like match.com initially were discovered by the mainstream, the quality of people online was much higher than it is now. I would not get involved in these services now, even just for fun because there's a lot more deception going on than there used to be. Yahoo is probably the worst in terms of bogus solicitations, but there are new breeds of sites that are inherently deceptive by their very design, such as eHarmony.com, which I think is probably one of the worst offenders, comparing their process to that of an impersonal "mate shopping spree" and structuring the process so there's no way you can get to know the other person (or even see what they look like!) without paying lots of money.
After many years, I decided I would not participate in these mediums any more. Most of my friends also have lost faith. If there's one thing that the online sites teach you, it's that you're better off looking in real life. The only exception to this is if you're very antisocial -- in which case you'll find a plethora of equally antisocial people to mingle with, but you might not like the results. Usually we seek out people that compliment what we have to offer and a lot of the terminally insecure online personalities are looking for people to "save" them. Two needy people end up as a recipe for disaster. Take a cruise, go do something you like doing and look for people that are out there. Online is great for meeting new friends and stuff, but don't take it seriously, and don't believe what you read.
I got an online diary (blog, I guess) at BloopDiary.com in January of 2003. After having "met" and talked to a certain girl on there for a few months, that fall we talked on the phone. Long story short, she now lives in my town (In Missouri; she's from Pennsylvania), we've been together for over 2 years, engaged for more than 1, and will be getting married next December. The important thing is to go online looking for FRIENDS, not dates. Make the right friends, and go from there.
I had a IT professor back in the end on 80's which had set up a minitel (*) chat room to "round the end of the month". The way he did it , was to hire some women, mostly 50+ "housewife", and then they chat under many personality. So sure he did have to pay them, and pay for his own connection, BUT since they chat with a lot of men and had "notice" about those, he did make some money. Not enough to be rich but enough for himself to live comfortably. He had to drop it later when traffic got low due to internet pick-up.
(*) french telephon network with limited terminal capability
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I found someone on match.com who I ended up marrying a year later. I did receive a few messages from various people looking for dates, although none that I had actually sent messages to (my wife signed up just so she could send me a message).
One of the biggest problems people have on these sites is that their photos suck, and I mean really suck. For god's sake, use a good photo of yourself, not some party-picture candid shot with your ex's arm still in the picture around your waist.
We got my sister-in-law to try lavalife, and jeez was she picky, just based on the tiny thumbnail photos. So guys, do yourself a favor and use a good picture. And just because a girl doesn't have a picture doesn't mean she's not hot - quite often the opposite. The hot girls get so many emails they often have to remove their pictures just to make it manageable.