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."

Comments

Plausible?

[daigu]

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.

Re:Plausible?

[dptalia]

Apparently this was an internal rumor for a while. Match.com and Ticketmaster.com are owned by the same company and it was "common knowledge" that ticketmaster people could pick up a little extra on the side doing extra curicular work for match.com.

*raises hand*

[Renraku]

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.

I'm suprised.

[mutewinter]

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."

This would seem to raise a seriously interesting..

[xoundmind]

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.

You calling my girlfriend ugly?

[tinrobot]

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.

Re:You calling my girlfriend ugly?

[Midnight Thunder]

Or the more classic:

"I have paid up for INSERT SITE HERE and have written to hundreds of thousands of girls and none of them get back to me. Funnily enough two days after my subscription expiring this really great looking girl was interested in meeting, but more importantly, she's very smart and has a good sense of humour . After some hesitation I think maybe this is the girl for me, so I sign up again. Unfortunately I must have waited too long, since her profile is no longer active."

Re:You calling my girlfriend ugly?

[Grishnakh]

I met my girlfriend on Match.com as well, and we're getting married next month. I'm a longtime Slashdot user too, so check my history if you don't believe me.

However, my adventures in online dating were not short, and not without lots of stories to tell. Even after dating my current gf for two years, I still manage to surprise her sometimes with stories of bad dates that I guess I hadn't told her before.

I mainly used 3 services: Yahoo personals, Matchmaker.com, and Match.com. Yahoo was the absolute worst. It had a lot of people, but at least half of the women there were fake. After reading about these lawsuits, I'm really hoping that Yahoo gets screwed over because they were the most blatant, in that, even if they weren't the ones putting up all the fake ads, they certainly had to know about them, and didn't do nearly enough to curtail them.

Matchmaker.com was actually pretty decent, and was good in that it had a really long questionnaire that, while it was a pain to fill out, was really good for learning about other people. Other dating sites just had a text box saying "write about yourself here:", which isn't very good if you're not the type who's good about writing about oneself. The problem with Matchmaker was that they just didn't have many women on it, so it was easy to exhaust the supply in short order.

Match.com's main advantage was size: it had lots of people, and consequently a decent number of women. It also didn't have all the fake people Yahoo had (though the employees posing as customers I can't speak to, as I never encountered that to my knowledge). Otherwise, it was pretty mediocre as far as how the site was set up.

Interestingly, I had been doing the online dating thing for about two years when I met my current g/f, and I was so sick of it that I was about to cancel my memberships and take a vacation from it. I had a lot of email exchanges and a lot of dates (and I usually don't date very much; women tell me I'm very attractive, but I'm just not very social, and I really hate bars and the other primary ways 20-something people seem to use to meet, plus I'm an engineer so of course there's no decent women in my workplace), but many women didn't look like their photos, many proved themselves to be freaks even before meeting in person, and many would just disappear after the first date.

Of course, my experiences date from 2001-2003, so maybe things are a little different now, but it doesn't sound like it from what I'm reading here. My feeling is that online dating can be rather treacherous, but if you're not the type who can or wants to meet dates in bars or at work, there might not be many alternatives.

Online dating over the last 10 years

[Wiseleo]

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. :-)

Online dating - real or scamtastic?

[King_TJ]

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.

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match worked for me

[technopinion]

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.