Slashdot Mirror
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."
So now you can sue when a girl doesn't like you?
If the allegations are correct, at least somebody will get screwed.
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.
99% of the things you can pay for on the Internet are a scam if you don't get something tangible out of it that you can hold in your hands. And even then, there's things you can hold which are still a scam like drugs.
Don't spend what you can't afford to lose.
That being said though, I'm pissed off at Yahoo now, since I signed up for a month to try it out and was possibly scammed since someone had "messaged" me before I signed up, but never messaged after I contacted them back. Not even a note to blow me off, which I found strange, but figured she'd found someone else or my reply wasn't interesting. While I accepted that my shortlived subscription was just a Blind Date that was a bit expensive and failed, now I feel victimized too. There's no way to know if she was a Yahoo shill, or just some woman that didn't find me interesting. Either way it's not a happy outcome. There can't be too many happy online daters out there in cyberland today upon hearing this news.
Fortunately I've since been tipped off to the existence of 100% free sites like http://www.craigslist.com/ and http://www.plentyoffish.com/ which don't require you to pay. Plenty of Fish makes their money from Google advertising instead of scamming people with fake people.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Some of those singles in the class action suit should exchange phone numbers.
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.
Well that and well broiled.
/SFL!
I'm socially inept. I'll admit that. But why do chicks hate it when I get a good gander at the chest when they're the ones wearing the skimpy cloth that barely covers them in the first place. I don't actually stare or follow but when sitting in a public place I make it my duty to check out the scene.
Frankly, if you don't want to be treated as a meatbag wear something half-way dignified.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The litigant was responding to the profile of a girl who shared a remarkable resemblance to his idol, Kate Moss. He sent her over two dozen messages in a 3 week span, expressing his undying love and admiration, to which she finally replied and agreed to meet him. To the litigant's dismay, upon meeting the subject-in-question, he found that not only was she _not_ Kate Moss, nor even her twin. The subject couldn't even fit into the front seat of his Yugo, and needed two safety belts to secure herself in the rear. Scarred emotionally, and physically (she tried to sit in his lap), the litigant is suing match.com for mental anguish and his $25 monthly fee...
I don't see anything wrong here. Someone committed fraud, they get sued. The difference between fraud and robbery is that a robber uses force, a fraudster uses persuasion, promising something without intent to deliver. No one ever says that muggers shouldn't be put in jail, so I don't understand what it is about fraud that people think should go unpunished.
I don't know why people think suits are a way to shift blame. Sure, there are lots of silly suits out there, suing a neighbor for a too loud lawnmower and things, but suing Yahoo and Match over astro-dating and date bait is, in my opinion, fair game. And if they are guilty, they should get a whopping big judgement against them.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
I didn't end up doing it, but yes, its definitely something that goes on. They didn't tell me which site(s) it was for during the interview, but i suppose I could find out. Our job was to make up fake profiles of very horny people and post then. We were supposed to chat with people as well since the site also had that function. Being interviewed for a job like that was one of the weirdest things I have ever done. One of the questions was "If your profile says that your a red head with big tits, and some guy sends you a message saying that he wants to eat you out, what do you say in reply? There were many people working there doing the same job, it was like a call centrer.
Well...we don't want to give the impression that all of the male geeks are serial killers.
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
I met my wife on Yahoo Personals. All I ever met on Match.com were totally whacked out women. Pretty, yes, but psychotic. I'm psychotic enough - I don't need the competition.
-h-
I had a cough cough "friend" cough cough who tried two of these sites. We'll just call the Hatch and Rahoo. Anyhow, this "friend" would get emails back that said "hey, if you want to see me naked visit this other site LINK."
I have, er, my friend has noticed that whenevr his subsciption was about to expire he would suddenly get a ton of "winks" or "flirts" that you have to subscibe to reply to. Could be a coincidence
If you are using these sites, my "friend" would give this advice- when you see a 20 y/o female who is seeking men 18-45 they are usually a fake profile (Not from the provider necessarily, but these "women" usually reply back with a link to their paysite.)
The worst offenders, not that I would know, are the companies that advertise on porn sites. They have nude pics come up of women in the "next town over" or your town (you get these if they know your ip and can tell where you are) and you just know that there aren't 50 nubile young 18-25 y/o women in these towns looking for no strings sex on the net.
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
" I met my wife on Yahoo Personals."
I met your wife on there too.
It's just business.
Y'know, I've heard that line excuse some of the most foul, unacceptable behaviour, and I'm tired of it. No, it's not just business. Business is like any other interaction-- you treat people fairly, or you don't fucking treat them at all.
I see all kinds of posts lambasting frivolous lawsuits and the general decline of morals in America; often, those posts are from the same people who stand up for ill-behaved corporations and say inane things like, "It's just business."
Well, fuck them in the ass with a spinning roto-rooter.
Things done in the name of business represent some of the most immoral things in our culture today-- the purchasing of government by corporations, for instance. So, no, it's not just "business;" business should include treating each other with decency and ethics, just like all human interaction.
Now, where the hell did I put my lithium?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
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.