Fraudulent Practices of Internet Dating Sites

Can You Really Know Who's Out There?

Users of two on-line dating services have recently filed lawsuits against the matchmakers, accusing them of fraudulent practices.

A Match.com subscriber claims the service employed women to respond to ads posted by men whose memberships were about to expire and, in his case, date them. He knows this because, he says, his cyber-sweetie told him so. 

A Yahoo Personals subscriber stated that the service posts bogus profiles. He discovered this after finding the same woman’s picture included with multiple profiles in search results for widely separated cities. This was reported, ironically, by the AP in a story that appeared in the Yahoo web site’s news summary.

Virtual matchmaking is so open to corruption that it hurts to think about it.

How simple it must be, in a per-click world, for a systems administrator to sort profiles by number of views and send a generic message to all the losers at the bottom who aren’t getting any action. That could explain the number of replies from women who’ve been well out of my age range, who obviously didn’t read the ad, whose messages were definitely generic. Who, if they had read what I was looking for, and were serious,  wouldn’t be responding!

How simple it is, in cyberspace, to assume a completely different identity. On the Net, there’s simply no way to know who’s really who. And the honor system died a long time ago.

Virtual matchmaking is so money-driven that it makes joining a monastery an acceptable alternative.

Nearly all the sites demand a profile before any serious searching can take place; before you can determine if your time will be worth it. Yahoo at least allows a few in-the-clear searches. Contacting anyone there, or searching past the cutoff point, will cost 19.95, all major credit cards accepted.(What? No Paypal?)