REUTERS — Nov 18 — Match.com is accused in a federal lawsuit of goading members into renewing their subscriptions through bogus romantic e-mails sent out by company employees. In some instances, the suit contends, people on the Match payroll even went on sham dates with subscribers as a marketing ploy. Match spokeswoman Kristin Kelly said the company "absolutely does not" employ people to go on dates with subscribers or to send members misleading e-mails professing romantic interest. In a separate suit, Yahoo's personals service is accused of posting profiles of fictitious potential dating partners on its website to make it look as though many more singles subscribe to the service than actually do. 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 Yahoo suit was filed last month by Robert Anthony, of Broward County, Florida. The suit, brought in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, accuses the company of breach of contract, fraud and unfair trade practices. The lawsuit also claims the company violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, a law best known for being used in prosecuting organized crime. FULL ARTICLE @ USA TODAY
Mark Brooks: Small players, one man bands and new sites that are scrambling to get to critical mass may well send bogus emails. Larger, established top ten players don't. Date bait emails are very bad practice. As an industry we should work to stamp it out. These services don't 'send' their employees on dates. However, I've not heard of many dating services banning their employees from using the services they work on.
” Larger, established top ten players don’t. Date bait emails are very bad practice. ”
If you believe that I have a bridge to sell you…
Lets start with True.com In the signup process you are given the following check boxs checked by default.
Let us help you get started. Based on some of the information you’ve just given us, we’ll introduce you to up to 20 of your closest matches.
Who I’m Looking For.
Yes, select my best matches and tell them I’m interested in hearing from them.
Who’s Looking for Me?
Yes, select my best matches and tell them I’m interested in hearing from them.
Who’s Seen My Profile?
Yes, show me who’s seen my profile and tell them I’m interested in hearing from them.
My members tell me that if you don’t uncheck those options random bait emails are sent on your behalf to other members to try and get them to convert to paid. Most of these emails get send to members right when their subscription is about to expire or before they become paid. Many many former true.com members on my site are furious and looking for some kind of recourse. I do not think this lawsuit is going away and more then likely there will be many more. Supposidly match.com and yahoo are doing something similar and the suits against them describe this practice as fraud. Basically these companies are screwed.
I thought match.com used to have a free option to post your ad, and you only had to pay to initiate conversation. When’d that change?
You can still post your profile for free on Match.com. The point I think Markus is trying to make is True’s system is auto generating “I’m interested in you” emails and sending them to free members on your behalf in hopes that they’ll upgrade so they can write you. You probably have no idea which users were contacted or that you’re actually even interested in them. So you can see how a user would be upset if they upgraded because they received a message saying another user was interested in them, then come to find out after writing them they had no interest at all.
Can anyone inform me of the law firm that initiated the lawsuit?
I have a terrible problem with one of the other sites listed above.
I will provide details if someone can provide me with the name of an interested and willing attorney.
Thanks.
Mitch
I strongly urge you guys to NEVER register with True.com and with a valid credit card. I am having nightmares with this dating service that I never used. I was given bait and swith tactics and found out many of the so called emails that I received are frauds. I can not cancel my membership now and they are charging me every month for service I never use. I have to call every month to tell my credit card company to dispute these charges and my credit card company can not stop these charges. There needs to be a lawsuit for this kind of fraud.
Fyi, singlesnet.com is also a sham. lots of fake profiles, employees faking it writing you back. You get a gazillion ladies flirting your account all the time, even ones that are way out of state or had stated in their profile they don’t want your ethnicity writing them. They also claim they love you and later end up in Africa or something and need money. Worst of all they put your Paypal account on auto renew w/o telling you.
Singlesnet is run by a bunch of crooks, they need to be sued!!
Some of these dating sites also show “members” as on-line or recently active even though they may no longer use the service to get other potential daters to sign up for their services
I was a TRUE subscriber back in 2004/2005 and had to fight with these people to get them to stop charging my credit card. In the last 6 months, TRUE has been sending me numerous winks from ladies “who want to meet me” and I can start communicating once I renew my membership. I asked TRUE for a “free” trial membership without giving them a credit card nbr, they weren’t that accomodating. I guess that if I signed up tomorrow those “interested ladies” would disappear entirely. My offer to TRUE.COM is as follows: If your service is real, then give me a really free trial membership without a cc number.
When you sign up for Match, they ask you if you’d like to register for 1 month, 2 months, etc. When your subscription is up, that’s it right? Nope. They deduct straight from your credit card. Here is the message the customer service people sent me:
For your convenience, we automatically renew your subscription each time it expires, freeing you from the tedious task of manually resubscribing each month while still guaranteeing your original subscription rate and helping you avoid an interruption of service.
HOLY CRAP. What a sham. The antagonistic emails and messages that followed just fueled my desire to make sure these people get shut down.
I’m depressed about just having signed up in the first place. Anyone want to go on a date?
for what it’s worth my experience of this group of sites is included here.
Written by Steve Law
22 march 2008
I have some real concerns as i thought i would post a couple of profiles on different white label dating sites First thing i noticed was the absence of subscription fees another join free and get hauled in type of site i thought.I suspect the winks system is used sometimes by the sites to make them think your being contacted although this is hard to prove i posted seperate profiles with different descriptions one with a picture and one without and i received exactly the same emails from members and also winks even the words in the emails were the same.Now call me suspicious but surely different people wouldn’t get the same contacts on completely different sites.This to me suggests they are system generated and sent blanket to all male members.
Next experiment over a month or so i sent 180 emails and got 50 returns none of which were normal conversation and didn’t end up in reciprocation the emails ended after 3 mails and now i have no conversations going.There were also suspicious gaps in the emails of 3 days and the mails were always sent during the daytime apart from about 3 which were early evening.Next experiment was with the cancellation system provided on the site i cancelled before the month was up but still got billed for 2 months later.It’s unlikely i will get a refund this has actually happened before.A lot of profiles were dead profiles after a short time meaning they were no longer members but were still being advertised so you could do a search for someone in your area get loads of hits and even some emails from one or two people but i found after a couple of weeks they were not subscribed. The sites like you to believe that they have lots of members and i specifically asked if my profile would be completely deleted and i had no response also there was no way to delete it on this site yourself.Well in my book thats plain wrong.I suspect there are a lot of other things going on that the site does but this is hard to prove.They deleted my diary entries as well as i expressed my feelings about the site the last diary entry i put i was leaving and i thought there was something going on but they deleted the last part.I sent quite a few emails to the admin asking for the billing agent details but they wouldn’t give that information either.They just said it’s on my statement turned out there was no phone number included on my statement i would have to phone my bank at my own expense.I would have thought that you were entitled to be able to contact these people by phone but all i got was the head office address which was the site admin and not the billing agent.So all in all not very good.I will say there are some quite good sites out there so there not all bad and review sites do a good job of telling you which ones are good beware not all are independent. But i believe there needs to be more regulation of the cowboys.I’m not saying that white label dating are to blame as they only distribute the software to anyone that wants to run a site you can call it anything you like but the database engines are the same they do have a bit of responsibility in as much they need to allow the software to clearly show the information a customer wants and not just use it as a money spinning tool to lure people into subscribing by these winks and messages from members who you think but can’t prove are actually contacting you.In some cases there are genuine mails going to other members but i wonder if there is some hooking in of the punter going on.Again for legal reasons I’m not accusing Whitelabel of this it’s something i just suspect happens with many sites to boost the revenue of the site by getting as many subscribers as possible.I’m on a lot of free sites and the same patterns do not occur with the email traffic which again re inforces a lot of my thoughts they seem more realistic and random more scammers there but if your savvy then you know the ones that put email addresses up front and straight away on the first mail is a suspect.I sent an email to Whitelabel dating asking them how they protect there reputation from people who use there databases and software in less than honest ways.As yet i have had no reply.There are small and large operators who hide there address in very small print at the bottom of the terms and conditions pages on a lot of these sites some are genuinely doing a good job but unless they are all regulated then the bad ones keep getting away with it!The good ones usually have an affiliation to a consumer protector so these are obviously safe if you have an organisation to complain to who is impartial and independent of the website admin i think thats whats needed across the board.For obvious legal reasons i have not named the websites using Whitelabel dating’s software but you may see it appear at the bottom of the browser as it’s accessing the site.Obviously there are quite a few database suppliers out there and i suspect the story is the same with them as well.
This is just a correction to the last post.It appears what i thought was the cancel repeat billing button was actually some kind of cancel top up button which i set to no.I asked the site admin what this was but i never got a reply seemed ambiguous at best and designed to fool you into thinking you could cancel repeat billing.