Online Dating Services Being Accused of Deceiving Lonely Hearts

Recently the online dating service Match.com was sued by a male subscriber, who claimed that the service had sent him out on a date with one of their female employees just to keep him signed up to the program. Yahoo! personals has also been sued for creating fake singles profiles to entice lonely hearts to sign up for the service. Match.com has demanded that the lawsuit be dismissed, calling it a "totally baseless attack." Yahoo declined to comment to reporters when asked about the allegations against them.

A report by Jupiter Research estimates that the American market for online personals had revenues of over $473 million last year—the largest moneymaking category on the Internet. In an accompanying consumer survey, Jupiter Research found that 35% of online dating service subscribers to three major sites—Match.com, Yahoo Personals and Spark Networks—were dissatisfied. Match.com, which claims more than 15 million members, offers a basic subscription for $29.99 a month. Yahoo charges $19.95 a month for a dating service, and $34.95 a month for people looking for more serious relationships. Do the math and it’s easy to see how lucrative it can be to offer lonely people a chance at love.

The lawsuit against Match.com, filed in Los Angeles by Matthew Evans, accuses the site of creating fake profiles and issuing sham e-mail "winks"—standardized indicators of interest by another subscriber—to make him think women were interested in him, and to keep him subscribed to the service. Match.com was quick to deny the allegations, even providing investigators with a signed affidavit from Autumn Marzec, the woman accused of being "date bait," who said she had never worked for the Match.com or its parent company, InterActive Corp.

The lawsuit against Yahoo! was filed in San Jose by Robert Anthony, who accuses Yahoo! of posting fabricated profiles of nonexistent people on its site "to generate interest, public trust, and give the site a much more attractive and functional appearance." Anthony says that Yahoo! sent him fake "new match" messages when his monthly subscription was about to be up for renewal. After several months of belonging to the site and failing to meet a potential match, he began to be suspicious. With a little investigation, he discovered that the same picture of a woman was posted on the site for different cities, with a different name for each posting. Anthony’s attornety, Randy Rosenblum, said "He wants to expose what he believes to be illegitimate conduct on the part of Yahoo and stop it from happening, because people are signing up for a service and are paying for it and they are not getting what they are paying for. They are being misled into thinking there are people out there who are interested."

Trish McDermott, a member of Match.com’s startup team who now serves as chief matchmaker at Engage.com, said that during her ten years of working for Match.com, she never saw any type of fraud being perpetrated on subscribers to the site. However, McDermott added, most personals sites employ a business model that in all likelihood fails consumers. The reason for that failure lies in the variety of subscriptions available at each site. In a pay-to-respond model, in which a subscriber can post a profile on the site but cannot respond to an e-mail sent by a potential match, there is no way for the subscriber to know whether the e-mail is from a paying member of the site. So if someone e-mails dozens of people and gets only one or two responses, it could appear that most of the profiles they wrote to were fake, when they are actually profiles of non-subscribers who can’t respond to e-mails.

"The true enticement of these services are the real people who like you for who you are," McDermott said. "Their expectation is to find an authentic person and to fall madly and truly in love, yet the experience can be very demoralizing for these people," she explained. Too bad the matchmaking services are more interested in making a profit than in making people happy.