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The Courts United States

Match.com Connected Daters To Fake Accounts To Boost Subscriptions, US Regulators Say (theverge.com) 174

Posted by BeauHD from the fraudulent-behavior dept.
The FTC has filed a lawsuit against Match Group alleging that the company connected Match.com daters with fake accounts in an effort to get them to subscribe. "The case hints at the murky line between genuinely helpful notifications and those that prey on people's curiosity to monetize a service," reports The Verge. From the report: Non-paying Match.com users cannot view or respond to messages they receive on the service, but whenever they receive one, Match.com emails them to let them know, encouraging them to subscribe to see the message. The FTC claims that, in hundreds of thousands of instances, Match.com notified daters of messages even after the company detected that the account sending the message was fraudulent. Once these people subscribed, they opened the message to see that the user had already been banned or, days later, would be banned for on-platform fraud, the lawsuit says. When these users then complained to Match.com or tried to get their money back, Match.com denied any wrongdoing.

The FTC claims this behavior led to 499,691 new subscriptions, all traced back to fraudulent communications, between June 2016 and May 2018. The lawsuit also claims that these automatically generated email alerts were often withheld from paying subscribers until Match.com completed a fraud review. It still allegedly automatically sent the advertisement email to non-paying users, however. The FTC also claims that Match.com made canceling subscriptions incredibly difficult -- canceling requires over six clicks, according to the complaint. Match.com also allegedly locked people out of their accounts after they disputed charges, even if they lost their dispute and had time remaining in their subscription. The FTC is seeking monetary relief for consumers who lost money from the company's practices.
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Match.com Connected Daters To Fake Accounts To Boost Subscriptions, US Regulators Say More

Match.com Connected Daters To Fake Accounts To Boost Subscriptions, US Regulators Say

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @06:34PM (#59237076)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I'm not sure about that, unless match.com knew the accounts were bots before passing them along.

      • Re:Murky line? It's fraud! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by CanadianMacFan ( 1900244 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @09:27PM (#59237654)

        Dating sites are creating the fake accounts themselves and then in small print tell the users, sometimes only when they sign up, that fake accounts exist on the site to help them to "experience the most" of the site.

        All Match.com has to do is show that the users were warned about the existence of the fake accounts.

      • Re:Murky line? It's fraud! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by taustin ( 171655 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @10:17PM (#59237780) Homepage Journal

        I suspect Match.com created those fake accounts for the specific purpose of enticing men to sign up for a paid account, thinking there were lots of available women there when there aren't. Apparently, the FCC suspects that, too.

        At least Match.com will allow women to actually sign up. Some of the even shadier dating sights won't, because actual women interfere with the scams.

        • I suspect Match.com created those fake accounts for the specific purpose of enticing men to sign up for a paid account, thinking there were lots of available women there when there aren't.

          LOL, of course they did. Pretty much every dating site and app in the world does this.

          Browse with a "free" account and shitloads of 'women' be there, dying to contact you. Sign up and you'll get a couple of bogus emails or PMs from them.

          When your subscription is about to lapse, suddenly loads of women will again come out of the woodwork, begging to date you...until you renew your subscription, that is.

          This trick is as old as dirt (but still works like a charm).

  • How about the "No shit" department? Anyone who has spent a nano-second on any dating site knows that shady business is the name of the game.

  • Bad economic models - Bad behaviors (Score:5, Interesting)

    by shanen ( 462549 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @06:41PM (#59237102) Homepage Journal

    No, I'm not really interested in this kind of website these days, and I'm sure my wife will complain if she ever finds out I said anything, but... Speaking hypothetically about a time long, long ago, I would have wished that there was one of these matchmaking websites that had a business model that was oriented around long-term relationships. In other words, the website would get the highest returns as money if and only if the marriage lasted. ADSAuPR, atAJG.

    As regards this particular scandal (in a world overrun by scandal), my understanding is that their revenue came from subscriptions, and most of the subscriptions came from perpetual shoppers of the male variety. In that environment intermittent reinforcement is the obvious strategy to keep the suckers in the game. Because most of the shoppees of the female variety don't appreciate the hopper shoppers, there's going to be a shortage on that side, and I am not at all surprised Match.com wound up cheating to create a little bit of extra reinforcement. In fact, I'm quite confident they ran analyses to estimate exactly how long a perpetual shopper would keep subscribing without any results and just how much of a non-physical result would be sufficient to keep those subscription dollars coming.

  • These dating sites are merely monetizing a person's need to be in relationship. I imagine they'd be willing to bait your hook with two worms to get you enrolled.

    The FTC also claims that Match.com made canceling subscriptions incredibly difficult -- canceling requires over six clicks, according to the complaint.

    Shit. That's the difficulty equivalent of getting shed of an embedded stalker.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Jarwulf ( 530523 )
      They're monetizing a guy's need to be in a relationship. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to guess at the gender ratio for who actually pays for this crap. Of course you'd never guess for apps like Bumble where the militantly feminist developers treat and talk down to men like second class users

  • So I guess they contend requiring seven clicks or more to complete a task on a website is worthy of a lawsuit. Comcast is in trouble if the plaintiffs win this one.

    • Six clicks is at least how many it takes to set up Windows 10 without a Microsoft Account. The lawsuit is more about the fraud.

  • This is common practice on dating services (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jarwulf ( 530523 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @06:43PM (#59237114)
    They almost certainly do the same thing on Tinder et al. I-I mean my male friends get likes but the girls never respond and then unmatch. When starting a new account you tend to get a ton of likes and then nothing. Sure no responses is to be expected because the typical woman on dating apps who is at minimum slightly more attractive then Medusa is inundated with hundreds of likes a day but in that case why bother to match and then go through the trouble of unmatching? Wouldn't you just forget the guy in your ever expanding library of thousands of matches? One interesting thing is that they've gotten clever with these fake profiles and more of them are showing up with plainer girls rather than the unrealistic way out of your league hotties that used to be common.
    • The fake profiles are likely AI-generated photorealistic female and male faces, using tech similar to what Nvidia showed off recently. Do you really think that Jodie with the Victoria's Secret looks or Brandon who looks like the cousin of Brad Pitt are real people?

      • Hey now! Jodie's been through a lot of failed relationships with attractive men who cheated on her and treated her poorly, so maybe now she's looking for (cough) an average guy who will treat her like a princess.

    • There are a lot of fake/bot accounts on these dating services. Depending on the service they can either be easy to spot or nearly impossible. For services that require profile questions, the fake accounts will just answer the minimum number. For services like Tinder that are just a picture and a bio, it's much harder to tell.

      I-I mean my male friends get likes but the girls never respond and then unmatch.

      What's happening here is that people are swiping right on everyone and then culling their matches. It's more efficient than carefully looking at each bio before making a decision.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jarwulf ( 530523 )
        Yes there are bots from third parties. Those ones are easy to spot and if you're handicapped to the point where you can't tell you can just objectively go off whether they ask you to visit an external site. Tinder at least is actually getting pretty good at taking them down, at least the obvious ones. But I think the sites also catfish themselves to string guys along.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @07:15PM (#59237262)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • The bots are great. One asked for my picture and I sent it Hitler, and it wouldn't stop telling me how hot I am.

        Some chicks might dig the "Hitler" look ....

      • The bots are great. One asked for my picture and I sent it Hitler, and it wouldn't stop telling me how hot I am.

        Try sending it an archived goatse.cx photo. Or tubgirl. Collect all the responses saying how hot it is and then write an article and expose the fraud. Now that would be something.

      • I thought women liked the bad boys.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AvitarX ( 172628 )

      I think to see uses the business model of charge for infidelity don't they?

      Like it's free but you can't control who sees you if you don't pay.

    • This is a common practice on InterActiveCorp [wikipedia.org] owned dating sites.

      The fact you are seeing similar conflict of interest in policy of Tinder as happens on Match should not be a surprise given they both owned by the same parent company.

      IAC also owns Plenty Of Fish and OkCupid. So when someone because disgusted by Match's predatory behavior and sign up for an alternative, in reality they are just ditching paying for one IAC owned dating site for yet another IAC owned dating site.

      • Oh yeah, I realized that a long time ago. What happens is that when you sign up on OKC, it'll give you two to four fake "likes". I'm 90% sure that these are "deleted" profiles as opposed to AI generated images. They'll even try to purposely match you with these fake accounts and encourage you to message them knowing full well you won't get anything back.

        The only "legit" match I ever got there was a person who wanted $500 for compensated dating. Dating sites don't work.

    • Sorry to say buddy, but Tinder and others like it work just fine for some of us. The problem is, the majority of women aim for just a small percentage of men.
    • Setting up a eHarmony profile is free but you have to buy a subscription to respond if somebody contacts you. So if you contact someone and there's no response, there is no way to tell whether she's ignoring you or just set up a profile and never paid. Sort of dishonest, I guess. But the plus side is if someone contacts you, they paid. So less likely to be a bot.

      I met my wife there. - Before we were married, I should add. ;)
  • Not one day goes by where you don't hear about yet another Internet-Shminternet-IoT company "crossing the line into immorality or outright illegality". A nice way to punish these CEOs would be to force them to pay 10,000 Dollars - in 1890s Dollars - per transgression and also to eat the smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop PC that was used by the victim while the transgression happened. Are there no decent people running any kind of Internet business anymore?

  • The first thing Match did when buying OK Cupid was (Score:5, Informative)

    by sandbagger ( 654585 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @06:50PM (#59237158)

    Was delete this article https://www.gwern.net/docs/psy... [gwern.net] by the mathematicians who founded OK Cupid. It demonstrated that the statistical improbability of the membership claims made by many dating sites such as E-Harmony and Match.

    Match, being a public company, had to publish information about their business. With 20,000,000 profiles, of which there were 1.3 million paying subscribers, the odds that you were trying to connect with profiles that were even active were really, really small. Of course, Match and the other web sites never delete inactive profiles so by now the odds are even smaller.

    • Match and the other web sites never delete inactive profiles so by now the odds are even smaller.

      Last-login-date is an available search criteria, so it is easy to exclude inactive profiles.

  • Too many dating services do this. If you get matches while not subscribed you are probably better off treating it as bullshit and focus on other dating opportunities.

  • Not just Match, others do the same thing (Score:3)

    by spagthorpe ( 111133 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @06:53PM (#59237174)

    Years ago in leading up to a class reunion, for a while they wanted us to sign up for a classmates.com account. At the time it was free, or you at least had more functionality with it. They changed around the membership levels or something, and wanted you to pay for the same level of service. After a while, you'd start getting bogus emails saying "hey, someone wants really to connect with you.", but you can only see who if you get a paid account.

  • It sounds like I'm in the minority here, but I met a lot of girls on match.com. I even met my wife there. Sure, there was a degree of fake/scammer bullshit, but most of it was really easy to spot. Overall, I don't have a bad thing to say about the service.

  • Did any users notice? (Score:3)

    by Required Snark ( 1702878 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @07:29PM (#59237296)
    Just wondering.

    Is Slashdot a good place to ask this question?

  • If its one thing the world is slowly learning is that US corporations are dishonest.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • This was common knowledge to users as far back as 15 years ago, when I was using it. I knew both men and women who were using match back then that would get the same profiles "matched" with them despite having completely disparate interests and desired traits in a partner. The "subscribe to meet me" type solicitations were ubiquitous and certainly not limited to recent business practices.

    Pretty much every dating site I've ever used has similar tactics.

  • I've never given much thought about dating sites, not surprised to read about match.com. I sometimes get these popup ads or spam email from sites. I get suspicious when they portray hot looking women desperate for men (really?). Some time ago I took a screenshot of an ad "meet Russian girls!" amusingly alongside a article of supposably new MiG fighter.

    Years before the internet I was talking with someone that consulted through a dating site, I was shocked he paid nearly $30K (1990 dollars), not sure if he

  • Match.com notified daters of messages even after the company detected that the account sending the message was fraudulent

    Dollars to donuts sez match.com created the bogus accounts in the first place

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