Whenever I read stuff like this, I think in my head: names. We want names. We want these people to never do this again.
Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says
141–150 of 508 posts
Re: Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says
#142Back when I was single, I was on a dozen dating sites. It was frustrating as heck to keep getting led on by fake profiles. eHarmony is the worst: they actually sold my email address to spammers. How do I know this? I have my own domain, and use a unique (hard to guess) email address for each site I have to give an email address to. So it was trivial to nail eHarmony as the culprit. Someone has already linked to the O…
eHarmony is disgusting. Or they were, the one time I tried to use their service ten years ago. My wife and I had been separated for a while and in the divorce process. (We were and remain on friendly terms, but it was definitely over.) I thought I would check out some dating services, and eHarmony sounded like one that wasn't sleazy or weird. So I filled out their lengthy multipage onboarding form, with all kinds of…
>And then they offered no way for me to recover all of the information I had just entered into their site - all the essays, personal questions and answers, all gone.
What's worse is that they probably saved it and profited from that data.
Re: Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says
#143Back when I was single, I was on a dozen dating sites. It was frustrating as heck to keep getting led on by fake profiles. eHarmony is the worst: they actually sold my email address to spammers. How do I know this? I have my own domain, and use a unique (hard to guess) email address for each site I have to give an email address to. So it was trivial to nail eHarmony as the culprit. Someone has already linked to the O…
eHarmony is disgusting. Or they were, the one time I tried to use their service ten years ago. My wife and I had been separated for a while and in the divorce process. (We were and remain on friendly terms, but it was definitely over.) I thought I would check out some dating services, and eHarmony sounded like one that wasn't sleazy or weird. So I filled out their lengthy multipage onboarding form, with all kinds of…
In my market, eHarmony pretty blatantly advertises itself as the morality police type of Christian platform - so this sort of thing is implied.
Re: Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says
#144I think it's a fatal flaw in the dating site business model, to be honest. Their incentive is for you to stay on the site for as long as possible. If you could find a relationship quickly and then they would leave the site quickly. This would reduce the amount of ad and subscription revenue, in addition to reducing the size of the pool of "potential matches", discouraging those who have more trouble finding someone.
Ah yes, the only profession aside from medicine that exists to eradicate itself.
Medicine does no more eradicate itself than food industry does. Of course, once you've eaten in a restaurant, you are not hungry anymore, but that's far cry from food industry "eradicating itself".
Re: Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says
#145I think it's a fatal flaw in the dating site business model, to be honest. Their incentive is for you to stay on the site for as long as possible. If you could find a relationship quickly and then they would leave the site quickly. This would reduce the amount of ad and subscription revenue, in addition to reducing the size of the pool of "potential matches", discouraging those who have more trouble finding someone.
Ah yes, the only profession aside from medicine that exists to eradicate itself.
Not quite. Teaching counts too, with the the end result of a good tutor being that they're not needed any more (same with a college or university).Quicker you pass say your driving test, the less money the instructor makes.
Re: Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says
#146Rewriting one of my earlier comments: I have used Tinder (owned by Match) before and it was one of the must frustrating experiences ever. First, they do shady things with your data. Since I made a Tinder account I been getting constant ads for random dating sites. This have been going on for months. God knows how many companies now have my data. Second, they employ dark patterns: 1) Easy account deletion. Why does th…
Re 2.
They changed it so swiping left on someone who liked you no longer decreases the like counter
Also before that if you were out traveling the likes you got while on the road will not show up in your stack when you leave the area where you got them
Also if you swipe left on someone and you’re in their stack and they swipe right on you, they’ll show up in the count
The rest is still super scummy, but the “rules” of the like counter are at least somewhat logical
Re: Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do the same thing with a gmail address -- just do myemail+uniqueid@gmail.com, because gmail drops everything after the + for routing the email but still tells you which address it was sent to.
I used to do this, but it is troublesome some times because some websites use libraries that strip or replace the plus sign and the final email ends up being an address that you don’t have access to. Most of the time this is not a problem because you can create the account again with the correct email, but I have lost a few good usernames in some popular websites because I pulled this trick on them, Gravatar is one o…
Any many just fail, assuming '+' is an invalid character
Re: Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
eHarmony is disgusting. Or they were, the one time I tried to use their service ten years ago. My wife and I had been separated for a while and in the divorce process. (We were and remain on friendly terms, but it was definitely over.) I thought I would check out some dating services, and eHarmony sounded like one that wasn't sleazy or weird. So I filled out their lengthy multipage onboarding form, with all kinds of…
In my market, eHarmony pretty blatantly advertises itself as the morality police type of Christian platform - so this sort of thing is implied.
Yes indeed, and I have no problem with their choice to serve only those who fit with their mission.
If they had only been honest and up front about it, and as soon as I said I was "separated" they said "sorry, we're not the dating service for you", it would have been fine! I would have respected that and moved on.
But when they actively lied to me by leading me through the entire onboarding process - when they knew from the beginning that they would reject me - that was beyond the pale.
Re: Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says
#149TFA is a bit imprecise with the wording, so it's not exactly clear to me, but from what I understand, there's two different things that could be happening. In one case, a dating site company internally creates fake profiles and/or operates bots which cause the fake profiles to interact with real potential users in an attempt to get them to sign up. This is like what AM did on their site, where there weren't actually…
One time on Match I got a wink from someone who passed me a web URL that was for an event, a performance of performance art IIRC. My entertainment tastes range all over the place, but at the same time I can only be in one place at any given time so I have to reject ideas.
When I shared my rejection of that particular idea with my fellow Match participant, there were no further messages. So I have no idea if maybe this was some sort of cult-front come-on or there was actually an attempt to fill some small venue with paying attendees for a legitimate entertainment, based on keywords in my profile that indicated a likelihood of interest perhaps? The latter of course is the most charitable guess. It was clearly not my sparkling personality they were interested in.
It was "in the middle" of my time on Match so I don't think there was any link with getting me to renew. Also the process passed the Turing test, so the term bot seems misapplied. But scammer in a gentle sense does apply in the sense that apparently romance was not the goal, but was a lure.
Re: Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a bummer. FWIW there are a fair number of non-gmail domains that are gmail-backed (e.g. a lot of universities' email systems) so it should still work with those consistently I hope.
It don't need to be gmail-backed for + to work. I use it on my own domain without any problems and there is no gmail involved
On my domain I made _ and . Also work the same as +, for annoying sites that somehow think + is an invalid character for email addresses.