Deceptive Dating: Lying Online

I was watching an episode of The Practice last year and remember thinking that the lawsuit the episode centered around was completely ridiculous. One of the main females signed up for a dating website, and had been messaging a guy for some time. Apparently her profile claimed how open-minded she was, that she believed in giving people chances, that she thought beauty is on the inside, etc. The guy asks to meet her, and they agree on a local restaurant. Or maybe it was a coffee shop. In any event, he sits down and she fake smiles for a few minutes before saying that she has to go somewhere. I’m not sure why she didn’t ask for pictures beforehand, but she thought he was completely unattractive when they met. The poor guy was totally interested, but she refused to go out with him again. He decided to sue her on the grounds of false advertising or something of that nature, and the rest of the episode focused on the beginning stages of the suit.

I thought the whole episode was kind of lame based on how unrealistic the suit seemed. Wouldn’t it be crazy and ridiculous to hold people to the things they say about themselves on a dating website? Isn’t embellishment pretty standard? I can’t imagine that people would create profiles to explain how overbearing they are. Instead, they’re “attentive”. The man in the episode ended up dropping the suit, so unfortunately we’ll never know the end to this fictional story. Apparently he just wanted an apology. Aw.

I was reminded of this episode when I came across an article detailing a class-action lawsuit against Match.com. The official complaint explains that, “As alleged herein, Match breached its contract and common law covenants with Plaintiffs and other members of the Class by representing itself in its Terms of Use Agreement (the “Agreement”) as “the service for single adults to meet each other online” when in fact Match’s service is little more than a scheme to induce members of the public to join (and pay for) Match’s website based on false pretenses.” It alleges that hundreds of thousands of profiles are either expired or illegitimate, sometimes created by “scammers”. The site allegedly does nothing to fix the problem because these fraudulent profiles draw in customers by inflating the number of users the site can boast. The suit claims that over half of the profiles of its million subscribers are not legitimate.

Aside from an injunction to stop the allowance of these profiles, the class action seeks refunds of the membership fee- $34. Even though there are thousands of users as part of this suit, the total being sought in damages does not amount to anything too steep for this multimillion dollar company. A spokeswoman for Match said, “The claims have no merit and Match will defend the lawsuit vigorously.” It’s definitely understandable why the company wouldn’t just settle. Any sign that the allegations could have been true would seriously undermine the site’s credibility. With such a huge number of competitors, its customers would simply take their accounts elsewhere.

I suppose it makes sense for the thousands of members to be upset by the lack of real users as advertised, especially since they pay for their subscriptions. I agree that Match should remove profiles as they expire- there has to be a way the software or whatever could just automatically delete them. As for the “fraudulent” profiles that are created by “scammers” though, I think it’s nuts to expect the site administrators to be able to weed out the people who aren’t actually looking for a date, or who aren’t the person they claim to be. Those are problems people could encounter just as easily when meeting someone at a bar. Are people always who they claim to be? No way. It’s just as easy to lie in person about your name, age, marital status, preference for long walks on the beach, etc. I don’t think it is Match’s job to make the online dating scene a more honest place than the bar scene.