Match.com and Yahoo Personals are accused of fraudulent acts to encourage members who have not had success to stay with the companies.

The allegations directed towards Match.com are that they have had their employees send fake romantic emails to clients about to leave their service, and have even sent them out on bogus dates, in order to keep them as paid subscribers. Yahoo Personals have allegedly created many fake profiles to inflate their apparent client base.

Match.com flatly denies the claims, but provides no further comments due to the pending litigation. Yahoo Personals gave no comments because of the lawsuit.

My personal opinion is that the claims are unlikely to be true. If Match.com were sending their staff out on dates with clients about to leave the service, there would be considerable cost and expenses involved with such an operation, and the risk of bad press and legal challenges for the organisations would be too great to warrant the return that this dubious practice would generate. Getting the staff to send emails would be a cheaper operation, but again, the risks of discovery too great. In the case of Yahoo Personals, Yahoo have so much traffic that it seems to me that they are unlikely to have any need to generate fake profiles to go along with real ones.

If you’re interested in joining an online dating organisation, then I have a page of reviews, and others have contributed their own opinions. You can view it by following this link to the online dating service reviews.