Another non-user here that agrees w @BigT just above.
If the only thing a free account gets me is a chance to tour their UI, and become part of their teasers to other paying customers that’s dishonest / sleazy. And the less clearly that reality is disclosed the sleazier it is. In an industry already tarnished with a reputation for sleaze that’s not a good look.
Before there were match making sites, there were dating agencies. And my contact in the industry told me that anything that presented as a dating agency was fraudulent. After working in the industry in the 1980’s, his observation was that the only agencies that weren’t fraudulent were meet-and-greets, which is to say churches and special interest groups, not dating agencies.
It sure seems like it wouldn’t be that hard to not use come-on bots. That’s active sleaze by the websites themselves. Call it sleaze by commission.
It also wouldn’t be that hard / expensive to police at least the worst of the scammers & jerks. Which is sleaze by omission, not commission.
I have no idea what these places charge per month, but there ought to be room for a quality product out there. I have to imagine a place that did those things would be popular with the folks who are serious about actually dating & meeting, not just trolling one another on a website.
What are the scammers trying to accomplish? Do people still get suckered into sending money to random people? I would think the ROI of these types of scams would be close to zero by now, as the general population is much more internet-savvy now.
Half the population is dumber than average. Scammers aren’t trying to sucker the savvy; there are more than enough easy marks out there. (Whether there’s a higher proportion of them among desperate folks who are unlucky in love is yet to be determined.)
I’m not entirely sure. I would assume it’s money. But I have never allowed one of these to get to the stage where I know what their deal is. I am tempted to just do it for science. Or maybe start off immediately asking them for money?
It’s not hard to spot them, so I’m not sure who falls for this stuff.
It’s simple to report spammers. And they’re trivially easy to spot. Match isn’t going to vet every user who signs up and pays. The fact that they have to pay to play eliminates a lot of the spammers right off the bat. (Do you think that Craigslist should vet every user before they can post?) Honestly, if a guy really believes that a 20-something beauty queen is lusting after him after viewing his scintillating, 5-word profile and pics of him posing with a fish he caught, he probably shouldn’t be looking online for a date.
Like I said above I didn’t see too many scammers during my latest foray into Match. Other sites had much more.
From my personal experience, from seeing people reporting crimes and from talking to women I know the scammers targeting males and females have totally different approaches. When males are targeted it tends to be less personal. They try to sucker you into going to a pay site were you have to pay to see them naked. There is also a scam were they get you on to a two way app and after they get the male to masturbate they threaten to send a video to all of their friends and family.
When it’s a female victim it tends to be an old fashioned lonely hearts scam. They convince someone lonely that they are in love (long distance) and they need money to come see them or some other made up reason.
Very true.
Side note: what is UP with all the pics of men holding a fish?
Or standing in front of their car?
Showing off your Jag or Maz, I get, but most of the time they’re standing in front of a beat-up old hatchback or something.
Well, having a car is something. Especially in non-US countries.
Lonely is a Hard State.
I really do not like match dot com. and the like
Would you like it in a box? Would you like it with a fox?
Men take pictures with a fish because they’re proud of the fish they caught, and they take pictures with a car when they want to show their friends the new car they bought. When creating a dating profile, those are the pictures they post because those are the pictures they already have.
I can’t tell you how many women’s profiles I’ve seen with pictures in their cars, or at Machu Picchu.
I don’t take pictures of myself; that’s vain. I don’t have a TwitFace account; that’s stupid.
How much success would I have in the online dating game? I’m happily married, but hypothetically speaking …
I’m amused by the fact that there are a lot of pictures of men and fish. Maybe that’s why I’ve seen so many women mention in their profiles that they like fishing. I thought maybe it was code for something that I wasn’t cool enough to understand. I hope they all find each other and are very happy.
I’m going to point out a small bright spot to all of the free and abandoned accounts which can’t respond to messages. It allows me to pretend that all of my unanswered messages were sent to one of those accounts and the silence isn’t actually rejection. I wonder if adding a picture of a fish would help with my response rate.
See the Machu Picchu stuff I liked back when I was dating. It shows me you’ve traveled a bit, and I like that. One of my favorites was a woman who had two normal shots and one with a garbage can over her head. If you’re brave enough to post that, and have that sense of humor, I like you. I want to see some character! I always liked one activity shot in the profile, something that gives me more than just a face or body. The ones that annoyed me were the amounts of pictures I remember seeing back then with pictures of a woman close to another man strategically cropped out. It may not have been an ex, but I’d bet much of the time it was. Can’t you be bothered to get a friend to take a nice picture if you don’t have any other one? I guess camera phones ubiquity now make it a lot easier than back then in 2005/2006, but man, it never occurred to me to post a picture like that.
Ha! Yes, I do feel silly when I take a selfie or mirror shot, but when in Rome…
ETA: I don’t think you!d have much success, if any, without a pic. I’m pretty sure I missed out on some good catches due to the fact that I have no Facebook, IG, TikTok, etc. accounts. Whatevs.
When I first started and I saw more scammers it became easy to spot but not for the reasons you think. They were all just slightly too good to be true. She would be hot but girl next door not beauty queen hot. They would be on the young end of acceptable age but not that far off that it would raise red flags. They did all seem to have photos taken by professionals and usually looked Russian.
Tinder I had no luck on. On there it had a lot of women who had there preferences set from 18 to 99 years old. I also learned the term “mutually beneficial relationship.” That’s a woman who is looking for a sugar daddy relationship. They would be very disappointed in my bank account.
I like it as well; just pointing out that there are cliché pictures for women, too. We take pictures of moments we want to preserve.
I took a sailing trip about 15 years ago and have a great picture from it. I’m not in the picture, but the fact that I was there and took it says something about the kind of person I am.
I never understood the thing about not liking fishing pictures. But I admit I’m older than dirt, and I actually like to see the guys showing pictures that actually tell you something about them. At least they have pictures. The dudes who have no pictures who constantly stalk and like my pictures. Ew.
One guy, the ONLY photo on his account, was a family picture at his wife’s funeral. They were all wearing masks so it was a recent picture. It was… bizarre.