April 12, 2010

How “elite” dating websites scam people

Woman Crying

My ex-girlfriend called me a few weeks ago, her voice shaking. She asked if it was possible to get money back from a website. I asked her what the website was, and she did not want to tell me. So I told her to call the credit card company and ask them to refund the money. She did, called me a few days later to thank me and I did did not hear about it again.

Till last week, when she called me, crying on the phone. She was being sued by the dating website for not paying the fee of a bit more than $800.

(I’m not going to mention any of the websites by name, because they are extremely litigous, and I don’t want it to be said I directly accused any particular company of scamming. You can use the quotes I include here to discover the websites or use the search term “elite” to find the sites)

I’m going to describe the techniques that these websites are using to squeeze a lot of money out of people with a service that gives them nothing in return.

Get the right customers in
These websites advertise themselves as dating “for the elite”. They plaster the web with advertisments, and in some european countries they have billboards and are advertising themselves in TV. By focusing on the “elite” they attract people who likely have money. Their adverts feature 30-50 year old professionals, a class of people that are not as used to the internet and its danger as other younger people.

These websites are not using viral growth or word of mouth, because they basically don’t want new customers to learn how the service works from old customers. They want new ‘untainted’ people each time.

Get them on the landing page, get their information
The person arrives on the page, and she is asked to sign up with an email address. That’s all that is required for now. If the person leaves at this point, every second day, the person will be emailed with various headlines like:

- Don’t give up so soon
- Attractive singles are just a click away

Make a profile for them
Once the person visits the page, they are asked to do a personality test. This test is followed with some questions about the person. However, these are NOT free-form fields! The person has various options to choose from that do not allow variance in how ‘attractive’ this person would be to other people. For example, one of the websites gives these options to the question “how attractive are you?”

- Extremely attractive
- Very attractive
- Attractive

There are no other options. The list of professions you can choose from is fixed. There is no free-form field. Why this? This is so that every profile on the site is basically attractive to other people.

Now suck them in
After all that information has been filled out, this is where the shady part starts. The people start receiving emails from very attractive strangers who want to meet them. The problem is – they cannot reply to the messages unless they subscribe. Handsome men keep writing them emails, and they just can’t reply. Here a quote from a complaint board:

“Before submitting my credit card, I received at least one email per day. Eventually, I had over 40 emails, none of which I could read until I paid the fee. I finally decied to take the chance and paid nearly $200.00 for a VIP membership. As soon as I began reading the messages, I realized that they were all generic. I responded to nearly all of them, as I wanted to test my theory that this is a scam. Many of my responses contained my personal email address, so that they could communicate directly with me. I did not receive a single reply. T”

There are many different variants. Another variant is that that customers are made to “welcome” new customers by sending them an email. But these emails are obscured, you can only see this:

“Very Attractive woman 3km from you sent you a message”

Because this lady previously selected herself as “Very attractive”, the website is not lying when they use that headline.

Make them pay big money
After being badgered by these emails for a long time, people will take a chance and pay for the site, hoping to meet all these attractive people. But there is almost nobody on the site, just a bunch of fake profiles and people interacting with these fake profiles.

The membership fee is perhaps $30 a month. BUT only a yearly subscription is offered! This is revealed at the END of the transaction. So the minimum cost is 30 * 12 = $360. There is no option to pay $30 to test it out. Because obviously, nobody will use it once they have paid. So they focus on the high end only.

And of course, they have a lawyer as part of their payroll so whenever anyone disputes the charge, they are immediately sent legal documents. That threat alone will make many people cough up the money.

In two years, such a website grew so big they started running adverts on TV. That’s a big budget for a website that sells absolutely nothing. My ex-girlfriend, she got scared when she received that lawyers letter, and she paid. That’s how much it costs to learn the lesson, was her last sentence before she dropped the phone.

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