- seed their database with fake profiles using photos of models to make their site more appealing. So many that they make the difference in their leadership of the US market
- match use Russian/Nigerian scammers to do this - or at least knowingly allow the scammers to create enormous numbers of fake profiles (not too clear which choice)
My view: yes this goes on, and the whole case hinges on how much effort match puts into cleaning its house on a regular basis .
I'm confused here. Why would match _want_ fake profiles on the site? Wouldn't that drive people away pretty quickly once they catch on that the hot chicks they're trying to talk to aren't what they seem?
Well for one, it's a solution to the chicken-and-egg problem that dating sites face when starting out. And I guess even with traction, you want people to feel like they are in "a crowded room", even if a bunch of the profiles don't respond back or flake.
All dating sites do this. If you know of a single dating site that did not "seed" with model photos when it was started, I would be interested to know about it.
badoo is another scam site with 80% fake model photos - it's obvious
the online dating scene is big money and very poor ethics
I'd like to see google dating - with a "don't be evil" motto
PlentyofFish didn't and it's still the second largest after Match.com. A lot of the smaller niche dating sites you'll find started from a related website or network. Facebook, although not a dating website, afaik never created fake profiles.
> badoo is another scam site with 80% fake model photos - it's obvious
I don't know the badoo guys personally, but I'm pretty sure they are working just as hard combatting fake model photos. It's not an easy solution, as you can't just say "Oh, look, let's ban everyone with this photo" because they will change photos constantly.
That attracts people to the site (fake profiles have nicer pictures), so they pay to be part of it. Not a lot of people see it is a fake profile at first.
I have tried to use dating websites. Even on non-free ones, you can still register for free and see profiles. Whenever the picture is really nice, I use a small Firefox plugin called "who stoled my pictures" and find the picture is from someone else (models for instance).
I don't know if those sites create the fake profile themselves, but they certainly do little to detect them. Usage of something similar to the "who stoled my picture" plugin would be quite effective (even used manually by their staff who goes through new profile to approve pictures anyway).
"Not a day goes by when someone doesn't tell me that they saw my pictures posted on Match.com or another website"
1) The numbers:
Given how many friends real people have, given that 50% or so of the population are male, given that not all of one's friends are single, given that not everyone who is single is searching the internet looking for love, given that not all the fake profiles that use her photo are geographically likely to be where her single friends that use dating websites live, given that not everyone that uses a dating website is willing to admit to it, what is the realistic likelihood that this 'mom and model' really does have people telling her almost every day that they have just seen her likeness online?
2) 'or another website':
It is well known that many dating websites use fake profiles bought of the internet. The complaint is about match.com, not mystery random other websites.
As for why the fake profiles...
The business model of a dating website (OKCupid excepted, which is also owned by match.com) relies on people paying a monthly fee to be on the site. Therefore it is not in the best interest of the dating website for customers to ever find a partner and leave.
To get people to join there has to be at least an illusion of sensible dates in the subscriber's area. Once paid up then you can message them, without paying then there is no way to do that. I believe match.com have sufficient subscribers so that most people in most large cities do have a reasonable amount of genuine potential dates, however, there is no way of knowing if those other dates are non-paying profiles that will not answer back to any messages sent. Therefore, there is no way of knowing if those profiles are genuine. Clearly reputation rests on these profiles being genuine, they cannot be outright fakes or else subscribers will cancel their membership and try their luck elsewhere.
As the situation stands the subscriber, not getting any replies back can assume that a) they are far too ugly for the 'hot chick' to want to write back, b) they have not done well writing a message they would want to reply to, c) the 'hot chick' gets so much interest that some 'hotter dude' has beaten them to it or d) the 'hot chick' has joined the site but not paid up. Only the paranoid would assume option e) that the 'hot chick' is some fake profile.
The BBC's Panorama recently did an investigation into dating websites and it found that quite a few were pieced together with fake profiles. These profiles can also be bought online, so, if you want a few hundred thousand profiles for a dating website then you can just buy them. There are also places in obscure parts of the world where people spend all day 'being' these fake/ghost profiles. I would not be the least bit surprised if there were also 'Eliza' programs automating this. I don't think match.com are that unscrupulous, but then again, they are, the business demands it.
Okcupid did a great analysis on why match.com's business is fatally flawed, they took it down when match.com bought them out, but you can probably still find it.
Some of the dating sites do worse than just steal pics. They hire cheap labor (3rd world) and using fake accounts send fake replies to guys (paying members). All under a ToS saying it is for entertainment purposes only.
Match will just claim it was spammers and scammers, not done by match.com's in house team.
There are companies set up out there that will populate a dating site with fake profiles. (I don't know their urls, but seen them before)
I think there was also a UK documentary on scammy UK dating sites, on tv a little while ago. All using fake profiles of course.
I don't know if Match.com incentivized this kind of behaviour, though it's very possible - however not sure that would make them liable, most likely they have in their ToS that they don't allow certain behaviours - but don't enforce it.
I know a lot of the people that are in charge of removing these scammers (they're not really spammers as much) from OKCupid and Match. The idea that they are conspiring with these scammers is mind-blowingly insane. Why would they? Match makes plenty of money charging a highly legitimate subscription for their excellent service of helping us find people we love. What possible benefit would they get out of conspiring on western union money scams with morally and economically bankrupt people that consult witch doctors to gain internet fraud powers (I'm not making this shit up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o26Eks801oc) and can barely type out english?
My suspicion (without knowing or asking) is that the scammers are probably using profiles stolen from other people, and this crazy lawsuit lady/lawyer/seriously-who-gives-a-fuck decided that there was a conspiracy between the two, while the reality is that Match is working their asses off (especially on holidays like Thanksgiving because the scammers assume people are on vacation and double-time it) to ban the scammers from the site.
Call a piece of shit a piece of shit. This is a hail-mary attempt by asshole lawyers to extract money from, unlike them, a productive industry that makes money from providing us with a useful service and doing a good job. If I was as big of a shithead as these people were, I would need about 1.5 billion dollars worth of opulence to forget how horrible I was too.
If they're interested in suing scammers, they should sue themselves.
Putting all other things aside, I know the incentive for the websites to outsource somebody to create fake profiles (see the comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6823194). But what's the incentive for the 'scammers'? How can they 'scam' people on match.com by creating fake profiles? By making them come all the way to Nigeria and rob them? Give me a break.
I am not a big fan of the lawyers, but you sound too biased with statements like - "Match is working their asses off" "their excellent service", "piece of shit a piece of shit".
Gathering info for a future scam? Match seems like a good vector to get people to divulge personal details that then make a later "it's your friend john, I'm stuck in the airport and need you to wire me some money" scam work.
You could use Facebook, but I have no reason to tell people on Facebook details about my past. They're my friends, they already know. Dating sites are the best way to get a stranger to tell you something personal.
> How can they 'scam' people on match.com by creating fake profiles?
Getting invited to some developed country by some lonely soul. Get that person to come to their country and then drain their money. There are really guillable and desperate people out there that just stop thinking as soon as somebody fakes interest in them.
But how would Match profit? They have millions of users. What changes if they have millions and a few thousand?
Hi there, I worked at Match for a while and the basic scam pattern I saw was this: a scammer will create an account and send a ton of messages to recently active users, the users that respond will be immediately prompted to take the conversation to email (away from Match's PM system), and once they're off of Match they ask for more personal information.
I never went further down the path than that but I'm sure the scam could evolve along the lines of "I am your one true love please wire me money to buy a plane ticket to come see you."
I was prepared to agree but I can see that it might be reasonable to expect Match to be more diligent about disallowing trying to avoid the mis-use of photos. As a simple example, the suggestion to closely watch, freeze or block domestic profiles created on international IPs. Especially in cases where content is to be used in marketing activities.
I've made catfish hunting on Plenty of Fish into an entertaining game. Once you know what to look for, it is pretty easy. The biggest tip-off are well-composed photos. I'll see a profile with those kind of photos and throw them into google image search. I've got about an 80% hit rate there and of those, I'd say 19 out of 20 are fakes (models, photos on multiple profiles in different countries, etc). Another approach is to do a google search on a sentence in the profile's self-description to see if that same sentence has been lifted from somewhere else.
What I don't understand is why the dating sites haven't automated the process. They could could do a google image search on every uploaded photo and any hits would be forwarded to a human for investigation. They could also keep an internal blacklist of photos and well-known scammer cut-n-paste self-description text. The fact that they aren't doing that (because it is so easy for me to do it on active profiles) suggests apathy.
I agree that it'd be stupid for these sites to conspire with scammers, and I doubt that's what's going on... but to dismiss it because they're already making "plenty of money" definitely doesn't fly.
We've all seen people and corporations do things that are plainly stupid in the name of more profit when they're already raking it in. Never underestimate the power of greed.
Let me see if I got this right... If the allegations are indeed true, this "part-time model" believes that fake pictures of herself posted on match.com have resulted in $1.5b of damage to her career?
If I ever have daughters, I guess I should push them into part-time modelling...
You didn't get it right. From the first sentence in the article: "A Florida woman has filed a $1.5 billion class-action lawsuit against online dating site Match.com..."
I had a friend who used to work for one of Match's competitors. He left when he learned of the unethical bullshit that goes behind the scenes. It's actually pretty awful.
The fake profiles are almost always female because sites like Match.com are heavily male dominated - they're what you would call sausage-fests. To even out the numbers, the site hires contractors to create fake but plausible profiles of decently attractive women, which is not a hard thing to do.
But it doesn't stop there. Let's say that you as a male user subscribe to the service and send out twenty beautifully-crafted messages to women who seem like good matches, and eagerly wait for a response. When none comes (since every decently attractive woman receives tens of messages everyday, and yours was just one of them), you lose your motivation. Just as you're about to cancel though, you receive a hopeful "nudge" or a "wink" from someone. Maybe you message back and forth a few times, enough such that you decide not to write off the site and allow your subscription to renew.
What happened is that you got gamed. These sites are very good at algorithmicly determining "at risk" users and they target them heavily with attention from fake profiles to induce them to stay. Of course, nothing comes out of those interactions but that doesn't matter - the longer the site can string along the user, the more money it makes.
My friend told me that ALL paid online dating sites (including Match) engage in this practice, which makes total sense. After all, you don't want users leaving your site in droves and signing up for the competition. You need to convince them somehow that they aren't total losers, and the best way to do that is to have a blond, 27-year old "Jessica" -- who loves dogs and just moved to the user's city and is looking for fun things to do -- give them some attention.
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[ 227 ms ] story [ 3398 ms ] threadhttp://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
Match are acussed of
- seed their database with fake profiles using photos of models to make their site more appealing. So many that they make the difference in their leadership of the US market
- match use Russian/Nigerian scammers to do this - or at least knowingly allow the scammers to create enormous numbers of fake profiles (not too clear which choice)
My view: yes this goes on, and the whole case hinges on how much effort match puts into cleaning its house on a regular basis .
badoo is another scam site with 80% fake model photos - it's obvious
the online dating scene is big money and very poor ethics
I'd like to see google dating - with a "don't be evil" motto
That's not true at all. I know this for a fact. I
> badoo is another scam site with 80% fake model photos - it's obvious
I don't know the badoo guys personally, but I'm pretty sure they are working just as hard combatting fake model photos. It's not an easy solution, as you can't just say "Oh, look, let's ban everyone with this photo" because they will change photos constantly.
I have tried to use dating websites. Even on non-free ones, you can still register for free and see profiles. Whenever the picture is really nice, I use a small Firefox plugin called "who stoled my pictures" and find the picture is from someone else (models for instance).
I don't know if those sites create the fake profile themselves, but they certainly do little to detect them. Usage of something similar to the "who stoled my picture" plugin would be quite effective (even used manually by their staff who goes through new profile to approve pictures anyway).
"Not a day goes by when someone doesn't tell me that they saw my pictures posted on Match.com or another website"
1) The numbers:
Given how many friends real people have, given that 50% or so of the population are male, given that not all of one's friends are single, given that not everyone who is single is searching the internet looking for love, given that not all the fake profiles that use her photo are geographically likely to be where her single friends that use dating websites live, given that not everyone that uses a dating website is willing to admit to it, what is the realistic likelihood that this 'mom and model' really does have people telling her almost every day that they have just seen her likeness online?
2) 'or another website':
It is well known that many dating websites use fake profiles bought of the internet. The complaint is about match.com, not mystery random other websites.
As for why the fake profiles...
The business model of a dating website (OKCupid excepted, which is also owned by match.com) relies on people paying a monthly fee to be on the site. Therefore it is not in the best interest of the dating website for customers to ever find a partner and leave.
To get people to join there has to be at least an illusion of sensible dates in the subscriber's area. Once paid up then you can message them, without paying then there is no way to do that. I believe match.com have sufficient subscribers so that most people in most large cities do have a reasonable amount of genuine potential dates, however, there is no way of knowing if those other dates are non-paying profiles that will not answer back to any messages sent. Therefore, there is no way of knowing if those profiles are genuine. Clearly reputation rests on these profiles being genuine, they cannot be outright fakes or else subscribers will cancel their membership and try their luck elsewhere.
As the situation stands the subscriber, not getting any replies back can assume that a) they are far too ugly for the 'hot chick' to want to write back, b) they have not done well writing a message they would want to reply to, c) the 'hot chick' gets so much interest that some 'hotter dude' has beaten them to it or d) the 'hot chick' has joined the site but not paid up. Only the paranoid would assume option e) that the 'hot chick' is some fake profile.
The BBC's Panorama recently did an investigation into dating websites and it found that quite a few were pieced together with fake profiles. These profiles can also be bought online, so, if you want a few hundred thousand profiles for a dating website then you can just buy them. There are also places in obscure parts of the world where people spend all day 'being' these fake/ghost profiles. I would not be the least bit surprised if there were also 'Eliza' programs automating this. I don't think match.com are that unscrupulous, but then again, they are, the business demands it.
Okcupid did a great analysis on why match.com's business is fatally flawed, they took it down when match.com bought them out, but you can probably still find it.
Match will just claim it was spammers and scammers, not done by match.com's in house team.
There are companies set up out there that will populate a dating site with fake profiles. (I don't know their urls, but seen them before)
I think there was also a UK documentary on scammy UK dating sites, on tv a little while ago. All using fake profiles of course.
My suspicion (without knowing or asking) is that the scammers are probably using profiles stolen from other people, and this crazy lawsuit lady/lawyer/seriously-who-gives-a-fuck decided that there was a conspiracy between the two, while the reality is that Match is working their asses off (especially on holidays like Thanksgiving because the scammers assume people are on vacation and double-time it) to ban the scammers from the site.
Call a piece of shit a piece of shit. This is a hail-mary attempt by asshole lawyers to extract money from, unlike them, a productive industry that makes money from providing us with a useful service and doing a good job. If I was as big of a shithead as these people were, I would need about 1.5 billion dollars worth of opulence to forget how horrible I was too.
If they're interested in suing scammers, they should sue themselves.
I am not a big fan of the lawyers, but you sound too biased with statements like - "Match is working their asses off" "their excellent service", "piece of shit a piece of shit".
You could use Facebook, but I have no reason to tell people on Facebook details about my past. They're my friends, they already know. Dating sites are the best way to get a stranger to tell you something personal.
Getting invited to some developed country by some lonely soul. Get that person to come to their country and then drain their money. There are really guillable and desperate people out there that just stop thinking as soon as somebody fakes interest in them.
But how would Match profit? They have millions of users. What changes if they have millions and a few thousand?
I never went further down the path than that but I'm sure the scam could evolve along the lines of "I am your one true love please wire me money to buy a plane ticket to come see you."
What I don't understand is why the dating sites haven't automated the process. They could could do a google image search on every uploaded photo and any hits would be forwarded to a human for investigation. They could also keep an internal blacklist of photos and well-known scammer cut-n-paste self-description text. The fact that they aren't doing that (because it is so easy for me to do it on active profiles) suggests apathy.
We've all seen people and corporations do things that are plainly stupid in the name of more profit when they're already raking it in. Never underestimate the power of greed.
This also applies to people filing (potentially) frivolous lawsuits against organizations they see as having deep pockets.
If I ever have daughters, I guess I should push them into part-time modelling...
The fake profiles are almost always female because sites like Match.com are heavily male dominated - they're what you would call sausage-fests. To even out the numbers, the site hires contractors to create fake but plausible profiles of decently attractive women, which is not a hard thing to do.
But it doesn't stop there. Let's say that you as a male user subscribe to the service and send out twenty beautifully-crafted messages to women who seem like good matches, and eagerly wait for a response. When none comes (since every decently attractive woman receives tens of messages everyday, and yours was just one of them), you lose your motivation. Just as you're about to cancel though, you receive a hopeful "nudge" or a "wink" from someone. Maybe you message back and forth a few times, enough such that you decide not to write off the site and allow your subscription to renew.
What happened is that you got gamed. These sites are very good at algorithmicly determining "at risk" users and they target them heavily with attention from fake profiles to induce them to stay. Of course, nothing comes out of those interactions but that doesn't matter - the longer the site can string along the user, the more money it makes.
My friend told me that ALL paid online dating sites (including Match) engage in this practice, which makes total sense. After all, you don't want users leaving your site in droves and signing up for the competition. You need to convince them somehow that they aren't total losers, and the best way to do that is to have a blond, 27-year old "Jessica" -- who loves dogs and just moved to the user's city and is looking for fun things to do -- give them some attention.