Scam Watch!
We're documenting all the popular Scams and Tricks that some other dating sites out there loving using to snag you. I'm sure some of these, if not all, will sound very familiar to you.
- Sign-Up First
This is the greatest and most popular scam out there. This is used to get you to sign up to a site quickly. You are not allowed to see how many people are actually on the site. You also cannot see how the functionality of the site works, or what features are available to you.
You may or may not be able to perform a search. Often times, the search will yield some arbitrarily high number of potential matches. This is usually false, and is just step-2 of this scam. In order to prove this, do a search for the age range of 98-99. They'll give you a number in the multi-thousands! I've seen no less than 3 Big-Named sites doing this. It's all about money folks. And these people have absolutely no problem lying to you about anything.
When you actually sign up to the site, then you find out that you've been hoodwinked. You will find out that the search results are not the same. - Phoney Offers
A great offer is shown on the site's homepage. Perhaps it's a so-called "low price" offer, or maybe it's a "limited free offer" ending today or right now.
Once you sign up, you'll see that this offer is available everyday. It's a superb trick which will entice many people looking for a deal. It's just unfortunate that you don't actually get one. - Paid Review Sites
This is when very popular web sites or blogs are paid to write a favorable article with bias. These are easily noticed by most critical consumers. The review will make no comparison to other sites, or the comparisons will be totally inaccurate. - Fake Review Sites
Here the dating site buys a different domain-name and writes reviews including comments from users. The only thing is, the review and all the comments are written by the company itself! Next, advertising is purchased online which will bring users to this fake site to read the great fake reviews.
It's only natural for a good consumer to look for reviews of any service or product one is interested in. We wouldn't expect companies to be so devious as to create a phoney propaganda site. But, they are out there in multitudes. So beware. - Fake Social Network Profiles
Phoney profiles are created on the biggest social networking sites like MySpace, etc. The profiles are setup to look like it belongs to a fan or zealot who wants to share the site with you.
These profiles are basically ads used to promote their sites, but in a devious way. Typically, an employee of the company is used to send out friend-requests, post messages, or do anything else to drive traffic to their site. - The Spam Campaign
The spam campaign is the easiest way to reach a lot of people. All of us get unsolicited email in our inbox. I think we know by now that these companies are slimy and we should not be patrons for any of their products or services.
We like to include Pop-ups and Pop-unders in this category as well. It's also a very cheap and an extremely annoying tactic. Dating sites still love using these techniques. - The Numbers Scam
This is when the site boasts about the number of their members or the number of marriages that occurred from using their site. Usually, absolutely no proof is given to back up their claims.
Sometimes, for the marriage proof, there will be pages of glowing comments from supposed married people who got hitched by meeting someone on the site. Is that proof? Where's the pictures and full names? I want to look these people up to see if they are real. I can create 100 pages of text like that in 1/2 hour.
I don't know how effective this is, but it's certainly very popular. - Fake Members
These members are usually easy to detect for various reasons. They are used by employees of the dating site to send tempting messages to potentially paying members.
These fake members are also used to load up the database of the site. In this way, it looks like there's loads of members from every single town. - You Can't Delete Yourself
This is the simplest scam of them all. You are not allowed to delete your profile on the site. The site knows you are a real member, and so they want to keep you there.
Many times there is just no way for you to remove your profile totally. Or, the delete functionality on the site doesn't work for some phoney reason. The hope is that you will give up trying to delete yourself. You are then stuck, and they like that.
When we see more Scams and Tricks out there, we'll update this document. If you see some new ones, email us and let us know! :)
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