“FTC Sues Owner of Online Dating Service Match.com for Using Fake Love Interest Ads To Trick Consumers into Paying for a Match.com Subscription”

FTC released a report on September 25th of this year reporting that they sued online dating service Match Group, Inc. (Match), the owner of Match.com, Tinder, OKCupid, PlentyOfFish, and other online dating sites, alleging that the company used fake love interest advertisements to trick hundreds of thousands of consumers into purchasing paid subscriptions on Match.com.

Please remember in the day and age of digital love, looking for a potential love seems easy. Create a profile, start searching through thousands of pictures, and make contact with the individual of your interest. So often people that are looking for romance are caught up in a scam. The reports of online scams have been rising steadily since 2015. Romance scammers lure people in with phony online profiles, often pulling photos off the internet of an attractive person and creating an appealing profile and then begin sending their target a message with an intense interest in meeting. If you respond with interest, normally the messages will continue trying to build trust, with excuse after excuse of why they can’t meet. Online services do not do anything to provide you the protection that working with a professional matchmaker does. We take your privacy and safety seriously. That is the reason that we screen and qualify each candidate before we accept anyone as a client. We understand the importance of your meeting face to face and not carry on with an online romance that is simply endless messages. All of our clients are real and serious about finding a life long companion. Unlike online services that create fake profiles themselves to lure you into signing up to respond to a message that they themselves send out. 
It saddens me that people not only need to worry about the rising attempts of scammers from individuals online but the online services themselves. Please remember to never send gifts or money to a sweetheart online that you have never met in person. Talk to someone that you trust about your new love interest. Sometimes you can be blinded by love and you may miss red flags that seem obvious to others. Take it slowly and ask questions and look for inconsistent answers. Try a reverse-image search of the profile pictures to see if they’re associated with other profiles that do not match. Look for broken English in the messages that you receive. If you receive long letters of them proclaiming their love, copy and paste the letter in google search to see if it pulls up the same letter in a possible scam report. If someone you have never met seems to fall in love with you in a very short time or always out of the country for work or hints to needing help financially for any reason, run! While meeting quality people on your own and be hard and risky, it doesn’t have to be. Call me to set up a time to come in to discuss your options and I can get you started on a safe and secure path to meeting the companion you have been dreaming of!