Watch out for all of the supposed "news" stories and review sites claiming the vast success of internet dating. Notice that these are all posted on sites belonging to parent corporations or subsidiaries of those very internet dating sites. Internet dating is highly touted as the last way to make money from the internet and these huge corporations will stop at nothing to trick you into building up their stock portfolios.

While women may find success, the story is quite different for men. Almost every female profile, no matter how detailed and well written, belongs to an internet porn spamming corporation. Your chances of meeting someone are slightly worse than your chance of being stuck by lightning.

Additionally, these sites create fake profiles of attractive women (usually hiring models to pose for the photo), which they use for advertising and also to wink or email members who are not paying subscribers to bait them into paying the membership fee (which is usually required to read or respond to an email/wink).

If you use a credit card to pay the subscription fee you will have extreme difficulty in stopping them from charging your account. Canceling your membership via email and phone will be futile. It can take up to a year of frustrating phone calls to stop the charges and you will never get the money back.

These sites also sell your personal information to third party internet networking corporations who will use that to spam you with targeted advertising and popups on your computer.

Simply logging on to one of these sites may sound like a risk free way to see what all the hype is about, but at the end you will find yourself out hundreds of dollars, with a virus infected PC, and a totally unusable email account.

If you are dumb enought to give your credit card # to one of the porn spamming companies, you will be out much, much more and will have little recourse for recovering this money.

Since these companies do nothing to verify the identity of the users, your children may be baited into joining with your credit card and will be easily scammed by the porn spammers, and its gonna cost you a bundle.

Do yourself a favor and block these sites from being accessed from your computer with a firewall program to save yourself from this endless nightmare.

Wow, I think guyincognito doesn't like dating sites. While I do agree you have to be careful (like with everything else on the internet) there are dating sites out there that offer a legitimate service. You just have to do a little research before you sign up.


I have to disagree. My friends and I belong to a well known dating site and two of them have met there current girlfriends there (maybe I will soon). I think that is where these forums come in handy in finding the right dating site. You can get actual peoples opinions.

I am sure some sites are a problem with this but when I decided to end my membership with Match.com, I didn't have any problems with them charging my credit card.

Read the dating sites Privacy Statement before signing up. A fare number of the major sites I believe do not sell email addresses (unless this has changed with some of them). You should be extremely careful with your emails from any source. Only open the ones that you know who the sender is. That's why I use a hotmail account for stuff I am not sure of. If you never open attachments you should be safe from viruses (even the ones that create popups) especially if you run an antivirus program.

Good points Darth . I must ask why did you quit match.com and what would you suggest as a alternative site ?

It's not a scam--my husband and I met on Match.com. I also met a great guy before I met my husband, and he and I dated for over a year.

I'm a reasonably attractive woman, and I have two friends who are online NOW--both blond, fit, and professional. Your posting is the first rumor I've ever heard that women online aren't for real.

I agree it's pretty obvious men outnumber women online, and that must get bizarrely frustrating for the men. But not all the pretty female faces and great profiles are false. I've written over 100 women myself, inviting them to take my survey on Internet Dating Success factors. Many of them have written me back--I know they're genuine.

I'm researching factors that contribute to success online for my master's thesis. If you're interested in the topic, please check out my survey--it's conducted by volunteers for the purpose of finding out what DOES help people have more success with online dating.

The URL is:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=38640517881

For ethical reasons, I can't compensate anyone for taking the survey --but I can send you a link to the live results. Over 100 people have taken the survey so far.

Best luck--
Lisa

There are companies that are starting to implement screening and background checks of members to be able to join or communicate with other members.

ie; www.true.com and now www.citydate.com, I suggest that people who are serious about meeting someone use one of these verified member sites.

These are my experiences exactly. I'm not an ugly guy. I get dates in the real world without too much of a problem. I'm professional, IVY league educated, athletic, I come from a big close family, am interested in many, many things but after trying ever single dating site in existence (due to tremendous pressure from my family who buy into this hype and want me to get married) I can say for sure, there is not 1 female on any site that has a slim/athletic build a college education and is between the ages of 18 and 30. I challenge anyone to show statistics that prove otherwise. Match.com is the worst offender of all. Just post a profile and see. You will get 3 unsolicited contacts from attractive women right away. These are fake profiles created by Match.com. When you pay the membership fee and reply to their extremely friendly, flitatious emails you will be met with no reply at all. You will then see these profiles online and attempt to chat with them. They will be extremely friendly once again but will have no idea that an email was sent from that profile to you. Internet dating may be a very effective way for complete losers and undatably ugly people to meet but you will never, ever, ever meet a woman that is 18-30 attractive and smart on an internet dating site, although you will see tons and tons of profiles of women with these qualities. Internet dating is a scam.

I've been on dating sites for about 18 months, and Ive met some nice women....so there are real people on these sites...but recently a site Ive been on a while as got me feeling very suspect...

I decided the site waan't offering anything so let my subscription run out, with in a week I'd had 5 people make me a friend without speaking to me and had a couple of messages sent, non I could reply to because my membership had run out...anyway figured what the eck £8.50 (UK) guess what nearly a month on and not one of those contacts will respond or as been in touch again...

let me know about Elite mate....?
johnny

YES!!!

I have tried udate.com, match.com, yahoo personals, and many others - they are all "cash machines" to deprive me of my money - the reports say that internet-dating is a $475M/yr business, the largest single business on the internet; I hope these lawsuits that people are bringing againest match.com and others wake these people up

I met a 28 yr old, beautiful girl with no kids who did'nt smoke, owned her house and works out several times a week. A hot romance ensued and I have been with her for 8 months. I could not have been more satisfied.

Maybe I was lucky but I dated very good prospects from online dating.