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Global Personals is one of the UK’s largest internet dating companies. Headquartered in Windsor it makes £40m a year, has 130 staff and runs 7,500 dating sites.

But most of its 2.2m customers have never heard of the company. That is because it runs dating websites on behalf of other companies. For example, if you use the dating section of the Evening Standard or the Independent, it’s actually Global Personals you’re signing up with.

It’s called “white labelling” – a well-known company can launch a dating website with the company’s branding all over it, but Global Personals runs the back end. When a customer subscribes to the brand’s site, Global Personals takes a share of the money.

Industrial-scale deception

Two former employees of Global Personals have described to Channel 4 News how the company carried out industrial-scale deception to dupe innocent daters into parting with their cash.

Ryan Pitcher and Tom (not his real name – he does not want to be identified) were recruited to join Global Personals’ 30-strong team of “pseudos” – a dedicated team of staff whose job it was to set up and run fake profiles on the company’s network of sites.

The team members would scour social networking websites and steal people’s photos to use on their fake profiles.

Ryan said: “You’d take Helga from Iceland and make her into Helen from Manchester and write a profile. You’d use her features and invent a whole new person.”

Each team member would be running as many as 15 different personalities: old and young, male and female. They would use these fake profiles to send flirty messages to innocent users – as many as 400 messages an hour were sent by the team.