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Back in June 2007, a lawsuit was filed against True.com (TrueBeginnings) by Thomas Wong at the District Court of Dallas County, Texas. Mr. Wong at that time (and I believe he still is) was represented by the law firms Tycko & Zavareei LLP and Crews, Shepherd & McCarty LLP. The lawsuit is primarily about the billing and renewal practices of True.com and the difficulties members have in canceling their accounts.

The Online Dating Insider has posted new information regarding this lawsuit. True.com’s motion for summary judgment was denied on December 3rd, 2008 and Mr. Wong's class action lawsuit will now be able to move forward.

For information on the original filing in 2007 visit The Earth Times.

It looks like PerfectMatch.com will be making an appearance in the new Adam Sandler movie called Paul Blart: Mall Cop which stars Kevin James. Previous films in which Perfect Match was the dating site used in the movie by relationship troubled characters include "Must Love Dogs" and "Failure to Launch". This approach to marketing has been very successful for Perfect Match which few other dating sites have tried. PerfectMatch.com also gets mentioned fairly regularly on TV by such popular shows as Dr. Phil and the Bonnie Hunt Show.

The new movie is due out in mid-January. Visit the official Paul Blart: Mall Cop website for more information on this movie and a preview. Read our PerfectMatch.com Review for more details on this online dating site.

As mention in a story we did in the spring, Avalanche is on track and has finished their first phase of international expansion. Avalanche is the parent company of Date.com, Matchmaker.com and Amor. These dating sites are now available in Spanish, Portuguese and German languages. Plus, subscribers can now pay by using the popular PayPal service. Avalanche decided to offer Paypal as a payment option because:

Statistically, Europe as a whole has less than 50% penetration rate for credit cards, with specific countries significantly lower, as Europeans prefer local payment options to pay for transactions.

Members who use Paypal gets the added advantage of not sharing financial information and are able to use many additional payment options. This means international members don't need a US bank account anymore.

Read our Date.com review, Amor.com review and Matchmaker.com review for more information on these dating services.

Late yesterday a press release went out by eHarmony which informed us they had settled a 3 year old allegation with the New Jersey Attorney General. The settlement was about eHarmony violating the New Jersey's Law Against Discrimination and not allowing a gay / same-sex matching service. Among $50,000 settlement money awarded to the NJ Attorney General Office and $5,000 to the original plaintiff (Eric McKinley) eHarmony has agreed to launch a same sex matching service by March 31, 2009. The new dating site is called Compatible Partners. In eHarmony's FAQ about the settlement they mention that the site will be free to the first 10,000 members who register within one year of the dating sites launch. Compatible Partners and eHarmony will be separate sites, with separate matching pools. If you seek same gender matching at eHarmony you will be directed to Compatible Partners.

The FAQ also points out:

The Compatible Partners site will have a statement posted to inform members that its Compatibility Matching System™ is solely based on research involving married heterosexual couples.

Previously eHarmony has stressed that their matching system was designed to match heterosexual couples and it would not work well with same sex matching. Is this really a win for gay activists then? One other interesting point from the FAQ is, because of the settlement eHarmony has not been found in violation of the law. Basically then eHarmony is being forced to create a gay dating site, not because it's the right thing to do but, because they do not want any more negative publicity. In the end eHarmony really wins. All this publicity surrounding eHarmony and same sex matching will more than pay for the settlement.

On a side note, the State of New Jersey seems to have something against online dating sites. Early this year they brought in the controversial Internet Dating Safety Act.

For more information about this matching service, read our eHarmony review.

Dating site PerfectMatch.com has seen a 47 percent increase in members over the same quarter last year. This is a huge jump especially in these economic times. Most other popular online dating services membership growth levels have either flat lined or increased marginally. Membership renewals are also up and when you combine these numbers with the new member numbers, matching on PerfectMatch.com has increased by 125 percent. Almost 92 percent of these matches are using the automated matching system called the Duet Compatibility System.

For more information on the dating service, read our PerfectMatch.com Review.

Tom Smiley recently released on October 31, 2008 a case study in which he examines the number of fake profiles found on Craig' s List. Specifically, he took a look at all personal ads for woman seeking men in all United States cities for one day. This totalled 6,590 individual ads. In total he claims to have found that 5,564 of these personal ads appeared to be fake. This means only 16% of the ads he examined where real. Tom Smiley used 5 different methods to figure out if a personal ad was a fake. These methods were:

1. Dismissal of ads with pictures posted in multiple ads.
2. Dismissal of ads with three point randomizers.
3. Dismissal of ads with typical verbatim occurrences indicating variables in form letters.
4. Dismissal of ads that are obvious fraud.
5. Dismissal of ads that simply don't match headline w/content.

More Details can be found here on his methodology including examples. I'm not a big user of Craig's List and always thought their personals section wasn't the best place to visit to find someone to date. After reading Tom Smiley's case study I definitely wouldn't recommend Craig's List for dating to anyone.

For the full case study see Online Personals Fraud and you can view our Craig's List review.