Dating Services

Finding love on OkCupid: good. Getting scammed out of thousands of dollars on OkCupid: not so much.

Unfortunately for Michael Picciano, he falls into the latter category. Picciano is now suing OkCupid and its parent company, IAC, for failing to conduct “even minimal screening of its subscribers and therefore deceptively creating the impression that their dating service was safe . . . when in fact . . . [it] was a trap for the unwary,” he says in his Manhattan civil suit.

It all began back in February 2013, when he received a message from “genuineguy62.” (Is it just me or is that, like, the least trustworthy name ever?) After 10 days of chatting on the site, Picciano continued the conversation with the man, who called himself Bruce Thompson, via personal e-mails. A month following that, Thompson made his first telephone call to Picciano. And by the end of March, the two had canceled their OkCupid subscriptions because “they had found each other.”

Shortly afterwards, Thompson asked Picciano to wire him money to cover “unexpected fees ”incurred while setting up a new computer parts business. Picciano says he made four wire transfers in steadily increasing amounts to addresses in Texas, Ontario and England. In total, the payments added up to $70,460.

Four weeks following his first payment, Picciano involved the police. A friend of his had found Thompson's photo and information on a site called MaleScammers.com and warned Picciano. Picciano handed over a $100,000 forged check given to him by Thompson to the police, but they were unable to find the con man’s fingerprints.

Picciano is faulting OkCupid for failing to "exercise reasonable care" in communicating "the dangers associated with online matchmaking." There is, however, a page on the site called "Safety Tips" that explicitly warns members against wiring money to other users – or anyone they meet online – because the sender “has no protections against loss.”

In addition to going after OkCupid, Picciano is also suing Capital One for "failure to comply with proper procedures for the transmission of wire funds transfers." The lawsuit allages that none of the wire transfers contained the address of the recipient "as required by law."

According to the court papers, Picciano believes Thompson is back on OkCupid, trolling for new victims under the screen name "bigheartedbt.” While this hasn’t been confirmed, OkCupid users should take note – better safe than sorry.

There are plenty of niche dating sites available for the picky dater – whether you’re into men or women with the same political preferences, vegetarian eating habits, or love of horses, there’s a site for you.

But what about the touchy subject of STDs? Although our society is more open to talking about sex, many people are still freaked out by the mention of contracting an STD. It’s not sexy – in fact, it’s enough to kill the romance on any date. So what’s the best way to approach dating when you have an STD?

According to the CDC (Center for Disease Control) even though one out of every six people aged 14 to 49 years have genital herpes, there is still a stigma about it when it comes to dating. According to research from the University of Michigan, giving someone an easily cured STD is considered to be worse than giving that person a fatal flu.

Which is why a number of online dating sites have been created to serve this growing market of singles who test positive for anything from Herpes to HIV. Instead of making STDs a stigma, these sites are helping people move past the inevitable and uncomfortable conversations with their dates to be able to focus on getting to know each other. In other words, STD dating sites help members date like everyone else.

Some STD-focused dating sites include PositivesDating.com, STDMatch.net, and PositiveSingles.com among others. (You can match by the type of STD on most of these sites.) Many offer systems of support to members, too – including counseling, support groups, and STD treatment locations. They are providing a much-needed service for those who feel intimidated or embarrassed by their disease.

But there’s a catch: even if you and your date share the same STD, you might not share the same strain. There are more than 100 types of HPV for example. Because an STD can weaken your body’s immune system, it makes it easier to pick up other ones, too. So you might be accumulating and worsening the problem by having sex with a date who shares the same STD.

Ultimately, whether you use an STD dating site to meet people or not, you should still exercise the same precautions as you would with anyone else. Don’t look at joining an STD site as a sexual free-for-all. Use protection like you would with anyone else you date, whether or not you have an STD. And don’t hesitate to get tested.

For more on a dating site for members with STDs you can read our Positive Singles review.

Single baseball fans are about to hit a home run.

If you’ve checked out the homepage of pretty much any Major League Baseball team recently, you probably saw a few ads advertising other single sports fans. On Athletics.com, for instance, ads on each side of the page featured an attractive group of potential matches and text that read "Meet other single Athletics fans.” A banner ad across the top said “Take them out to the Athletics game.”

What’s going on?

With baseball's regular season here, Match and MLB.com are coming together to give singles another reason to cheer this season. Baseball fanatics on Match.com will have the opportunity to connect online through 29 different fan pages (one for every U.S. team) for the duration of the 2014 MLB season – meaning they have way more to look forward to this year than their team making it to the World Series.

To get started, Match members can announce their allegiance to their favorite team (or teams, if they’re the indecisive type) by adding its logo to their profile. Match members can also search for other fans using a new community search tool that allows them to easily connect with members who have also added their favorite team to their profiles.

On the other side of things, MLB.com will be promoting 29 different MLB Club portals where singles can search for and connect with other fans of their favorite teams. When you find a fellow fan who tickles your fancy, you can take them out to the ballgame for the perfect first date.

Noah Garden, Major League Baseball Advanced Media's executive vice president of revenue, said "the Match.com conversation is one we've had on and off over the years to see if there's something we could do together." MLB hopes the promotion will give ticket sales a boost. "The idea is put like people together with similar interest and passion," he said. "There's still always room for more butts in the seats."

It sounds a little blunt, but I guess you've gotta appreciate the guy's honesty. And I'm sure there are plenty of die-hard baseball fans who will be pleased about having an easy way to weed out rivals. In fact, Match.com President Amarnath Thombre said the first question self-identified Yankees fans often ask of singles on the site is: "Who hates the Red Sox?"

Better have your answer ready before you log on to Match.com, baseball fans, or you just might strike out. For more on this service you can read our Match.com review.

People who participate in online dating may be more open to interracial relationships than those who stick solely to traditional dating, says a study published in the Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego analyzed the first interactions of 126,134 American OkCupid users to study the complex relationship tween online dating and race. They found, unsurprisingly, that many users tended to send messages to other users of their own race – but they also found that they were much more likely to respond to messages from users of a different racial background. The study also found that once an individual responded to a member of another race, they were even more likely to initiate conversation with other users of different ethnicities in the future.

"It's not that people's levels of prejudice are changing; people are avoiding others from a different racial background because they think those other people won't be interested," study author Kevin Lewis, a sociologist for UC San Diego, told USA Today. "Receiving an interracial contact and replying to it makes you send over twice as many new interracial messages in the short-term future than you would have otherwise."

Online daters may be chipping away at racial barriers, but that doesn't mean they've fallen completely. "Race as a dividing factor is much more important than basically any other attribute," Lewis explained. The study found that white online daters, both male and female, overwhelmingly made contact with other white users (although that's also due to the fact that there are more white people on OkCupid to choose from). Caucasian users were also the most likely to seek out people of another race. Those who identified as black, Hispanic, Indian or Asian were much more likely to stay within their own racial lane while online dating.

The only group that consistently bucked the trend was Asian women. Asian women were more likely to contact white men and other Asian men. They were also more likely to respond to white men (though it's important to note that all races were most likely to respond to white men).

Lewis calls online daters’ reluctance to reach out to users of different ethnic backgrounds "pre-emptive discrimination." Based on the way race has shaped their lives so far, they expect to experience rejection – or at least to have little in common with someone who doesn't share their heritage. But, says Lewis, the study suggests that if someone is bold enough to make the first move and overcome their fear of rejection, they are rewarded with the realization that the pool of potential partners is wider and richer than they had ever imagined.

Just in time for spring, Zoosk has announced the beta release of its new Priority Inbox feature to take Behavioral Matchmaking to the next level. The new technology will prioritize messages from members with whom you are more likely to discover mutual attraction. This update makes Zoosk the first online dating platform to offer a feature that ranks messages in members' inboxes based on the potential for compatibility.

Traditional online dating services are based on static profiles, compiled via one-time surveys and questionnaires. Zoosk, on the other hand, is powered by its dynamic and personalized Behavioral Matchmaking technology, which tracks and analyzes a member's activity on the site in order to recommend better matches. By applying this technology to inboxes, Zoosk is making its experience more effective than ever.

“At Zoosk, we are continuously working to provide the best possible experience for members to find relationship satisfaction online,” said Shayan Zadeh, Co-Founder and CEO of Zoosk. “Lots of dating websites highlight messages from people you’ve already talked to, but our technology allows us to take it a step further by prioritizing messages from new people we think you’ll want to have a conversation with.”

The new Priority Inbox feature will identify messages from members with a greater likelihood of compatibility, which it calls Priority Messages, using stars and highlights. Those messages will be driven to the top of users' inboxes so they can't be missed.

“When developing the Priority Inbox feature, we took into account the fact that sometimes people who date online, especially women, become inundated with messages,” said Alex Mehr, Co-Founder and President of Zoosk. “Priority Inbox is a very unique feature for our members who will be spared the task of having to dig through a mountain of messages to find their desired match; not only leading them to form stronger connections, but to form meaningful connections faster than ever before.”

The patent-pending Priority Inbox feature is currently only available to some Zoosk members, but the site expects to roll it out to the rest of its 25+ million members over the course of the next month. With the #1 grossing mobile dating app and a top 25 grossing app on the iPhone in the United States, Zoosk is already a market leader in the dating industry. The service can now be found in over 80 countries in 25 languages. Priority Inbox is just the latest in a long series of innovations taking matchmaking to the next level and keeping Zoosk on top of the dating game.

Dating is never easy, but apparently it's especially hard if you're a woman living in New York City or man living in San Francisco.

According to data from 2012, there are 473,600 unmarried men aged 20-44 living in the Bay Area, and 396,373 unmarried women in the same age range. Men outnumber women by 77,227. In New York City, on the other hand, women outnumber men by 7,215. An online dating service called The Dating Ring is getting a lot of press lately for promising to fly a jet full of single ladies from NYC to SF (while sending a plane-load of men in the opposite direction) if they can raise the money for the stunt.

It started out as a joke, but now Lauren Kay, CEO of the dating service, is seeking $10,000 to $50,000 in Crowdtilt funding to buy plane tickets for some lucky single people on Memorial Day weekend. If the financial goal isn't reached, everyone who made a donation will get their money back, but if all goes as planned, the East and West coasts will become the sites of “matchmaker-curated dates” arranged by The Dating Ring.

"It's a crazy idea that started out in jest," Kay told the San Jose Mercury News. "But it is not that crazy to go to another city with better odds to look for someone special." She suggests that subjects think of it as “a fun vacation.”

Frankly, it sounds like the perfect opportunity for another terrible reality show. Just imagine all those touchy-feely Californians going up against the hardened New Yorkers! So much potential for drama!

Richard Lane, a Bay Area dating expert with Events & Adventures, thinks that local men “will want ladies at the same level of intelligence as them.” Men in San Francisco “want someone who wants to get up and go. A woman who will hang with him at the sports arena in sweats, with her hair pulled back, by day -- but that night, can dress up, go dancing and knows how to pick the right wine to go with a great meal."

Of course, the potential culture clash isn't the only thing that stands to go wrong with this silly scheme. Jeremy Bollinger, president of DateSwitch, a San Francisco speed-dating firm, notes that the setup is dooming New York women and San Francisco men to being in long-distance relationships from the get-go. "Why do this,” he asks, “when there are actually San Francisco women looking for San Francisco men?"

I’ll tell you why, Jeremy: publicity. And it’s working darn well…the Internet hasn’t shut up about the idea since it was first announced.