Legal

The dating world just got a little weirder. A British divorcee seeking a wealthy boyfriend via a ritzy matchmaking agency sued the company over a lack of suitable dates - and was awarded over $16,000 for her trouble.

Tereza Burki, a 47-year-old from London, joined premium dating agency Seventy Thirty in 2013. According to reports, she was looking for a “sophisticated gentleman” with “a lifestyle similar or more affluent than her own” and “multiple residences.” Lemarc Thomas, Seventy Thirty's managing director at the time, assured Burki that the service only dealt in the “creme de la creme” of daters and had “a substantial number” of potential matches who met her requirements.

Burki shelled out a staggering £12,600 ($16,141 USD) to join, an investment she soon regretted.

Sean Rad, Co-founder of Tinder

Former and current Tinder employees slapped a lawsuit against parent company Match Group, claiming the popular dating app was purposefully devalued at the time Match Group was valuating stock options. The Tinder employees suing Match Group were placed on administrative leave, according to a report by MSN.

The ten former and current Tinder employees initiating the lawsuit include founder and ex-CEO Sean Rad along with co-founders Justin Mateen and Jonathan Badeen. Tinder’s VP of Communications Rosette Pambakian has also joined the lawsuit, and claims that IAC/ Match Group executive Greg Blatt sexually harassed her at a company party. (IAC changed its name to Match Group, but the company is still owned by media mogul Barry Diller.)

Pambakian wrote an email to Tinder employees explaining her decision, as reported by Fortune Magazine:

Chinese dating scammers are in hot water this summer. More than a thousand members of fraud rings have been arrested in the country over the last two months, potentially saving thousands of singles from falling victim to their deceit.

In June, police in the southern province of Guangdong cracked down on 13 gangs who posed as attractive women in order to con men into purchasing pricey products like tea and wine. Authorities apprehended a total of 1,310 suspects, each of whom could approach up to 1,500 victims per month.

“These scam gangs [succeed] because they capture the psychology of many men: When facing beautiful women, men lose their judgement, and feel too shy to refuse,” a Guangdong police officer said at a briefing about the arrests.

Laotian-born Sinakhone Keodara was browsing Grindr when he stumbled upon a profile with a succinct description: “Not interested in Asians.”

It wasn’t the first time he encountered discriminatory language on the app, nor was it a surprise to the Asian American friend he later phoned about it. Both had repeatedly experienced racism while using dating services. This time, they decided to do something about it.

Keodara took to social media to announce plans to bring a class-action lawsuit against Grindr for racial discrimination, calling for co-plaintiffs across the United States to join the fight.

This week, Match Group announced it has acquired dating app Hinge. According to the press release, the deal gives Match Group a 51 percent stake in the company. Match first started buying shares in Sept of 2017 and has the option to buy remaining shares of Hinge within the next year.

Hinge has spent the last few years revamping its image and features, creating an app that countered Tinder’s hook-up reputation, and aimed to create a space for more serious daters. This included dumping its initial Tinder-like swiping feature and allowing clients to build profiles more like traditional online dating sites. Interestingly, Match Group (which owns Tinder) initially invested in Hinge in the fall of 2017, soon after it debuted its new design.

Hinge is most popular among “urban, educated millennial women looking for relationships,” according to Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg. It has also grown its user base to “five times what it was a year ago,” according to an article in The Wall Street Journal, making it an attractive purchase for Match Group.

A Facebook engineer was fired for exploiting his position and access to personal information of Facebook users, according to website Tech Crunch. It’s reported that the firing resulted after the engineer’s messages with a match on Tinder were shared with company executives.

Over Twitter, Spyglass Security Founder Jackie Stokes revealed that someone she knew received “creepy messages” over Tinder, and she had confirmed it was an engineer employed by Facebook.

Stokes then posted a screenshot of the offender’s message, where he called himself a “professional stalker” and claimed to have access to the user’s personal data. He also shared private information about the user via their messages, information that she hadn’t shared publicly on social media.