Online Dating

David Wygant Blog gives advice regarding dating and relationships. On Sunday he had a good post which looks at several warning signs that may point to someone being untruthful or hiding something major in a relationship. More often than not these types of problems arise with people in long distance relationship where you have to rely on electronic communication like email and the phone. It is a lot easier for people to mislead you when you are not meeting face to face. For the most part these signs deal with someone who has been in a relationship for at least a few months. Here is a summary of David's 5 warning signs:

1. Your partner provides limited information. The person likes to discuss only certain aspects of his or her life.
2. You are never invited to their home.
3. Key information is missing. As an example David mentions if you have been dating for a while and you still don't know how the person is financially.
   • Another thing I would add here would be things like phone numbers. Do you only have the persons cell number and not their home phone number? Is there a reason for this and does it make sense?
4. You have not met friends or family.
5. Inconsistent Information.

The unofficial eHarmony Blog has a post about how she received a free month on eHarmony when she reported several fake profiles after communicating with members who were obviously not who they said they were. Poor english skills and huge inconsistencies where the warning flags.

No matter how hard a dating service tries, scammers are always going to get by the automated and manual checks of the dating site. Part of most dating services defences against scammers is to rely on their members to report them. In most cases people report fake profiles and move on, you never know what becomes of your report. Did the dating site follow up or did your email go straight to the trash bin? It's nice to see a service that acknowledged the problem and rewarded the members work with an additional month.

This is just good business for eHarmony. You don't want an unhappy member to go out and tell their friends.

For more information about this service, read our eHarmony Review.

Recently MillionaireMatch.com has added some new verification services. They already verify if a member qualifies as a Millionaire (if the proper documentation is sent in) and your primary photo, they will now also verify your age and occupation. When a dating site is geared towards matching Millionaires with other singles and assets play an important role, these verification services help both types of members out greatly. The millionaire members gets more activity on the site since his profile information is marked as verified and non millionaires don't have to worry about if the verified members have exaggerated some of their profile information.

I also notice, MillionaireMatch.com now allows guest members (free members) to reply to any gold members emails or instant messaging request. This greatly opens up the site to gold members since they know anyone can reply to their messages and they don't have to just send messages to other gold members.

For more information, please read our MillionaireMatch Review.

Related Story: MillionaireMatch.com New Features

MarketingWeek is reporting that OgilvyOne won the marketing account for eHarmony. I am unsure if this is the entire marketing account for eHarmony or just the United Kingdom part. eHarmony was reported to open a UK specific dating service in June (see story) but that appears to be less and less likely as there is just over a week left this month. Hopefully we will see it by summer's end. I did notice that the domain eHarmony.co.uk is registered but it currently just reroutes you to the eHarmony US site.

For more information on eHarmony, please read our review.

Do you want to see how many visitors a dating site has been getting over time? Google Trends now offers this ability. You can also compare up to 5 different sites. To see the daily unique visitor numbers (instead of just a graph) you must be logged into Trends.

The Google Trends website data is "estimated and aggregated over a variety of sources" (quoted from the Google Webmaster Blog. I would assume these sources are the searches people perform on Google (which they track) and from their other free services like Google Analytics. These results are probably more accurate than other companies with similar services like Alexa or Compete since, Google has such a large pool of data to collect estimates from. Google is responsible for providing over 60% (see USA Today) of the search results from search engines, for people in the United States.

According to several news sources (ABC15.com and AZ Central) the Arizona Attorney General has filed a lawsuit against Great Expectations dating service, alleging they misled their customers.

Great Expectations has said the case has no merit. This service has over 30 years of experience in matchmaking and is one of the few dating services which actually meet their clients face to face at one of their offices. They have more than a couple dozen offices spread across the US.

The suit was filed in Maricopa County Superior Court against Sun West Video, Inc which runs Great Expectations for Singles.

The suit is seeking refunds for consumers and financial penalties against the company.

The Attorney General's office alleged that Great Expectations:

• Misrepresented to consumers the overall number of participating members and members in certain age groups.
• Told consumers that two to three marriages occurred among members every month when it had no credible basis for such statements.
• Misrepresented to consumers that it had conducted a criminal background check on all of its members.
• Used high-pressure sales tactics that included sales representatives urging consumers to contact their credit card companies to get an increased credit limit to pay for a membership.
• Showed potential new members written profiles and photographs of people they said were Great.

These allegations have not been proven in court yet but, we have decided to remove this dating site review from our categories for the time being, just to be safe.