I was just reading in reuters.com an article (see the comment to this post) that said that both Match.com and Yahoo were “accused in [seperate] federal lawsuit[s] of goading members into renewing their subscriptions through bogus romantic e-mails sent out by company employees.” It goes on to say that they paid employees to create hot profiles to help sales.

I can’t really say I’m surprised at all… I routinely come across things that seem odd and out of place. For example, one of the most common scams going on is that you’ll see a beautiful girl. So you’ll write. You get a nice personalized letter back and she will give you her ‘personal’ email. WOW, you think, she actually replied. So you’ll write again. This time she’ll invite you to watch her on her private cam. As soon as you sign up for the free service, she (more likely he) gets a hefty affiliate commission and you get screwed without even paying for dinner. This is a totally common scam. But it’s not all that odd or out of place:) What IS odd though is when you see a really hot girl and she doesn’t reply. Ok, maybe that in itself isn’t all that odd…. I mean lots of people don’t reply, but then again, who’s to say this girl ever replies? I’ve run into a few of these girls and then later found their same picture with a totally different profile associated with it…. different age, height, location, profession, etc. And then, I’ll find their profile text somewhere else but associated with a different picture. In this case there were 3 girls from the same town, all smoking hot. The town maybe had 200 people in it. Just seems funny that there could be that many notably pretty girls in a town that small. So I wrote them…. no reply. So they arent webcam scammers. In fact, if they don’t write back, they aren’t just your typical butt ugly girl looking for a little conversation either. So why create multiple fake profiles? Doesn’t make sense…. unless they are just being seeded…. (?)

ok, I know you were expecting some kind of witty punchline, but I don’t have one this time… just thought it was an interesting article because I had been wondering about this for some time. Looks like we are all desperate.