The thing that bothers me most about the scammers on match dot com isn't the ones who are clearly just scumbags with fake profiles. You can spot these a mile away; they usually use the same template, provide contact info in their profiles, and are looking for people two or three times their age. These people are often operating outside the US and have a poor understanding of what states are and how close they are, so they will often set up a profile that says they're in Arizona and wink or favorite a guy in Alabama.
Some of these are actually pretty funny. I've seen some where the profile has 4 pictures and they aren't even the same woman, lol! I've seen the same pic used on different profiles. Some Russian jerk writing in horrible broken English saying "Oh, is to love this Nebraska such! Was today all day at ocean! Is to love, yes!" [Uh, sorry Boris, but the closest ocean to Nebraska is well over a thousand miles away, lol!]
Frankly, anyone who would give money to someone they met online is an idiot.
What does concern me however is something a growing number of people have noticed, which is that some of the fake profiles winking and favoriting match users seem to be generated by match itself, either as a particularly sleazy tactic for encouraging people to $ub$cribe or the actions of mischievous rogue employees simply seeking to tease lovelorn users of match.
I'll give you a specific, common example. After receiving a flurry of winks and favorites from obviously fake profiles, I complained to match (you can send them a so-called "detailed report" describing the incident, etc.). The first time, I received a form email response with a bunch of lofty promises and apologies. But the winks and favorites by fake profiles continued. So I sent another report, complaining yet again and pointing out how these fake profiles would be very easy to filter out if match was serious about preventing such behavior because they all have essentially the same template, often use pics of the same women, contain yahoo email addresses encoded as "username at YH", etc. I got no formal response, but a few minutes after sending the report in (i.e. just about the time it would take for the match employee to read my complaint) I received two favorites in rapid succession by fake profiles with no pics. The profiles were immediately removed from the site as well.
Now, this is clearly not some outside scammer, but some punk at match (whoever read the complaint) basically giving me a digital middle finger. There's no way an offsite scammer could know about my complaint, and there is nothing to gain from this sort of harassment. Only someone working inside match could react like that in real time to my complaint, and have the ability to so rapidly create a fake profile, wink, and immediately remove the profile.
But in addition to that, match is effectively in cahoots with the offsite scammers as well by virtue of its refusal to lift a finger to stop them. I think they think they're good for business because they keep older men interested and paying members of their site.
This is really the sort of thing that a news magazine program like 60 Minutes or Dateline ought to investigate. Something really stinks at match dot com.
I have mounds of documentation of everything I allege here, BTW.
