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Originally Posted by Fletch XXX
Is there really any "dating site" that doesnt pay people to make fake profiles all day long?
i mean come on, no one believes that they dont.
seems to me its all fake shit.
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I'm involved in the operation of one of the larger mostly mainstream dating sites. We're not quite on the scale of Match or Yahoo but probably in the tier under them. I'm not going to mention which site, since that's not really relevent to the point I want to make.
Once a dating site reaches a certain critical mass, making fake profiles is a waste of time and might actually be detrimental to retaining paying subscriptions. That's not to say that dating sites aren't loaded with fake profiles, they certainly are, but they're made by third parties (atleast in my experience) which fall into the following five categories:
1. Financial scammers (usually from Nigeria or Ghana and to a lesser degree Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia) who then contact other members with various offers of riches, matrimony, etc in hopes of scamming a few hundred bucks.
2. Profiles with commercial purposes: escorts, cam-girls, spam harvestors, porn-site redirectors, translation services, etc.
3. People who don't think they're attractive/successful/interesting enough so they make up fake personas and post fake pictures.
4. Men pretending to be women to have cybersex or trade nude pictures with lesbians (who are also usually men pretending to be women).
5. People who are "just curious" about checking out the site and who don't want to put down any real information for fear of being spammed by the site or identified by their friends. These profiles are rarely very active so they're not much of a problem.
The financial scammers and the commercial profiles are definitely problems and we do all we can prevent them from harassing the other members. We don't view the other three types as harmful and thus don't remove them unless they're disgustingly obviously fake (ie celebrity photo) or other members complain about them.
I seriously doubt that Match paid for a woman to date some guy just to keep him from cancelling. If you do it on a small scale it wouldn't be cost effective and if you do it on a large scale you'd need to advertise pretty heavily for professional daters. My guess is that the woman lied about being employed by Match either as an excuse for not going on a repeat date or to put the guy down (ie You're so stupid/ugly/boring/etc I'm only dating you because they paid me).