Scam Dating Sites

There’s a new online dating site on the net every 36-72 hours. Few people would consider joining an online dating site with no members, so what do many of these new site owners do? They “create” a database of about 50,000+ fake members. They know that without *active* members, nobody will join. It doesn’t seem to matter to the webmaster that none of the members are real. They also charge for membership from $4.95 to $29.95 a month. For nothing!

It’s gotten so bad that two credit card processors, 2checkout and Google’s Checkout both forbid dating sites to use their service. Too many scammers are spoiling it for those trying to provide a good service. In addition to having fake members, there are several sites that pay women to contact men upon joining. The trick is that the men can join for free but they have to pay to read their mail. Once they join, all those 22 year olds aren’t so interested in a guy 45 - not until it’s time to renew. Then there are the sites that make the cancellation links really difficult or even impossible to find. All these things add up to more people asking for their money back and the resulting chargebacks are more than the credit card processor will bear.

How popular are dating sites?
In a recent survey by Ipsos-Reid, an international market and social research company, 44% of Americans believe they have a better chance at finding a new relationship on the Internet than a singles bar. Some are meeting through traditional dating sites like match.com or lavalive.com and others are meeting through social networking sites like myspace.com. They want to meet real people for real relationships and many will tell you that they’re sick of wasting their time and money on slick-looking sites with no substance.

How do honest dating sites compete?
It’s not easy. We started SexyAds.com back in 1997 when the web was new and you could start a personal ads website for next to nothing. There was no software in a box like they have today. Everyone back then had to develop their own software and start out with zero members. Over the past 10 years, the first dating sites each accumulated well over a million members but we all did it one member at a time. Success came from advertising, affiliate programs and word of mouth. I’ll admit that it’s tough competing against slick scammers who use email spam, gorgeous fake members who send fake emails and who do their best to beat the search engines.

Where’s it going?Competition is a great thing, it keeps everyone on their toes trying to be a bit better than everyone else. When sites are adding new features, providing a better infrastructure to make connecting easier and producing effective advertising campaigns, everyone wins and reputations are secure. I believe that all these new sites with no substance will drop by the wayside, one by one. We’ll start seeing them come on the market for sale, first at ridiculous prices and then fade away when nobody buys them. The sites’ value will be the worth of the domain name.