Beyond the cold database problem and its problematic solutions, scammers remain an issue on online dating sites. Fraudsters living in Eastern Europe put up thousands of fake profiles for girls who claim to need money for a visa, Mr. Evans said. “You can always tell a fake Eastern bloc profile,” Mr. Evans said. “The 22-year-old girl who looks like she’s 14, and she’s got her boobs out and she’s squished them together with her elbows… ‘I would like to be meeting you.’ The minute you see that fractured English you know. But people don’t see that, because dating sites sell hope.”
A few years ago, he realized a curious thing that bodes poorly for anyone who hopes to find true love online. “Guys will pay $25 a month just to flirt with people on the Internet even if they are fake,” he said. “Millions of men spend money just to flirt with women that they know they’re never going to meet.”
For the online daters who wrote back to Betabeat, the hazards come with the territory. “When a profile is written in fluent English and I receive messages that are grammatically poor, then I get suspicious,” Saleem Siddiqui, a 42-year-old Londoner, said in an email. “Also, many of the ‘fake’ members say they live in the UK but never use British spelling (e.g. colour instead of color). However, I haven’t experienced anyone trying to extort money from me in recent years.”
Alex Furmansky, a Ukranian-born New Yorker who graduated magna cum laude from Wharton in 2007, has wanted to start a dating site since college. He quit his job last year to start Sparkology, a members-only dating site for educated young professionals, in order to avoid the kind of skeezy cruising he’d observed on sites with huge databases. Mr. Furmansky became increasingly disillusioned with online dating as he learned more about it. Hoping to get Sparkology on one of the many sites that claim to objectively rate dating services, he realized most of the reviewers wanted him to pay to play. When he asked for a candid review, he was told “it would be easier” if he had an affiliate linking program so the review site could collect a commission for referring customers.
Mr. Furmansky was further scandalized by a pitch from SaleDatingProfiles offering to sell profiles. “When we got that email, I yelled at my colleagues for even showing it to me because I didn’t want a trace of it in my inbox,” he said. “It was like a slap in the face, like, ‘is this really how it works?’”
SaleDatingProfiles is based in Israel and Russia, a representative told Betabeat over Skype, and operates 150 dating sites of its own, which she declined to name. SaleDatingProfiles says its profiles come from users who signed up for a dating site in its network. New customers must agree to terms of service that include a clause: “The Company has the right to exchange the profiles of Members with other Dating Websites in order to help our Members to find perfect marches [sic]. Also this will give them more wide choice.”
BuyProfiles.com did not respond to a request for comment. But a representative for DatingProfilesSale.com corresponded with Betabeat by email. Six years ago, he tried to build his own dating site, he said. “Nobody can start dating business without profiles,” he wrote. “People come only to dating sites where [there] are many other people.” He found a Ukrainian website that had left its profiles and email addresses exposed and copied about 100,000 profiles. Next he offered his 100,000 profiles to World Dating Partners in exchange for 100,000 additional profiles and built up the business from there. (World Dating Partners says it does not trade profiles with other sites, but acknowledged that it recently changed ownership so it’s possible such a thing happened in the past.)
DatingProfilesSale.com now has a number of large customers, he said, but he would not reveal which ones. “Yes, it’s big sites like eHarmony, but Internet companies basically keep in secret how they run [their] business. If I tell you their secrets, then they will be mad [at] me,” he wrote. “I have hundreds [of] satisfied customers but I am not sure if they want popularize [that] they buy profiles from me.”
Badoo, Match.com, OKCupid, PlentyOfFish and Spark Networks, which owns Spark.com, JDate and ChristianMingle, expressly denied buying or selling profiles. “We are dedicated to building safe, secure and authentic online communities that help strengthen the various communities we serve, and buying or selling profiles does not align with this mission,” a representative for Spark said in an email. EHarmony did not respond to a request for comment.
In general, it’s mostly small players that buy profiles, Mr. Evans said. “It’s these latecomers, like people still trying to start dating sites,” he said. “Like, oh my God, don’t you have anything better to do?”
“If you just go on some of the sketchier dating sites on the web, you start to have this experience of ‘Are these people real? What’s going on here?’” said Aaron Schildkrout, who co-founded the New York–based dating startup HowAboutWe and coined “black hat dating.” The bad actors hurt the industry, he said. “At the same time, it allows more authentic experiences like the one we’re trying to create to stand out and be a breath of fresh air in a sort of tundra of iniquity.”
Mark Brooks, a consultant and publicist who works exclusively with Internet dating companies, said he once fired a client for buying profiles. “When people have a bad experience on any Internet dating site, they just label it ‘Internet dating. ‘Internet dating sucks!’” he told Betabeat. “I don’t work with anybody who’s bad for the industry because in ten years time I won’t be working with anybody, because there won’t be an industry.”
A version of this story appeared in the New York Observer the week of March 28, 2012.