Match.Com .... Fraud??

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A good friend of mine is a strong believer in Match.Com. Among other things - she is a also a believer in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Denver Broncos. (And by the time she reads this post - I am sure she also believes she can kick my butt for penning this post). So to save my skin - she shall go unnamed.

Being a Marketing Professional and all that nice shenanigan I pull oh-so-successfully in my day job the Market sizing of the Dating market came up as - $245.2 million on online personals and dating services in the first half of 2005, up 7.6 percent from a year earlier, according to the Online Publishers Association.

Anyways - legend has it that our Recruiting Committee head Eve Psalti (everyone reading this blog and wants to get a job here - should get to know Eve and send her your resume...) was quoted on saying that Match.com is probably populated with one-eyed bald-geriartrics, absolutely shunning my friend's belief. (For Legal purposes - I will have to claim that legends do have their way of being wrong.... sometimes) Now on with the story.

So this story on Reuters cites Match.com had been recently been "accused in a federal lawsuit of goading members into renewing their subscriptions through bogus romantic e-mails sent out by company employees. In some instances, the suit contends, people on the Match payroll even went on sham dates with subscribers as a marketing ploy." Yahoo.com had similar suits too apparently.

Now this is interesting. Here are some what-if scenario qns...

* What-if the Match.com members who went out on dates jus happened to leverage their access to the database and go on Dates and happened to share their place of work with the person they date?

* What-if the person who was being dated - got this info - valued the value of dating this person versus the monetization of revenue from a lawsuit and chose the latter?

* What-if having employees going on dates was not a markeitng sham but a sense of strengthening the value-proposition of the solution - after all its better than having the person whoz a customer feel single/lonely/frustrated isnt it?

Thanx BoingBoing for giving me insight into this article :)