Complaint Review: BDSM.com

I responded to a profile on Manhunt that was a incredibly hot guy claiming to be a Master looking for a submissive. I know nothing about that scene at all, and thought it would be interesting to pursue just to see where it led. Since I am ignorant of what goes on in the lifestyle, and these people know that, he began to start explaining things I would need to do to play my part. This part of the conversation took place on Yahoo messenger which he asked me to switch to from Manhunt.

The final step required in order to "seal the deal" was for me to go to BDSM.com and sign up so that we could connect on that site and provide public notice of the fact that I belonged to him. Again, not knowing anything about that lifestyle, it seemed logical that a public profession would be part of the process, but when I realized you couldn't do anything without paying for the basic subscription fee, I started to get suspicious.

I initially declined and said I wouldn't do it but he kept talking about how important it was and had a pretty decent explanation, and since it was only $20 I thought, "What the hell....". At least it would be interesting to see what kinds of people are on the site and maybe see how things work. But I told him I'd googled the whole thing and had read numerous reports about people being scammed. He pretended to have no idea what I was talking about.

After signing up, he said he saw my profile and was pleased and now we could be together blah blah blah. However, I could see in my profile stats that my profile had never been viewed by anyone, and he never accepted my request to be friends. That seemed strange since he'd made such a huge deal about it, and sure enough, over the next few days he became less and less talkative. I also noticed his city listed in his profile was on the opposite side of the country, but when I asked him about that he said he'd relocated here several years ago.

At this point I was sure it was a scam, and found stories from other people online about how there seem to be reps sitting in a room with a database of model photos owned by a parent company using them to create these fake profiles. So I signed on to Manhunt, and as he had been for the last several days after we were supposedly "sealed" by my signing up for BDSM.com, he was there with the same ad still looking for more guys to suck into the same scam.

I sent him a message on Manhunt saying that he should notify his supervisor to decomission that particular profile since I was going to forward my documented conversations to the legal team in charge of the class action lawsuit. He responded very sweetly that he had no idea what I was talking about and that I wasn't making sense, and immediately I got a message pop up on Yahoo Messenger saying "hey baby!". So I responded on Manhunt with a full explanation of how I knew what he was up to, and IMMEDIATELY the profile was deleted and he was gone from Yahoo Messenger.

I notified BDSM.com as well as Manhunt, and I wanted to document it here too. I'm not upset about the money because I knew very well that this was probably a scam. But I told him if he was scamming me I would hunt him down. So I'm just interested in seeing these people stopped.