Complaint Review: Match.Com

Approximately 8 years ago, Match.com was a good place to meet other singles.  To day it is not such a great place.  Today, when you sign up for their service there isn't enough of a description as to what really is included in the membership.  As you begin to use the service you begin to see that you cannot use all the functionality of the service to which you though you were getting.  They start sending you prompts to add emailing capability, on thier tools section they state they have a 6 month guarantee, remember that.  Apparently if you want your profile to be hidden, that costs you additional money, if you want to be seen, that costs additional money, if you want to email members, that costs additional money.  Yet they offer free trials to people.  Members pay for every little detail and this isn't disclosed at the begining of the signing up of the membership.  So when your into a membership already for $63.53 for 6 months and you find out that this is not going to get you to be able to chat with anyone, then of course they prompt you to add additional $2.00 here and $10.00 there.  By the time all is said and done... I have a credit card charge of $63.53, $187.53, $63.89 and $21.31.  

All this would have been fine and dandy if the members or trial members were real people.  Match does not appear to have any type of screaning to keep the rif raff off their site.  Not only did I get approaced to get someone from Africa who is impersonating a middle aged engineer that lives either in LA, Colorado, NY or somewhere else.  When you come to find out things don't jive and you end up with a black man who is 24 years old and has dread locks. Not that there is anything wrong with their description, but that is not who was portrayed.  This was one.  The other was similar.  A middle aged man, engineer worked on oil rigs, off and on shore, who had engineering projects and he went to Africa and travelled all over the world.  Ohh and these men always have a young child who they take with them on the projects.  Once they are there, they all of a sudden need money and are being held hostage or run out of money.  All this praying on people's emotions and heart strings.  This scenario happened over and over again, with slightly different details but with very common stories.  It is disgusting that our society has come to this but even more disgusting are that these dating sites do not have some type of background check, or even checks and balances.  How are these people in countries like Africa able to log on to the US sites and be able to post pictures that are not of them and of other people and attemtp to defraud innocent people?  Sites like Match.com, Pof etc need to be held responsible for their memeberships.  When I signed up for this, I did not sign up to get exposed to scammers and people who are capable of decieving people and impersonating others.  They should have to prove that they are who they are with live video and other legal identification for tracking purposes and possible prosection in the event that they have defrauded members.  The admins at least need to be able to be able to track members, verify that they are true and legitimate pople.  They also should have copies of Driver's license and other information to verify indentification on file and track this type of behavior.  Otherwise there is no saftey net for the members to prevent from fake or fake profiles.  There needs to be a board that members can check on the site so that if this is going on with other members, that these scammers and fake people can be exposed.  

My complaint is that Match.com does not care enough about their members to put safety nets in place and when a member complains and wants their money back because they did not recieve what they expected, Match should believe enough in their product to rememburse people.  In one week I received multiple fake profiles and contacts and several attempts to defraud me.  Thank God I am not naive.  How many people out there are though?  My experience with the dating sites Match.com and PoF is that they are full of scammers and liars.  There are very few people who actually are real people, but then again there are no checks and balances, so who knows.  

It is one thing to pay large amounts of money to participate in a dating site, it is another to not get the service or safety that you would expect that should come with the fees that are being charged.  Buyer beware.   Match.com does not reimburse you if you are disatisfied with the service and they don't deliver what they promise and charge you for every thing you will do in their site.  It is not a simple pay so much a month, they will fee you to death for this and that.