- Report: #281796
Complaint Review: Mate1 - Plattsburgh New York
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Mate1
334 Cornelia St, #354 Plattsburgh, 12901 New York, U.S.A.
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Mate1 - Mate One, Meet Zero: Dating Site Full of Cheap Tricks Plattsburgh New York
In June 2006 I sampled the social networking site Mate1, quickly finding it incapable of fulfilling its purpose and very likely using fraudulent tactics. For fifty dollars a month, this site would just about have to do cartwheels to earn my respect, especially after such a skimpy paid trial period of three days. Luckily one could post a profile and run searches for free, just not actually interact with members, which turned out to be quite instructive. For half a year I received notifications via private email any time a full member supposedly tried to reach me, in reaction to my sparkling profile prose, no doubt. Results follow ....
A total of 22 notifications arrived from 14 June through 22 November. Here is my list of correspondents and their basic stats, in order from the most recent:
Eight messages, over a third, came from an "online ambassador". Twelve, over half, came from women eight years or more my junior. Sixteen of them hailed from locations much farther than 75 miles away from my home in Rhode Island. So let's say the point of this site is to help me meet people, specifically age-appropriate women, who may hopefully be reached on a single tank of gas. Most don't qualify and the Ambassadors ostensibly are not trying to meet up anyway. Why on earth would all these strange women be writing me out of the blue, unless of course they are compensated by the site in some way to do so, either through free memberships or direct payments? This is about where Heather's account of her Mate1 experience starts to make sense ....
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/142/RipOff0142721.htm
But that's not fraud, you might blurt out, that's just a seemingly dubious campaign to drive site traffic and convert non-paying lurkers like myself into paid members. And look, you still have six ladies fairly near you, and none of them appear to work for the site. Yes, let's do look at those closely. As you may have learned from countless jokes and comparisons to lunar craters, Rhode Island is small enough to let you tour every corner in a single day and still make your bedtime. If the state had towns named "Gotha", "Huntington", and "Knoxville", I would have seen them by now. Granted, several Providence apartment buildings have the name "Huntington", but that really doesn't count, and at that point neither do the remaining two members from Norwich and Dartmouth. Mate1 lost all credibility with that geographic chicanery.
I will give the site credit for not continually pounding me with conversion come-ons. In fact, there was a six week period without any notices at all. If this was a swindle they weren't trying very hard. Now what if I forget the faux belle-ringers and take a direct approach through onsite search? Things don't look any better. These are my impression notes from June 2006:
// BEGIN QUOTE //
"Somewhat ugly and sparse design. Instant messenger button on main page after login flashes constantly. Banner space in right column is sold to outfits bent on visual annoyance. User name is email address, which is stupid and may promote spam from affiliates.
Advanced Search not very detailed or creative. Has the usual items like appearance, income, religion - half of them never matter. Height range limiter, which for some reason is the only filter dependent on a radio button, never works. First dozen results are always outside the range specified.
Profiles provide numerous input fields for "Dislikes" and "Favorites". All are optional and some members never bother to fill them in. Matching based on those terms apparently provided, but results are just another listview of profiles.
Biggest drawback is very suspect site promotion in the form of highly dubious onsite mail. This is a "pay-to-play" site, where browsing is free and communication is not. As a consequence, only the first dozen or so "matches" show recent site activity. The rest are at least one or two months past last login.
Three day free trial is prominently offered at all times, but only if they get your credit card or checking account number, which is retained "for verification purposes" in case paid subscription is ordered, they hope through negligence.
Profiles are generally uninspired, most lack photos, and I'm hard pressed to find anyone I need to contact. What else kills me is how many user handles resemble license plates. A common format is a short word followed by three digits.
Pretty typical for a lame site, in other words, and therefore another reason not to pay."
// END QUOTE //
What I observed was an unpleasant, user-hostile site with faulty features and a very limited active roll call. These are not the attributes of a social site that wants my business more than my money. That's what makes this quote from the Mate1 terms of service such a head-scratcher:
"The mission of the "Online Ambassadors" is to interact with said Members, at their sole discretion, with a view to welcoming said Members and encouraging their active participation on the web site."
You might think if Mate1 would only build a site that was easier on the eyes, easier to use, and encouraged positive activity and robust profiles, there would be no need for a gang of "ambassadors" to go around cattle-prodding people into using the thing. It seemed to me the only parts of the site to really get any attention were the ad spaces and the urgings to hand over my banking data. The site code constantly tried to set a "flash installed" cookie, followed by calls to "mediaplex" and "optimizedby.rmxads" and other third parties that suggest banner ads and marketing fishing. It's also telling that Mate1 posts its street addresses, but will only accept electronic forms of payment. In other words, they want to be certain of a recurring charge.
By mid-December I'd had my fill and "cleaned out my desk", so to speak, dumping my headshot and replacing my friendly profile text with pretty much a warning to other visitors. My essay began, "I sure get plenty of mail for a site that gets no attention or access fees from me. ..." On the same day I disabled offsite notification. I wanted no more of these women from fictional locales littering my private mail. Six days later I got another offer anyway, the second one from "KestrelMarie" in Chicago.
Logging back in, I saw that under my "email options", the one reading "notify me when I receive a new e-mail or an instant message" was enabled once more behind my back. This I disabled a second time. I also found my profile had switched its target to "Seeking Men", which I also never authorized. Either the site code was more crippled than I imagined, or someone in Admin didn't like my new attitude. I reset everything the way I wanted and never returned. On the plus side, I have not been hassled with Mate1 promotions since, and it does not appear my address was traded to spammers as Eroticy did. (in spades!) That however makes a very short "plus" list against a tall "minus" list for Mate1, and if my suspicions are true the company needs to be dissolved.
NSpectr3
Westerly, Rhode Island
U.S.A.
A total of 22 notifications arrived from 14 June through 22 November. Here is my list of correspondents and their basic stats, in order from the most recent:
Eight messages, over a third, came from an "online ambassador". Twelve, over half, came from women eight years or more my junior. Sixteen of them hailed from locations much farther than 75 miles away from my home in Rhode Island. So let's say the point of this site is to help me meet people, specifically age-appropriate women, who may hopefully be reached on a single tank of gas. Most don't qualify and the Ambassadors ostensibly are not trying to meet up anyway. Why on earth would all these strange women be writing me out of the blue, unless of course they are compensated by the site in some way to do so, either through free memberships or direct payments? This is about where Heather's account of her Mate1 experience starts to make sense ....
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/142/RipOff0142721.htm
But that's not fraud, you might blurt out, that's just a seemingly dubious campaign to drive site traffic and convert non-paying lurkers like myself into paid members. And look, you still have six ladies fairly near you, and none of them appear to work for the site. Yes, let's do look at those closely. As you may have learned from countless jokes and comparisons to lunar craters, Rhode Island is small enough to let you tour every corner in a single day and still make your bedtime. If the state had towns named "Gotha", "Huntington", and "Knoxville", I would have seen them by now. Granted, several Providence apartment buildings have the name "Huntington", but that really doesn't count, and at that point neither do the remaining two members from Norwich and Dartmouth. Mate1 lost all credibility with that geographic chicanery.
I will give the site credit for not continually pounding me with conversion come-ons. In fact, there was a six week period without any notices at all. If this was a swindle they weren't trying very hard. Now what if I forget the faux belle-ringers and take a direct approach through onsite search? Things don't look any better. These are my impression notes from June 2006:
// BEGIN QUOTE //
"Somewhat ugly and sparse design. Instant messenger button on main page after login flashes constantly. Banner space in right column is sold to outfits bent on visual annoyance. User name is email address, which is stupid and may promote spam from affiliates.
Advanced Search not very detailed or creative. Has the usual items like appearance, income, religion - half of them never matter. Height range limiter, which for some reason is the only filter dependent on a radio button, never works. First dozen results are always outside the range specified.
Profiles provide numerous input fields for "Dislikes" and "Favorites". All are optional and some members never bother to fill them in. Matching based on those terms apparently provided, but results are just another listview of profiles.
Biggest drawback is very suspect site promotion in the form of highly dubious onsite mail. This is a "pay-to-play" site, where browsing is free and communication is not. As a consequence, only the first dozen or so "matches" show recent site activity. The rest are at least one or two months past last login.
Three day free trial is prominently offered at all times, but only if they get your credit card or checking account number, which is retained "for verification purposes" in case paid subscription is ordered, they hope through negligence.
Profiles are generally uninspired, most lack photos, and I'm hard pressed to find anyone I need to contact. What else kills me is how many user handles resemble license plates. A common format is a short word followed by three digits.
Pretty typical for a lame site, in other words, and therefore another reason not to pay."
// END QUOTE //
What I observed was an unpleasant, user-hostile site with faulty features and a very limited active roll call. These are not the attributes of a social site that wants my business more than my money. That's what makes this quote from the Mate1 terms of service such a head-scratcher:
"The mission of the "Online Ambassadors" is to interact with said Members, at their sole discretion, with a view to welcoming said Members and encouraging their active participation on the web site."
You might think if Mate1 would only build a site that was easier on the eyes, easier to use, and encouraged positive activity and robust profiles, there would be no need for a gang of "ambassadors" to go around cattle-prodding people into using the thing. It seemed to me the only parts of the site to really get any attention were the ad spaces and the urgings to hand over my banking data. The site code constantly tried to set a "flash installed" cookie, followed by calls to "mediaplex" and "optimizedby.rmxads" and other third parties that suggest banner ads and marketing fishing. It's also telling that Mate1 posts its street addresses, but will only accept electronic forms of payment. In other words, they want to be certain of a recurring charge.
By mid-December I'd had my fill and "cleaned out my desk", so to speak, dumping my headshot and replacing my friendly profile text with pretty much a warning to other visitors. My essay began, "I sure get plenty of mail for a site that gets no attention or access fees from me. ..." On the same day I disabled offsite notification. I wanted no more of these women from fictional locales littering my private mail. Six days later I got another offer anyway, the second one from "KestrelMarie" in Chicago.
Logging back in, I saw that under my "email options", the one reading "notify me when I receive a new e-mail or an instant message" was enabled once more behind my back. This I disabled a second time. I also found my profile had switched its target to "Seeking Men", which I also never authorized. Either the site code was more crippled than I imagined, or someone in Admin didn't like my new attitude. I reset everything the way I wanted and never returned. On the plus side, I have not been hassled with Mate1 promotions since, and it does not appear my address was traded to spammers as Eroticy did. (in spades!) That however makes a very short "plus" list against a tall "minus" list for Mate1, and if my suspicions are true the company needs to be dissolved.
NSpectr3
Westerly, Rhode Island
U.S.A.
3 Updates & Rebuttals
NSpectr3
Westerly,Rhode Island,
U.S.A.
Mate1 - Another Bogus Dating Site Sells Out To Spammers
#2Author of original report
Mon, December 10, 2007
It's another case of speaking too soon. Mate1 has handed over my site-specific email address to the spammers. The address I gave it was generated by an email alias service, used exclusively for Mate1 traffic, and never publicized, therefore I know this was done willfully to profit from an otherwise dormant account. I've not so much as loaded Mate1's home page, and saw little if any use of my old address since abandoning the site. All of a sudden last week I see 32 attempts by spammers to reach me within three days. The ones that made it to my inbound pile are mostly of the cheap variety imploring the recipient to either enlarge or reduce a given body part, and tend to share a similar layout and verbiage. Total trash, of course, but at least no spoofs of financial sites are evident. Just as happened with Eroticy, this incident comes about a year after dumping Mate1's highly dubious service for good. You'll recall my revised email notification settings were ignored and profile settings changed after I gave the nose-thumbing salute on my way out. Similarly the timing of this spam barrage strikes me as retaliatory, for the cold bath I gave them here on RoR in October. But maybe I'm granting them too much credit for alertness. Still, if right now you run a simple unfiltered search on the term "Mate1", user complaints appear in the top ten results. A lot of them cite the usual problems with bad dating sites, such as predatory billing practices and flimsy come-ons from shill members. Often a Mate1 rep posts a softsoaping rebuttal in these forums, suggesting user error, yet the bait-switch routine remains a part of their business model. Just to be fair, I loaded the home page today for the first time in a year and found this notice on its login prompt: "We will NEVER spam you." Really now .... Mate1 may not spam, but they have plenty of pals who will once their contact list is traded or sold. Then there is that gray matter definition of "spam", which one critic of Mate1 has clarified neatly: [BEGIN QUOTE] "Online Ambassador" is a loophole disguised as a novel idea by Mate1 so they can legally get away with spamming their users and scamming them into staying or renewing. [END QUOTE] (See entire post here: onlinepersonalswatch.typepad.com/news/2006/12/mate1_online_am.html) I must append my prior entry here, which was quietly redacted right after I announced "my list of correspondents". There was no personally identifying data beyond user handles, ages, and place names, and this assumes any of them can be trusted. Point was, they ostensibly hailed from all parts of the U.S. and Canada, and whenever a message seemed to originate from within my home state the listed town was fictitious. Clearly something smelled wrong about Mate1, and this has been echoed by others who lost a great deal more time and money trying to disassociate from the site. Aside: A breezy interview with the CEO was posted in September, floating frightening plans to expand the user base into European and Asian markets and somehow integrate phone contact between members. No one used the phrase "mobile phone", but no doubt the impulsive nature of the wireless culture is just what they'd like to exploit with their obfuscating "trial" offer. onlinepersonalswatch.typepad.com/news/2007/09/liz-wasserman-m.html
NSpectr3
Westerly,Rhode Island,
U.S.A.
Mate1 - Another Bogus Dating Site Sells Out To Spammers
#3Author of original report
Mon, December 10, 2007
It's another case of speaking too soon. Mate1 has handed over my site-specific email address to the spammers. The address I gave it was generated by an email alias service, used exclusively for Mate1 traffic, and never publicized, therefore I know this was done willfully to profit from an otherwise dormant account. I've not so much as loaded Mate1's home page, and saw little if any use of my old address since abandoning the site. All of a sudden last week I see 32 attempts by spammers to reach me within three days. The ones that made it to my inbound pile are mostly of the cheap variety imploring the recipient to either enlarge or reduce a given body part, and tend to share a similar layout and verbiage. Total trash, of course, but at least no spoofs of financial sites are evident. Just as happened with Eroticy, this incident comes about a year after dumping Mate1's highly dubious service for good. You'll recall my revised email notification settings were ignored and profile settings changed after I gave the nose-thumbing salute on my way out. Similarly the timing of this spam barrage strikes me as retaliatory, for the cold bath I gave them here on RoR in October. But maybe I'm granting them too much credit for alertness. Still, if right now you run a simple unfiltered search on the term "Mate1", user complaints appear in the top ten results. A lot of them cite the usual problems with bad dating sites, such as predatory billing practices and flimsy come-ons from shill members. Often a Mate1 rep posts a softsoaping rebuttal in these forums, suggesting user error, yet the bait-switch routine remains a part of their business model. Just to be fair, I loaded the home page today for the first time in a year and found this notice on its login prompt: "We will NEVER spam you." Really now .... Mate1 may not spam, but they have plenty of pals who will once their contact list is traded or sold. Then there is that gray matter definition of "spam", which one critic of Mate1 has clarified neatly: [BEGIN QUOTE] "Online Ambassador" is a loophole disguised as a novel idea by Mate1 so they can legally get away with spamming their users and scamming them into staying or renewing. [END QUOTE] (See entire post here: onlinepersonalswatch.typepad.com/news/2006/12/mate1_online_am.html) I must append my prior entry here, which was quietly redacted right after I announced "my list of correspondents". There was no personally identifying data beyond user handles, ages, and place names, and this assumes any of them can be trusted. Point was, they ostensibly hailed from all parts of the U.S. and Canada, and whenever a message seemed to originate from within my home state the listed town was fictitious. Clearly something smelled wrong about Mate1, and this has been echoed by others who lost a great deal more time and money trying to disassociate from the site. Aside: A breezy interview with the CEO was posted in September, floating frightening plans to expand the user base into European and Asian markets and somehow integrate phone contact between members. No one used the phrase "mobile phone", but no doubt the impulsive nature of the wireless culture is just what they'd like to exploit with their obfuscating "trial" offer. onlinepersonalswatch.typepad.com/news/2007/09/liz-wasserman-m.html
NSpectr3
Westerly,Rhode Island,
U.S.A.
Mate1 - Another Bogus Dating Site Sells Out To Spammers
#4Author of original report
Mon, December 10, 2007
It's another case of speaking too soon. Mate1 has handed over my site-specific email address to the spammers. The address I gave it was generated by an email alias service, used exclusively for Mate1 traffic, and never publicized, therefore I know this was done willfully to profit from an otherwise dormant account. I've not so much as loaded Mate1's home page, and saw little if any use of my old address since abandoning the site. All of a sudden last week I see 32 attempts by spammers to reach me within three days. The ones that made it to my inbound pile are mostly of the cheap variety imploring the recipient to either enlarge or reduce a given body part, and tend to share a similar layout and verbiage. Total trash, of course, but at least no spoofs of financial sites are evident. Just as happened with Eroticy, this incident comes about a year after dumping Mate1's highly dubious service for good. You'll recall my revised email notification settings were ignored and profile settings changed after I gave the nose-thumbing salute on my way out. Similarly the timing of this spam barrage strikes me as retaliatory, for the cold bath I gave them here on RoR in October. But maybe I'm granting them too much credit for alertness. Still, if right now you run a simple unfiltered search on the term "Mate1", user complaints appear in the top ten results. A lot of them cite the usual problems with bad dating sites, such as predatory billing practices and flimsy come-ons from shill members. Often a Mate1 rep posts a softsoaping rebuttal in these forums, suggesting user error, yet the bait-switch routine remains a part of their business model. Just to be fair, I loaded the home page today for the first time in a year and found this notice on its login prompt: "We will NEVER spam you." Really now .... Mate1 may not spam, but they have plenty of pals who will once their contact list is traded or sold. Then there is that gray matter definition of "spam", which one critic of Mate1 has clarified neatly: [BEGIN QUOTE] "Online Ambassador" is a loophole disguised as a novel idea by Mate1 so they can legally get away with spamming their users and scamming them into staying or renewing. [END QUOTE] (See entire post here: onlinepersonalswatch.typepad.com/news/2006/12/mate1_online_am.html) I must append my prior entry here, which was quietly redacted right after I announced "my list of correspondents". There was no personally identifying data beyond user handles, ages, and place names, and this assumes any of them can be trusted. Point was, they ostensibly hailed from all parts of the U.S. and Canada, and whenever a message seemed to originate from within my home state the listed town was fictitious. Clearly something smelled wrong about Mate1, and this has been echoed by others who lost a great deal more time and money trying to disassociate from the site. Aside: A breezy interview with the CEO was posted in September, floating frightening plans to expand the user base into European and Asian markets and somehow integrate phone contact between members. No one used the phrase "mobile phone", but no doubt the impulsive nature of the wireless culture is just what they'd like to exploit with their obfuscating "trial" offer. onlinepersonalswatch.typepad.com/news/2007/09/liz-wasserman-m.html
