Online Dating sites Essay

You’ve heard of tinder, POF, christianmingle.com, and match.com. These websites claim to find you perfect matches. They say love is right around the corner with their website. These websites make it so you, the searcher, has the opportunity to meet tens of hundreds of women in search for that special person that will steal your heart. These dating sites have become huge in today’s society in meeting new people. Dating sites were a good idea back in the day. However, if you go to google and search the word online personals you will find the online dating scene has evolved. There are roughly 15 million so called dating sites today and that number rises daily. A law suit was filed against Yahoo a few years ago stating the web site deliberately and intentionally created false or non-existing profiles to make matches for their clients to keep them interested in the dating scene. Customers would pay a monthly fee to try and find their match or women of their dreams. Meanwhile, yahoo was making false profiles to make people believe they had finally found that special person or had a potential match and paying a fortune to keep them around. In 1996 Yahoo tried to get the courts to dismiss the complaint on grounds that it was barred by the CDA or Communications Decency Act. This act was the first notable attempt by the United States Congress to regulate pornographic material on the Internet. The courts rejected the argument and stated that yahoo would have to become an information content provider. (Miller, 2014) Another dating site by the name of Match.com had a similar lawsuit filed against them. This company however took it to the next level. The have hired employees who would do something called a date bait. These employees would send bogus emails back and forth with customers and would even go on actual dates with these people. An employee stated, â€Å"They had gone on as many as 300 dates a month.† The employees would do this to keep customers paying for the use of their website. (Miller, 2014) This lawsuit has yet to be resolved and Match.com remains the leading online matchmaker to this day. I had a friend who had just gotten out of a very long relationship and wanted to get back out there  and start dating. Her problem was she had been out of the dating scene for so long she honestly did not know where to even start. She decided she would try out one of these so called dating sites and see if they actually worked. She told me that she did the site for about two weeks. During these two weeks she received hundreds of messages from creepy guys looking to hook up. She told me, â€Å"Half of the guys I messaged weren’t even real people.† What she meant by this was that the people she messaged were automated, not real, and responded to every request they received to try and get money out of you. An article in the Huffington Post stated, â€Å"A model is suing Match.com for 1.5 million dollars.† The model is suing Match.com because the website allowed ove r 200 fake profiles be made using her pictures. The people creating these profiles with her pictures are talking to people and actually getting to know them and then asking them for money for multiple reasons. Some people are actually sending the money and being scammed as the person they are talking to is never heard from again. Online dating has evolved immensely since the 1990’s. It used to be a credible source to meet people and go on actual dates. Now a days, in the 2010’s, any mention of online dating is usually mentioned because someone tried scamming you out of money from Nigeria or some other country. Lawsuits are being filed all of the time on the websites because people are being scammed but the websites are winning because you agree to terms and agreements. What this does is make you, the customer, liable for any actions that partake after signing up for the website. In closing, the world of online dating is a scary one. It is quickly evolving into a large scam. Lawsuits are being filed daily against these sites but there is nothing that can be done as we, the customers, are at fault. People are never who they appear to be online. References Communications Decency Act. (n.d.). Retrieved November 16, 2014, from http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Communications_Decency_Act.html Miller, R., & Miller, R. (2014). 12. In Business law today: Text & summarized cases : Diverse, ethical, online, and global environment (10th ed.). Mason, Ohio: South-Western Cengage Learning. Scherker, A. (2013, November 25). This Model Is Suing Match.com For $1.5 Billion. Retrieved November 16, 2014, from