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Match.com May Pay Heavy Price for Fake Profiles
Online dating becomes more popular with each passing year. In 2013, 38 percent of singles reported having used an online dating site or some sort of mobile app. But in order to secure a successful online date, it takes time and effort to weed out all of the duds–after all, approximately 1 in 10 online dating profiles is faked.
Now, when I say faked, I’m not saying that people are lying about their looks, or amount of children, or whether they’re actually ready to settle down with the right girl. To be honest, if we included those kinds of relatively harmless fibs, I’m sure the number would go way over 1 in 10. I’m talking about faked profiles purely for the purpose of Internet fraud.
Internet fraud is not new. I know that I’ve received those horrifying emails from friends and family claiming someone has been kidnapped or robbed while in an exotic location, and they need me to wire $15,000 to a random location at least half a dozen times. And don’t even get me started on those spam emails where someone introduces themselves as a member of royalty, informs me they are getting their inheritance in a few weeks and will pay me some exorbitant fee, but just need some money to tide them over. The propositions are ridiculous, annoying, and unbelievable, yet thousands of people fall for them annually. In 2011, The Internet Crime Complaint Center reported 315,000 fraud claims, but there were probably many more that did not get reported.
One of the newest waves of such Internet schemes has been taking place on dating websites. And at least one scam on the popular dating site Match.com has ended in abject tragedy. In 2010, a 70-year-old Yonkers man named Al Circelli was contacted by a profile pretending to be a beautiful young woman in Ghana named Aisha. “Aisha” corresponded with the man for over a year, built up a rapport with him, and then informed him that she was in financial struggle. The profile scammed $50,000 out of Circelli until he went broke and actually had to borrow money from his son in an attempt to help her out. When he found out that it had all been a scam, he committed suicide.
Now, Match.com is being sued by a woman named Yuliana Avalos, and other unnamed plaintiffs. “Aisha” had been using Avalos’s modeling photos during her attempt to extort money from Circelli. Avalos claims that her pictures are used constantly on the site; at this point she has discovered at least 200 fake profiles in her likeness. While Avalos has become the face of this lawsuit, the others involved in the suit also tend to be young, attractive, and relatively visible women whose public personas have been co-opted to create fraudulent profiles.
According to the plaintiffs, it would be pretty easy to prevent this fraud from happening. There is facial recognition software that could pinpoint multiple profiles using the same photographs. And there are ways to track computers’ IP addresses to see if the computer on which the profile was created actually matches the city on the profile. She claims that the site knows about these fake profiles, but doesn’t necessarily do anything to stop them because even fake profiles inflate the number of users the site is able to report. The class action lawsuit is currently $1.5 billion.
A similar suit regarding fake profiles on Match.com was dismissed a few years ago. In regards to Avalos’s lawsuit, a Match.com spokesman has already claimed that the lawsuit is baseless, stating “the real scam here is this meritless lawsuit, which is filled with outlandish conspiracy theories and clumsy fabrications in lieu of factual or legal basis. We’re confident that our legal system is as adept as we are at detecting scammers and will dismiss this case in short order.”
Match.com absolutely needs to start working harder to weed out scam profiles. People pay for their service, and they should be guaranteed that they are only interacting with real profiles. That being said, I’m not sure how effective Avalos’s lawsuit will be. According to the claim, the defendants (Match.com and its subsidiaries) were cognizant of these fake profiles and broke laws by not removing them. From reading the complaint, the plaintiffs do seem to have identified a large number of fake profiles. But the question is, was it Match.com’s job to police these profiles? If so, could it be, for example, Google’s job to prevent fake emails? Companies can only do so much. Hopefully, Avalos’s lawsuit will help define those hazy parameters.
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Anneliese Mahoney (@AMahoney8672) is Lead Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.
Featured image courtesy of [maya elaine via DeviantArt]
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