Matchmaker, matchmaker make me a match

Bambi, did Match.com pay you to go out with me?


No, of course not Herman, girls like me go out with guys like you everyday!

Match.com, one of the top Internet dating websites, has been accused of hiring people as "date bait" to date some of their one million customers to encourage them to keep paying for the service.
A Los Angeles racketeering lawsuit said the lonely hearts website secretly recruited people to send enticing emails to its customers and to go out on dates with them as a way of getting them to keep up their 30 dollars monthly subscription.

The company's ringers, branded "date bait", went on as many as 100 dates a month -- three per day -- with Match.com customers, who use the site to search for boyfriends, girlfriends, and possible husbands and wives. "The paid Match.com employee then goes on a date with the subscriber, gives the deceptive appearance of having a lot in common with the subscriber ... with the intent of luring the subscriber into re-signing with Match.com," the suit alleges.

The suit charges as well that when a customer's subscription was expiring, Match.com produced fake responses to customers, suggesting another person had an interest in meeting them, in order to prod them to resubscribe.

"Hiding behind Match.com's portrait of online success is a very big, very dirty secret ... Not everyone you meet and date through Match.com is just another Match.com member," said the lawsuit, filed in a Los Angeles court on November 10.