Talk:Match.com/Archives/2012

Allegations removed

I removed the section below. It's way too POV and the sources are not reliable. It could probably be cleaned up, condensed, and readded in some form consistent with our guidelines and policies but it requires a significant amount of work.

Deceptive billing and general business practices, serious security breaches, poor customer service

Match.com is notorious for its security breaches and scandalous billing practices. Several different consumer-protection websites have listed hundreds of complaints from former Match.com members. In particular, ConsumerAffairs.com (http://www.consumeraffairs.com/dating_services/match.html ) has an extensive list of unhappy customers who were fraudulently charged fees by Match.com. For example, Match.com has a "California no-refund policy," which allows them to charge a person's account without offering them a refund within a certain period of time. What's worse, Match.com also uses a highly deceptive billing practice of "automatic credit card billing," by which Match.com automatically withdraws funds from the accounts of all members each month unless a member cancels their membership. Current and former match.com members complain that the company often ignores customer's requests to cancel a membership, even the "Free 3-Day Membership," and continues billing the customer indefinitely until the customer cancels the credit card or requests the credit-card company to intervene.

Match.com's latest security breaches involve hackers obtaining a member's login name and password, then using those two important data to access a member's account. Some members have recently reported that these security breaches have resulted in fraudulent emails being sent out to Match.com members, using an unsuspecting member's account. Some emails contained extremely offensive and vulgar language, which was quite damaging to all parties. On many occasions, Match.com has handled consumer complaints by summarily terminating the accounts of those members who have filed complaints with Match.com, and refusing to refund any membership fees.

As if these serious problems weren't enough, a former Match.com employee provided this unique insight to the highly deceptive business practices of Match.com, which may turn out to be illegal: "There are over 12 million actual users on MATCH, but you as a subscriber are never going to see more than about 200 of them, even if you actually had 1000's of matches, because of the way their system is coded for hashing thru the potential matches based on your profile info . . . THEY JUST DON'T CARE. I do believe that it's just a matter of time before this corporations bogus practices will be their downfall. They are destined to be the next big corporate scandal headline."

As of 08 September, 2007, repeated attempts to contact Match.com executives to resolve these issues have failed. Interestingly, on 12 June 2007, True.com was sued in Texas, alleging the very same deceptive and, perhaps, illegal billing and business practices that Match.com is currently engaged in.

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Is this notable?

In early 2005, the Match.com International division of Match.com invested £3m in a United Kingdom offline marketing campaign.

I have removed the entire "criticism" section. I'm sure that people have criticized the site and these criticisms should be discussed, but this section is written in an overly chatty style that sounds like the complaints of one person who's upset at Match.com. Some POV is not cited (e.g. that "Match.com is notorious for censorship...") Most citations supporting facts appear to link to some blog recounting one person's experience, so they give undue weight to essentially one person's opinion. For example, the citation in the Pictures section ([1]) reads like a rant. The text "There is significant evidence (in the form of complaints)" sounds like an admission that there is no such evidence beyond the allegations themselves. Zashaw (talk) 01:53, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

'6-month free' guarantee

Under the Controversies section, we have this text:

"While Match.com advertises a six-month guarantee, it does not offer refunds for disappointed customers. Their fine print states that if you don't find someone special during a qualifying six-month paid subscription to the Match.com service, they'll give you an additional six-month subscription."

This is rubbish. The guarantee is completely clear and unambiguius - if you don't find someone special within 6 months you get 6 months free. You don't have to delve into the 'fine print' to find that - it's the main headline of the offer. Suggest removing this so-called 'controversy'. 86.169.194.104 (talk) 16:22, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Efficacy statistics by an industry leader

Match.com does not publish comprehensive efficacy statistics, but they do present numbers in other ways such as by saying number of people on the site, number of members who report positive matches, etc. An industry leader who works for a competitor just published statistics for Match.com using Match.com's MetricsQ42009.pdf public stockholder report from Q4 in 2009. This is important for article inclusion because he is an authority in the industry, he presented the findings as an official statement, and because so far as I know, no other authority has ever presented data of this sort, including Match.com. The data is inherently interesting.

The data is neither good or bad, but since its presentation is not part of Match.com's marketing plan, some people may perceive it as negative. I am posting on the talk board in advance in case anyone wants to discuss my addition of it to this article. Thoughts? Blue Rasberry 18:16, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

I agree that Christian's OkTrends blog post is fascinating. As for your edit to the lead paragraph of this article (which I reverted), no new facts were presented. The paragraph already includes the total number of "members" (20 million) and the total number of paying subscribers (1.35 million). Dividing the latter by the former tells us that roughly 7% of "members" are subscribers, or that 93% are not. Pointing out that only paid subscribers can read or send messages, that Match gives no indication to its users which profiles are subscribers and which are not, and that therefore most profiles presented belong to people who are unable to read or respond to messages sent to them, would probably best be done in the "Controversy" section. Jaydiem (talk) 07:25, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

The URL underlying an outside link has a bad reputation through Web of Trust for malware & spying

Web of Trust ^ IAC 2009 Annual Report http://ir.iac.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1047469-10-1538 , February 26, 2010

The 10-k form is filed with the SEC. Maybe we should link the same report through the SEC rather than IAC? This does not appear to be the only bad source used. Source #1 does not look good: http://www.consumer-rankings.com/dating/comparison Synergee (talk) 23:11, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

Guess I should go through them then. Synergee (talk) 23:51, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

49/51 male/female ratio

I saw the dubious tag in the introduction and wondered why this is there? Could someone please fill me in? Synergee (talk) 03:59, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

10k data is for all dating services IAC provided not just match.com

I noticed alot the membership info, existing subscribers, total membership, revenue ect were all based off the 10-k from 2009 (there is now a 2012 one out). The problem is IAC lists totals for its "match" segment, not match.com itself. To list the totals as they are in the 10-k would be innacurate as they include other "match" services that are totally SEPERATE from match.com. You cannot lump all the members and all the revenue together as these sites are all different, and have there own members databases that are not shared between the different services.

Im not even sure the same people within IAC run the other websites. This date would be fine for the IAC article under thier "match" portfoli but not for a specific match.com wikipedia article.

I also removed a portion on the amount of members, and the ratio of male vs female subscribers as that page no longer even exists and is 2 1/2 years out of date and therefore likely a very different number today. Its better to have no number then a vastly outdated one from a dubious source. We need better sources.

and it should prob be mentioned that the VAST majority of members are dormant accounts that are never used again, maybe contrast the current subscriber's to members number.

Any thoughts? -Tracer9999 (talk) 13:34, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Russia

This site never opens in Russia. It always tell that "something wrong, and we will fix it".