FTC Sues Parent Company of Popular Dating Platforms Match.Com, Tinder for Fake Ads
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Match Group, the parent company of popular dating platforms Match.com, Tinder, OkCupid and others for profiting off of fake ads Wednesday.
The FTC alleges that between 2013 and 2018, Match Group used fake love interest advertisements to convince hundreds of thousands of users to purchase subscriptions on Match.com, making false “guarantees,” failing to provide certain services and making it “tedious” and “confusing” for users to cancel subscriptions.
“We believe that Match.com conned people into paying for subscriptions via messages the company knew were from scammers,” said Andrew Smith, director of the FTC bureau of consumer protection, according to the release. “Online dating services obviously shouldn’t be using romance scammers as a way to fatten their bottom line.”
Match Group said the FTC “misrepresented internal emails and relied on cherry-picked data to make outrageous claims” during its investigation in a Wednesday statement, according to a press release.
“For nearly 25 years Match has been focused on helping people find love and fighting the criminals that try to take advantage of users. We’ve developed industry-leading tools and AI that block 96% of bots and fake accounts from our site within a day and are relentless in our pursuit to rid our site of these malicious accounts,” the statement adds. (Read more from “FTC Sues Parent Company of Popular Dating Platforms Match.Com, Tinder for Fake Ads” HERE)
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