SAIGH LAW, P.L.L.C.

The infamous Online Dating website Match.com is being sued by a disgruntled former customer who claims that the service baits users with fake profiles and sets up ’staged’ dates with people who do not even subscribe to the service to keep customers on the hook.

Sean McGinn, a 37 year old Brooklyn man and TV Producer who filed the lawsuit states that Match.com “inflicted humiliation and disappointment on lonely hearts who feel rejected when their e-mails get no reply.” He was referring to what he claims is Match.com dangling phony date bait by posting profiles of people who no longer subscribe to its $39.99-a-month service. He further claims that subscribers to Match.com have been “defrauded” out of millions of dollars and countless hours spent sending messages to the people-less profiles designed to lure people in.

Most members of Match.com — which claims 86 million searches a month in the United States — are actually unavailable because they “are canceled subscribers or never subscribed at all,” according to his suit filed in Manhattan federal court. The class-action complaint doesn’t specify damages, but says they exceed $5 million. McGinn is demanding that Match.com “cease and desist its deceptive practices,” which he claims are “willfully causing emotional harm to the consumer and social harm to society at large.”

“Match’s policy causes severe emotional distress and anxiety for some [subscribers], including those who keep writing e-mails to one member after another and never hear back because he/she is writing to people who’ve canceled,” his suit says. “Because the writer has no way of knowing this, he or she may experience profound personal anguish and suffering which is easily preventable by Match.com”. He also alleges that “Match.com induces canceled members to log in . . . creating the appearance that inactive members are active” by sending bogus notifications that read, “Someone has winked back at you.”

About 15 other disgruntled Match.com users are lined up to join the case. McGinn’s suit is the latest in a series of fraud allegations lodged against Dallas-based Match.com and other social-networking sites. One such lawsuit, a 2005 suit accused Match.comm which is owned by media mogul Barry Diller’s “IAC Corp.” — of sending a female employee out on a date with a male subscriber to keep him signed up.

As reported in the New York Post