The dating service has been accused of catfishing new subscribers.
Match.com is trouble with regulators for allegedly playing games with the hearts of lovelorn consumers in a way that resembles a lot of romance scams.
From June 2016 to May 2018, consumers bought nearly 500,000 subscriptions within a day of receiving the questionable wink, according to the lawsuit. If Match.com did, indeed, allow fake winks to lure people into paying for a subscription on the site, it doesn’t look much different from the kind of tactics scammers use when they try to “phish” for lonely singletons who are willing to hand over money. “These kinds of romance scams are very targeted social engineering attacks, effectively ‘hacking’ the victim’s emotions, rather than trying to perform a technical assault,” Nathan Wenzler, senior director of cybersecurity at Seattle-Wash.
How romance scams work Consumer have lost $884 million from 2015 to 2017 on romance scams, according to FBI and FTC estimates cited in Wednesday’s lawsuit. The FTC received over 21,000 romance scam complaints last year, up from 8,500 in 2015. Shares of Match Group are up 67% since the start of the year. The S&P 500 SPX, -0.24% is up 19% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.30% is up almost 16% in the same period.
Match Group, Match.com’s parent company, said it has been “relentless” in pushing bots and fake accounts off the site, it said.
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