ASSOCIATED PRESS -- Nov 25 -- Match is charged with sending a female employee out on a date with a male subscriber as "date bait" to keep him signed up and Yahoo Personals with creating fake profiles to entice subscribers. Match.com denied the allegations and obtained an affidavit from the woman in question, who declared she never worked for the company. The suit says Yahoo posts fake profiles and alleges Yahoo also sent him fake "new match" messages when his monthly subscription was up for renewal. After months of failing to meet a potential match, he became suspicious and discovered the same picture of a woman being posted for different cities under different names. Trish McDermott, chief matchmaker at Engage.com and a Match's former VP Romance, said she never saw any type of consumer fraud during her decade at Match.com. She added that the majority of personals sites, including Yahoo and Match.com, employ a business model she believes fails consumers. It's not clear who is a member and who isn't in the pay-to-respond model, in which a user must join a service to respond to an e-mail sent by a potential match but cannot post a profile, McDermott said. If someone e-mails 100 people and gets only one response, he or she could conclude that most of the profiles are fake when they actually show non-subscribers who can't respond to e-mail, she said.
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