A Tale of Noncorporeal Dating Profiles - Ghosts in the Dating Machine

A Tale of Noncorporeal Dating Profiles - Ghosts in the Dating Machine

The Economist recently included an excellent article overviewing the cosmos of online dating, noting controversies, statistics, etc., but one of the most interesting revelations included the mention of GHOSTS. That's right, phony members created by dating websites to pose as real members.

According to TE:

To make matters worse, unscrupulous site operators sometimes stuff their databases with fake profiles maintained either by their own staff or by people they have paid. These “ghosts”, in the industry’s jargon, are used to draw in new punters and to help keep existing ones hooked. Last year Jetplace, an Australian company, admitted that it had been running more than 1,300 false profiles on a matchmaking service that it owned. Dating-site bosses maintain that such instances are rare, but detecting them can be tricky.

As most of us already know who date online, even if they're not ethereal types, the profiles of the corporeal can be very misleading.

Even genuine profiles can be misleading: OkTrends, a blog run by OkCupid, reported last year that users routinely fib about things such as their height and wealth in order to boost their chances of being contacted. Yet the prospect of a first face-to-face meeting provides a natural check on people’s propensity to exaggerate. Some researchers have found that daters tend to come clean about any slight misrepresentations they have made before meeting a potential partner.

No surprise there, eh?  And of course, we have the hordes of con artists.

The industry has also been slow to strengthen security measures to protect those seeking romance from falling into the clutches of frauds, cads and worse. A few agencies, such as True, an American dating service, regularly run background checks on their customers. But they are the exception rather than the rule. As well as weeding out crooks and sex offenders, True also uses official databases to spot married people posing as singles ... many online-dating services are reluctant to undertake thorough background checks because these could put off potential customers.  

So, darling readers, ya gotta be smart out there!  Seriously, the best way to go for online daters is to focus on niche sites for the intelligent that provide a screening method of some type, Love for Wits.Com being the only one we know of at this time.  The admins tell us they require references and they employ a testing procedure which stops the spammers cold.

Fingers X'd!