Ever get false advertising vibes?... Or think those spend-the-rest-of-our-lives-together messages were from fake people? The FTC might be down to take your case. This week, the FTC announced a lawsuit against Match Group, the owner of Tinder, for misleading millions of potential daters with faux-mance.
Here's how the scheme went down... Match teased singles with fake messages from fake people in order to get them to join Match.com for real.
- A pop-up ad starts winking at you with the message "He just emailed you! Could he be the one?" Then there's a picture of a guy with perfect facial structure.
- You click the ad to find love, and end up creating an account. In your messages tab, the handsome dude's account is "unavailable".
- Turns out that hunk is just a picture and the account doesn't exist. But you've already started paying.
- From 2016-2018, the FTC calculated that 499,691 singles purchased Match.com subscriptions within 1 day of seeing the untrue ad.
Fake ads aren't cool, and this is a bad look... We feel bad for the duped victims, despite their deficient fakeness radars. Match stock fell 7% on Wednesday on this news. Rivals Bumble and Facebook Dating could win some hearts.
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