Saturday, July 08, 2006

Suspicious True

A couple weeks ago I was surfing a couple different online dating sites. One of the sites I explored was True.com. Their unique marketing angle is that they run background checks on anyone who registers at the site for a paid subscription. I had made an attempt to log in so that I could perform a search. I don't think I was very impressed with the site and forgot about it.

A few days ago, I noticed in my mailbox (I have one e-mail address dedicated to online dating) a couple e-mails saying that so-and-so had winked at me. I didn't recognize the source of the e-mails. At first, I thought it was from this other website I had posted on.

When I clicked on the link to one of the guys, I found myself at True.com. The main page said that I had 2 e-mails and 83 winks (since June 25?). Strange... how come only now am I receiving e-mails to alert me?

I went back to my e-mail account and realized that the spam filter had diverted all the True.com e-mails to the spam folder. There were dozens of e-mails about winks, e-mails about messages, and e-mails from the site about potential matches.

When I looked at them more closely, however, I was very turned off. I had entered the basics about myself in terms of preferences, lifestyle, etc. I also posted what I was looking for in a man. This is why I was very disturbed to find that probably a third of the winks were from men who were divorced with children. Another third were from ethnicities I did not specify. The final third were from men who were WAY out of my age range... we're talking people claiming to be under 25 and over 45. Did any of these guys read my profile before winking?

Now, in previous times when I've put myself through online dating, I accepted that a handful of e-mails were from men outside of my preferred box, usually men a few years above my posted range. This time, however, once I threw out all the undesirables and those who had offered absolutely no information about themselves (not even their ethnicity or marriage status), I was left with maybe 8 guys who may have been okay. A ten percent hit rate? Eeck. I was hesitant even with several of them because they indicated they were religious and implied they were semi-regular attendees (and I am not really religious).

I considered signing up to find out more about these men, but an alarm sounded inside me. I went back through some of the profiles I deleted. I hadn't made much analysis of the profile names the first time around - inca7777, 1dream4u, etc. That's when I started noticing a few like "ridemehard" and that was the last straw (I don't care to mention the other few).

Maybe my mind got a little too creative, but I couldn't help wonder if this site was known as some unspoken place to hook up for one night stands or something. It especially seemed odd that in several cases, the men with children did not indicate their marital status. Why fill out one field and not the other. Why else would 20-year-olds subscribe to an online dating site? They're too young to need this. Then again, there are more obvious websites to go to for those types of rendezvous. Perhaps these are just bored losers trying to make trouble.

Who knows... it's just that I've not recently encountered anything so bizarre.

3 comments:

zerodoll said...

eeew, totally creepy. maybe your spam filter was telling you something!

Megan said...

No no! Tell us the other names!

Pandax said...

Megan, I deleted the account. You're not missing much. The others weren't as entertaining, just raunchy - "1pus[xxxxx]" and something about an orgy.