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WooMe: TechCrunch40 Finalist, $20 Million In Funding – And One Huge Scam

144 points by bjonathan 16y ago

sharescribe 16y ago
The Complete Idiot's Guide To Frauds, Scams, and Cons http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0028644158/thepoliticalg-20 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0028644158/thepolitic...
JacobAldridge 16y ago
TC / Crunchbase might want to change their WooMe's company profile on their pages as well, in light of this article. Kind of funny that the article calls it "bait-and-switch, from the horrible kind" while linking to an internal-ish overview that says "best of all it’s free". http://www.crunchbase.com/company/woome http://www.crunchbase.com/company/woome
- nikcub 16y ago
  150k+ records in Crunchbase so it is difficult to keep it up-to-date. The good news is that anybody can edit any record.
  - whyleyc 16y ago
    I just edited the company bio - how long do I have to wait to see the update ?
    - nikcub 16y ago
      The mods usually go through the moderation queue once a day. If you create an account, after a few edits are approved you get permission to insta-edit.
anon2345 16y ago
Hey don't knock the horse face. I did fine at Burning Man wearing a Horse Head mask. Maybe there are a lot of playa princesses on WooMe.
- JabavuAdams 16y ago
  Wow. It's 2011 and I still haven't gone to Burning Man. Been meaning to go since 1995. looks at blizzard outside
vaksel 16y ago
That's like the oldest scam that pretty much every single dating site uses. I'm surprised how TC is shocked...shocked to find that on a dating site. Reddit did the same thing starting out...the only difference is that they didn't try to trick you into paying.
- notahacker 16y ago
  There's a bit of a difference between the company owners starting conversations between themselves to create content interesting enough to attract outsiders and robots (indirectly) asking you to pay so you can reply to their messages. The most underhand variation of all I've encountered was sms.ac (ironic acroynm) which suckered you in with Bebo-style friendspam to join their "free SMS" network, at which point your blank profile started receiving unsolicited reverse charge "flirts" from random non-humans.
- DevX101 16y ago
  The value reddit users get is from viewing new and interesting content and comments. The value a user of a dating site gets is the PROSPECT of going on a face to face meeting with another person. If reddit engineers were good enough to make an AI to post great new great content everyday along with insightful comments and analysis, I'd still go. Hell, that might make me want to go even more often. If I found out a dating site users were doing the same with messaging, that completely precludes me from getting the value I really want from the site, thus its useless.
kirbman89 16y ago
Wow. That is a horrible. Can't believe any VC would invest money in such a misleading, annoying startup. Are these messages coming from WooMe internally or are they SPAM submitted from "Russian bride scams"? Either way, I'm staying away and warning others!
- plusbryan 16y ago
  WooMe probably didn't start out this way. Desperation can do bad things to good intentions.
ig1 16y ago
I'm not sure what the law is in the US, but I'm pretty sure that would be illegal in the UK both under sales legislation and under anti-fraud laws.
fedd 16y ago
where is the analogous website for scamming women with pics of hot boys? "pay 50% OFF to chat with Ivan!" what a chauvinism!..
nicferrier 16y ago
for the record, robin wauters didn't approach us to verify anything in the story and the accusations are untrue and misleading. we focus very hard on getting people to talk to each other and interact and we have a number of features on the site, driven by users, that make that happen. Ironically, the user featured in the pic is one of the longest standing and most active on WooMe.
- robryan 16y ago
  So your saying that every message received came from a real user of the website?
  - nicferrier 16y ago
    I don't know what he received so I can't say. But our tools promote real users interacting with real users. Maybe Robin could talk to us if he has a problem. Horses for courses not withstanding.
    - redthrowaway 16y ago
      "I don't know what he received so I can't say." Speak straight. Do you or do you not send automated messages or messages from fake accounts in an effort to entice visitors to sign up?
      - nicferrier 16y ago
        we do not.
        redthrowaway 16y ago
        Is it your belief that the messages in question are genuine?
        tptacek 16y ago
        Are you aware of any process by which new users are sent automated messages from accounts, valid or not?
meterplech 16y ago
This is particularly poignant and frustrating given OKCupids recent acquisition. I'm happy for those guys- but I am sad that the one good dating site will probably be discontinued. It's tough when you know the shady tactics of practically all the others.
- regularfry 16y ago
  Match.com would have to be utter idiots to close down OkCupid. If they keep it running, it's a serious asset, for a bunch of reasons, and one hopes that they'd be mature enough not to care if one brand they own is cannibalising another. If they close it down, yes, their main brand will be protected, but so will everyone else's. There's no competitive advantage whatsoever in doing it.
getsat 16y ago
It's really unfortunate that this is the norm and not an exception. That said, users of these kind of sites are probably most susceptible to this kind of trick as love, lust and infatuation are probably the strongest emotions. I know of a few people who scrape profiles off of dating site A, create new profiles using that data on dating site B then message users on site B asking them out. A requirement for going out on a date with them (they're obviously posing as an attractive female and messaging males) is signing up to a service that does a background check to verify that they're not dangerous. Affiliate network payout per conversion on background check = $20+ USD Doing that at scale = you are making $2,000+ USD/day
- DevX101 16y ago
  You want to call them out here? Maybe with an anonymous handle if they know you?
  - getsat 16y ago
    They're all way outside US jurisdiction (where all these sites operate), so there's really no point. These aren't people I know personally, merely acquaintances from various black hat communities. Honour among thieves, and all that.
edw519 16y ago
The only thing more frustrating than an ethically challenged business is the investment that came its way instead of going to legitimate start-ups that may die on the vine for lack of capital.
- zoomzoom 16y ago
  Who is to say that ethically challenged businesses cannot be legitimate targets for investors? I hate these sites, but my bet is that they pay off for investors as well as your average YC company...Investors are in the business of making money, not making judgements about ethics. Legal challenges are the ones that matter to a business, not ethical ones.
  - pavel_lishin 16y ago
    Maybe we should change that.
    - zoomzoom 16y ago
      The question is: how? The sentiment (in the US, at least) still seems to be towards less regulation at the moment. Enforcing ethics as well as laws would seem to require even more regulation, unless you have a magic potion that will convince all business directors to self-regulate all at once!
      - watchandwait 16y ago
        Regulations are only as ethical as the regulator -- just ask Bernie Madoff's victims how well that worked. Indeed, more regulation leads to a false sense of security, and certainly stifles innovation. Better to have the market, and market players like TechCrunch, sort out this type of low-level malfeasance.
        zoomzoom 16y ago
        I am definitely not advocating more regulation, only pointing out that laws and ethics are not the same thing. The parent of the above post is the one suggesting to "change that" (implying more regulation) and I am answering that comment. I agree that this kind of "malfeasance" is not really worth any more attention from regulators.
diziet 16y ago
How is this an article so thoroughly under-researched? Why not go a little bit further and investigate if actual people are posting? Hi $name, thank you for messaging me. I'm new to this site, so can you please tell me the process on how you send me that message, where did you have to click, etc? I am still trying to figure this out, so if you could tell me what buttons you had to press to send the message to me, I'd appreciate it, it would help me get started. Thank you ahead of time, $name. P.S. Have you read any good books lately? And then, to be even more sure, create a couple more accounts through proxies and see what kind of messages they get. Do deactivate them after. See, while it does look like some sort of bait-and-switch, at least try to verify it. Maybe at the very least they've got a very persuasive feature where new members do get popped up, and there's a user initiated "Poke" like feature (that appears as a message on your end), so that would put them somewhere in grey-hat tactics out of the black-hat area.
- yaakov34 16y ago
  Oh come on, COME ON, I'm all for research too, but 15 messages from women in the middle of the night who want to date a horse is not something that requires going deep undercover before you decide that it's fake. And he said that it would cost him $60 just to contact anyone or do anything on that site.
  - noodle 16y ago
    i agree that its most likely fake, but it seems like TC would be able to comp him for the $30 for a membership it would take to lend weight to the story. are the messages fake? again, yeah, probably. but its also concievable that one or two are "lol a horse" type of messages. kind of depends on how the site itself works.
    - robinwauters 16y ago
      It's not just the messages from users, it's the whole concept of showing nothing unless you hand over your credit details, pretending hot women are dying to contact you even though you're obviously not date material (unless they're into horses), the unsolicited emails, the corny live chat box and pop-up message when you try to close it, and so on.
jonursenbach 16y ago
It's this kind of stuff that always gets me fired up about one of my previous employers and the cadre of clones that they run. What WooMe is doing is nothing different than any other adult "dating" website in that they send messages to users with the hopes of getting them to sign up with a recurring charge (that the company hopes they forget about) and then immediately cut off almost all of this instant contact that the paid user just received. Then about a week later they'll send out a mass mailer to a set of demographics with more fake messages just to string that person and get them to continue forgetting about that recurring $24.99 charge. Don't even get me started on upselling.
elliottcarlson 16y ago
There is a huge industry going on on these kinds of sites - not necessarily done by the site owners... Generally there are two monitizations for a third party; first of all being an affiliate and sending traffic can be big bucks (I paid for my wedding as a referrer for SexSearch and AdultFriendFinder - I'm not ashamed because I didn't use necessarily shady practices to accomplished this). With big bucks, I mean an easy $45 (at the time) per signup, more if it were a female registering. Having a day making $2k wasn't unheard of. The second, shadier method, is that there will be "service providers" posing or automating profiles on these sites. The "service providers" (escorts, phone sex, porn sites, rival "dating" sites or plain our scammers) attempt to get the people to use their service by enticing the end-user and making them believe they are a real person. This is generally overlooked because for these new unpaid accounts, their curiosity gets the best of them when they can't read these private messages they are getting, and they end up paying for an account. (It was even beneficial to me, even though I wasn't luring anyone in to paying for an account, these service providers would convert them for me). The thing that backfires is that so many of these service providers will hurt the quality of a site by making users instantly see that something is wrong - just like in the parent article. It's in WooMe's interest (if they are indeed not doing it themselves) to take control over this kind of misuse, and not let it get out of control - they will just lose real users, and in the end money.
- minouye 16y ago
  I'm not really understanding the second method. I don't see how a rival "dating" site would have any incentive to get a customer to pay for a rival service. Are you saying that once affiliates drove a user sign-up, they would engage the user via messages to get them to sign up for a paid plan so they would get a greater payout? If so, how did they find the specific users that signed up via their affiliate links? Just trying to understand who other than WooMe would have an incentive to spam on their site.
  - elliottcarlson 16y ago
    It wouldn't be rival dating sites; it would be affiliates to rival sites. I guess the best way to see it is; once you have identified a sucker, take them for all they are worth. Possible scenario: 1) User signs up for free on WooMe 2) User is enticed by fake account to signup because the picture alone suckered them in, and the unknown of their message just made it too much. 3) Fake account tells user to check out their profile on fake account's website 4) Fake accounts website is a redirect with affiliate code to rival site 5) User signs up for rival site, thus giving the commission to the fake account's holder. It sounds like a lot of work, but it's all automated and easy to pull off. Edited for formatting
yaakov34 16y ago
Here's a suggestion for WooMe, if it wants to cling to some credibility or at least plausible deniability: upgrade the journo's account for free, so that he can contact the senders of those messages. If the messages are offering dates, and insisting on upgraded levels of membership - case closed. If the messages are promoting some unrelated service - the site has a raging spam problem. And if the messages are real, I'll be a monkey's uncle.
- notahacker 16y ago
  Really, this is too easy to game to worry the cynics - the site owners could log in and continue a few conversations for a bit to make the bad publicity go away. If I was running this kind of operation I'd probably ensure some conversations continued for a couple of messages after users paid up, just to make sure they didn't cancel or file chargebacks. If I assume men preferred their hot women to pass the Turing test I could probably outsource the flirting to someone in the Philippines at $5 per hundred messages.
staunch 16y ago
When WooMe launched they got a lot of attention. They thought they were going to take the world by storm. Unfortunately their product is a novelty. They took $17.4 million dollars of VC with no real hope of showing a return to their investors. They got desperate and this is the result.
20110202 16y ago
Here is what the site does (or at least did two-three months ago, when I tried it). After you pay for your account, it immediately asks you "do you want the site to introduce you to people who may be of interest" or something like that. A little later, I looked at my Sent folder and saw that I had said "hi" or "what's up" to dozens of people, many who are not local or I otherwise would not be interested in.
cloug 16y ago
I'm kinda disappointed, I just signed up (with what I thought was a engaging picture: http://www.illusionking.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/horse_head.jpg http://www.illusionking.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/horse...) and I've only got three messages from VIP members. Thank you Anita, Yanisa and Shawna !
Tichy 16y ago
The evidence does not seem overwhelming to me. It is well known that girls love horses, so it doesn't seem that surprising that he is flooded with messages if he uses a horse avatar.
moomba 16y ago
This site may be dishonest, but its certainly nothing new. Most dating sites you go to employ some of the same tactics. They will try to lure you in and then put up a paywall. I guess the thing that is bad here is that they lie about having automated messages when they obviously do. That is really kind of slimy, they might as well admit to the obvious at this point.
galactus 16y ago
I don't understand, how does he know it is actually WooMe behind the bots? Couldn't it be some scammer who has nothing to do with WooMe?
unreal37 16y ago
I realize I'll probably spend some karma here, but after reading TC and checking out the site (and the blog post by the site), I see what's happening. And there is a LOT of misunderstanding in the TC article and in the comments of HN. One of the services WooMe offers is to automatically introduce people they think will get along. They do NOT make it clear its the system doing the introduction, nor that its automated. But what is clear is these are all real people on the site, no fake accounts. So yes, no person sent a hello to a horse in the middle of the night. But that doesn't make the whole thing fake. It mimics a scam, but is not. Imagine if after signing up for Facebook for the first time, FB sent you 10 friend requests within minutes of people they thought you knew - one step further than what they already do with suggested friends. Is that a scam? Or is that a ham-fisted attempt at helping you get started using the site? It's clearly not a scam. It's just really really borderline on the ethical side. I've never used a dating site of any kind, so I have no idea what is normal in that industry.
- mthoms 16y ago
  Except that the screenshots clearly say "(so and so) has sent you a message", which is plainly false. I'm not sure how you could see it any other way.
jasonmcalacanis 16y ago
No one remembers how you got that--just that you got there.
iloveyouocean 16y ago
I launched an online dating site FlowMingle.com in 2008 (since closed down). When we were building the site on '07 and looking for investment, over and over we heard 'Your site isn't viral/social enough. Look at WooMe, look at Zoosk, etc. They will eat your lunch!' and with regards to OKCupid "It's at best a niche site for geeks and freaks, it's growing too slowly, it's not viral enough." Although this TC article is hardly news for anyone who has examined the WooMes of the world for even 15sec., I find the fact that WooMe is outed as a scam and that OKCupid is acquired by Match.com to be hugely vindicating. By providing users an honest, transparent service that legitimately helps them achieve their aims, you CAN and eventually WILL profit and grow. The damage in investors betting on companies like WooMe is that 1) they scam bunches of online daters and turn them off from the whole industry, they disappoint and lie to people 2) other entrepreneurs see big investment and media coverage for a company like WooMe and think they should chase after that model and mold their businesses to what investors want rather than what users want. 3) ultimately, investing in WooMe doesn't create any long term value and is a waste of time/money and starves other legitimate businesses of opportunity. Just because a company is getting investment $$, press, meteoric growth, etc does NOT mean it is actually delivering anything of value and/or helping its users achieve their goals. There is always opportunity to win against ANY competitor by doing those simple things.

144 points by bjonathan 16y ago

The Complete Idiot's Guide To Frauds, Scams, and Cons http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0028644158/thepoliticalg-20 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0028644158/thepolitic...

JacobAldridge 16y ago

TC / Crunchbase might want to change their WooMe's company profile on their pages as well, in light of this article. Kind of funny that the article calls it "bait-and-switch, from the horrible kind" while linking to an internal-ish overview that says "best of all it’s free". http://www.crunchbase.com/company/woome http://www.crunchbase.com/company/woome

nikcub 16y ago
150k+ records in Crunchbase so it is difficult to keep it up-to-date. The good news is that anybody can edit any record.
- whyleyc 16y ago
  I just edited the company bio - how long do I have to wait to see the update ?
  - nikcub 16y ago
    The mods usually go through the moderation queue once a day. If you create an account, after a few edits are approved you get permission to insta-edit.

anon2345 16y ago

Hey don't knock the horse face. I did fine at Burning Man wearing a Horse Head mask. Maybe there are a lot of playa princesses on WooMe.

JabavuAdams 16y ago
Wow. It's 2011 and I still haven't gone to Burning Man. Been meaning to go since 1995. looks at blizzard outside

vaksel 16y ago

That's like the oldest scam that pretty much every single dating site uses. I'm surprised how TC is shocked...shocked to find that on a dating site. Reddit did the same thing starting out...the only difference is that they didn't try to trick you into paying.

notahacker 16y ago
There's a bit of a difference between the company owners starting conversations between themselves to create content interesting enough to attract outsiders and robots (indirectly) asking you to pay so you can reply to their messages. The most underhand variation of all I've encountered was sms.ac (ironic acroynm) which suckered you in with Bebo-style friendspam to join their "free SMS" network, at which point your blank profile started receiving unsolicited reverse charge "flirts" from random non-humans.
DevX101 16y ago
The value reddit users get is from viewing new and interesting content and comments. The value a user of a dating site gets is the PROSPECT of going on a face to face meeting with another person. If reddit engineers were good enough to make an AI to post great new great content everyday along with insightful comments and analysis, I'd still go. Hell, that might make me want to go even more often. If I found out a dating site users were doing the same with messaging, that completely precludes me from getting the value I really want from the site, thus its useless.

kirbman89 16y ago

Wow. That is a horrible. Can't believe any VC would invest money in such a misleading, annoying startup. Are these messages coming from WooMe internally or are they SPAM submitted from "Russian bride scams"? Either way, I'm staying away and warning others!

plusbryan 16y ago
WooMe probably didn't start out this way. Desperation can do bad things to good intentions.

ig1 16y ago

I'm not sure what the law is in the US, but I'm pretty sure that would be illegal in the UK both under sales legislation and under anti-fraud laws.

fedd 16y ago

where is the analogous website for scamming women with pics of hot boys? "pay 50% OFF to chat with Ivan!" what a chauvinism!..

nicferrier 16y ago

for the record, robin wauters didn't approach us to verify anything in the story and the accusations are untrue and misleading. we focus very hard on getting people to talk to each other and interact and we have a number of features on the site, driven by users, that make that happen. Ironically, the user featured in the pic is one of the longest standing and most active on WooMe.

robryan 16y ago
So your saying that every message received came from a real user of the website?
- nicferrier 16y ago
  I don't know what he received so I can't say. But our tools promote real users interacting with real users. Maybe Robin could talk to us if he has a problem. Horses for courses not withstanding.
  - redthrowaway 16y ago
    "I don't know what he received so I can't say." Speak straight. Do you or do you not send automated messages or messages from fake accounts in an effort to entice visitors to sign up?
    - nicferrier 16y ago
      we do not.
      - redthrowaway 16y ago
        Is it your belief that the messages in question are genuine?
      - tptacek 16y ago
        Are you aware of any process by which new users are sent automated messages from accounts, valid or not?

meterplech 16y ago

This is particularly poignant and frustrating given OKCupids recent acquisition. I'm happy for those guys- but I am sad that the one good dating site will probably be discontinued. It's tough when you know the shady tactics of practically all the others.

regularfry 16y ago
Match.com would have to be utter idiots to close down OkCupid. If they keep it running, it's a serious asset, for a bunch of reasons, and one hopes that they'd be mature enough not to care if one brand they own is cannibalising another. If they close it down, yes, their main brand will be protected, but so will everyone else's. There's no competitive advantage whatsoever in doing it.

getsat 16y ago

It's really unfortunate that this is the norm and not an exception. That said, users of these kind of sites are probably most susceptible to this kind of trick as love, lust and infatuation are probably the strongest emotions. I know of a few people who scrape profiles off of dating site A, create new profiles using that data on dating site B then message users on site B asking them out. A requirement for going out on a date with them (they're obviously posing as an attractive female and messaging males) is signing up to a service that does a background check to verify that they're not dangerous. Affiliate network payout per conversion on background check = $20+ USD Doing that at scale = you are making $2,000+ USD/day

DevX101 16y ago
You want to call them out here? Maybe with an anonymous handle if they know you?
- getsat 16y ago
  They're all way outside US jurisdiction (where all these sites operate), so there's really no point. These aren't people I know personally, merely acquaintances from various black hat communities. Honour among thieves, and all that.

edw519 16y ago

The only thing more frustrating than an ethically challenged business is the investment that came its way instead of going to legitimate start-ups that may die on the vine for lack of capital.

zoomzoom 16y ago
Who is to say that ethically challenged businesses cannot be legitimate targets for investors? I hate these sites, but my bet is that they pay off for investors as well as your average YC company...Investors are in the business of making money, not making judgements about ethics. Legal challenges are the ones that matter to a business, not ethical ones.
- pavel_lishin 16y ago
  Maybe we should change that.
  - zoomzoom 16y ago
    The question is: how? The sentiment (in the US, at least) still seems to be towards less regulation at the moment. Enforcing ethics as well as laws would seem to require even more regulation, unless you have a magic potion that will convince all business directors to self-regulate all at once!
    - watchandwait 16y ago
      Regulations are only as ethical as the regulator -- just ask Bernie Madoff's victims how well that worked. Indeed, more regulation leads to a false sense of security, and certainly stifles innovation. Better to have the market, and market players like TechCrunch, sort out this type of low-level malfeasance.
      - zoomzoom 16y ago
        I am definitely not advocating more regulation, only pointing out that laws and ethics are not the same thing. The parent of the above post is the one suggesting to "change that" (implying more regulation) and I am answering that comment. I agree that this kind of "malfeasance" is not really worth any more attention from regulators.

diziet 16y ago

How is this an article so thoroughly under-researched? Why not go a little bit further and investigate if actual people are posting? Hi $name, thank you for messaging me. I'm new to this site, so can you please tell me the process on how you send me that message, where did you have to click, etc? I am still trying to figure this out, so if you could tell me what buttons you had to press to send the message to me, I'd appreciate it, it would help me get started. Thank you ahead of time, $name. P.S. Have you read any good books lately? And then, to be even more sure, create a couple more accounts through proxies and see what kind of messages they get. Do deactivate them after. See, while it does look like some sort of bait-and-switch, at least try to verify it. Maybe at the very least they've got a very persuasive feature where new members do get popped up, and there's a user initiated "Poke" like feature (that appears as a message on your end), so that would put them somewhere in grey-hat tactics out of the black-hat area.

yaakov34 16y ago
Oh come on, COME ON, I'm all for research too, but 15 messages from women in the middle of the night who want to date a horse is not something that requires going deep undercover before you decide that it's fake. And he said that it would cost him $60 just to contact anyone or do anything on that site.
- noodle 16y ago
  i agree that its most likely fake, but it seems like TC would be able to comp him for the $30 for a membership it would take to lend weight to the story. are the messages fake? again, yeah, probably. but its also concievable that one or two are "lol a horse" type of messages. kind of depends on how the site itself works.
  - robinwauters 16y ago
    It's not just the messages from users, it's the whole concept of showing nothing unless you hand over your credit details, pretending hot women are dying to contact you even though you're obviously not date material (unless they're into horses), the unsolicited emails, the corny live chat box and pop-up message when you try to close it, and so on.

jonursenbach 16y ago

It's this kind of stuff that always gets me fired up about one of my previous employers and the cadre of clones that they run. What WooMe is doing is nothing different than any other adult "dating" website in that they send messages to users with the hopes of getting them to sign up with a recurring charge (that the company hopes they forget about) and then immediately cut off almost all of this instant contact that the paid user just received. Then about a week later they'll send out a mass mailer to a set of demographics with more fake messages just to string that person and get them to continue forgetting about that recurring $24.99 charge. Don't even get me started on upselling.

elliottcarlson 16y ago

There is a huge industry going on on these kinds of sites - not necessarily done by the site owners... Generally there are two monitizations for a third party; first of all being an affiliate and sending traffic can be big bucks (I paid for my wedding as a referrer for SexSearch and AdultFriendFinder - I'm not ashamed because I didn't use necessarily shady practices to accomplished this). With big bucks, I mean an easy $45 (at the time) per signup, more if it were a female registering. Having a day making $2k wasn't unheard of. The second, shadier method, is that there will be "service providers" posing or automating profiles on these sites. The "service providers" (escorts, phone sex, porn sites, rival "dating" sites or plain our scammers) attempt to get the people to use their service by enticing the end-user and making them believe they are a real person. This is generally overlooked because for these new unpaid accounts, their curiosity gets the best of them when they can't read these private messages they are getting, and they end up paying for an account. (It was even beneficial to me, even though I wasn't luring anyone in to paying for an account, these service providers would convert them for me). The thing that backfires is that so many of these service providers will hurt the quality of a site by making users instantly see that something is wrong - just like in the parent article. It's in WooMe's interest (if they are indeed not doing it themselves) to take control over this kind of misuse, and not let it get out of control - they will just lose real users, and in the end money.

minouye 16y ago
I'm not really understanding the second method. I don't see how a rival "dating" site would have any incentive to get a customer to pay for a rival service. Are you saying that once affiliates drove a user sign-up, they would engage the user via messages to get them to sign up for a paid plan so they would get a greater payout? If so, how did they find the specific users that signed up via their affiliate links? Just trying to understand who other than WooMe would have an incentive to spam on their site.
- elliottcarlson 16y ago
  It wouldn't be rival dating sites; it would be affiliates to rival sites. I guess the best way to see it is; once you have identified a sucker, take them for all they are worth. Possible scenario: 1) User signs up for free on WooMe 2) User is enticed by fake account to signup because the picture alone suckered them in, and the unknown of their message just made it too much. 3) Fake account tells user to check out their profile on fake account's website 4) Fake accounts website is a redirect with affiliate code to rival site 5) User signs up for rival site, thus giving the commission to the fake account's holder. It sounds like a lot of work, but it's all automated and easy to pull off. Edited for formatting

yaakov34 16y ago

Here's a suggestion for WooMe, if it wants to cling to some credibility or at least plausible deniability: upgrade the journo's account for free, so that he can contact the senders of those messages. If the messages are offering dates, and insisting on upgraded levels of membership - case closed. If the messages are promoting some unrelated service - the site has a raging spam problem. And if the messages are real, I'll be a monkey's uncle.

notahacker 16y ago
Really, this is too easy to game to worry the cynics - the site owners could log in and continue a few conversations for a bit to make the bad publicity go away. If I was running this kind of operation I'd probably ensure some conversations continued for a couple of messages after users paid up, just to make sure they didn't cancel or file chargebacks. If I assume men preferred their hot women to pass the Turing test I could probably outsource the flirting to someone in the Philippines at $5 per hundred messages.

staunch 16y ago

When WooMe launched they got a lot of attention. They thought they were going to take the world by storm. Unfortunately their product is a novelty. They took $17.4 million dollars of VC with no real hope of showing a return to their investors. They got desperate and this is the result.

20110202 16y ago

Here is what the site does (or at least did two-three months ago, when I tried it). After you pay for your account, it immediately asks you "do you want the site to introduce you to people who may be of interest" or something like that. A little later, I looked at my Sent folder and saw that I had said "hi" or "what's up" to dozens of people, many who are not local or I otherwise would not be interested in.

cloug 16y ago

I'm kinda disappointed, I just signed up (with what I thought was a engaging picture: http://www.illusionking.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/horse_head.jpg http://www.illusionking.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/horse...) and I've only got three messages from VIP members. Thank you Anita, Yanisa and Shawna !

Tichy 16y ago

The evidence does not seem overwhelming to me. It is well known that girls love horses, so it doesn't seem that surprising that he is flooded with messages if he uses a horse avatar.

moomba 16y ago

This site may be dishonest, but its certainly nothing new. Most dating sites you go to employ some of the same tactics. They will try to lure you in and then put up a paywall. I guess the thing that is bad here is that they lie about having automated messages when they obviously do. That is really kind of slimy, they might as well admit to the obvious at this point.

galactus 16y ago

I don't understand, how does he know it is actually WooMe behind the bots? Couldn't it be some scammer who has nothing to do with WooMe?

unreal37 16y ago

I realize I'll probably spend some karma here, but after reading TC and checking out the site (and the blog post by the site), I see what's happening. And there is a LOT of misunderstanding in the TC article and in the comments of HN. One of the services WooMe offers is to automatically introduce people they think will get along. They do NOT make it clear its the system doing the introduction, nor that its automated. But what is clear is these are all real people on the site, no fake accounts. So yes, no person sent a hello to a horse in the middle of the night. But that doesn't make the whole thing fake. It mimics a scam, but is not. Imagine if after signing up for Facebook for the first time, FB sent you 10 friend requests within minutes of people they thought you knew - one step further than what they already do with suggested friends. Is that a scam? Or is that a ham-fisted attempt at helping you get started using the site? It's clearly not a scam. It's just really really borderline on the ethical side. I've never used a dating site of any kind, so I have no idea what is normal in that industry.

mthoms 16y ago
Except that the screenshots clearly say "(so and so) has sent you a message", which is plainly false. I'm not sure how you could see it any other way.

jasonmcalacanis 16y ago

No one remembers how you got that--just that you got there.

iloveyouocean 16y ago

I launched an online dating site FlowMingle.com in 2008 (since closed down). When we were building the site on '07 and looking for investment, over and over we heard 'Your site isn't viral/social enough. Look at WooMe, look at Zoosk, etc. They will eat your lunch!' and with regards to OKCupid "It's at best a niche site for geeks and freaks, it's growing too slowly, it's not viral enough." Although this TC article is hardly news for anyone who has examined the WooMes of the world for even 15sec., I find the fact that WooMe is outed as a scam and that OKCupid is acquired by Match.com to be hugely vindicating. By providing users an honest, transparent service that legitimately helps them achieve their aims, you CAN and eventually WILL profit and grow. The damage in investors betting on companies like WooMe is that 1) they scam bunches of online daters and turn them off from the whole industry, they disappoint and lie to people 2) other entrepreneurs see big investment and media coverage for a company like WooMe and think they should chase after that model and mold their businesses to what investors want rather than what users want. 3) ultimately, investing in WooMe doesn't create any long term value and is a waste of time/money and starves other legitimate businesses of opportunity. Just because a company is getting investment $$, press, meteoric growth, etc does NOT mean it is actually delivering anything of value and/or helping its users achieve their goals. There is always opportunity to win against ANY competitor by doing those simple things.