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A video dating service exaggerated how many people belonged to its network and how often its members got married, the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office said in a lawsuit filed Friday.
Authorities said complaints going back to April 2001 from dozens of Great Expectations customers in southeastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware include allegations the company misrepresented costs and terms of service.
The lawsuit filed in Montgomery County seeks more than $65,000 in restitution from Great Expectations, a King of Prussia business that closed in June 2005, and its former owner Harold K. Cohen.
The other defendants are EllisKP LLC of Sewell, N.J., doing business as Great Expectations in King of Prussia; its owner, John Jack Ellis Jr.; and Cohen's GEKP LLC, which operated as Great Expectations of Philadelphia.
Deputy Attorney General Saverio Mirarchi said the dating services made unkept promises to provide customers with suitable matches.
"They said they had a screening process, but that wasn't anything too spectacular," Mirarchi said Friday. "They basically examined a photo ID, their bank checks, their addresses and asked a few questions."
Cohen said Friday he had not been involved in the business for more than two years. Asked whether misleading claims had been made to customers, he said "not that I know of, and not that was ever permitted as any policy that I had knowledge of."
"The service was good enough to be presented on the true facts of its performance and its abilities," Cohen said.
Customers paid as much as $3,400 in membership fees to belong to what the company described as a network of more than 175,000 people across the country, including 4,000 in King of Prussia. It boasted a "success rate" of more than 70 percent and also said about 300 members were married from one location in a single year, according to the lawsuit.
In reality, the Attorney General's Office said, the number of available singles and the incidence of marriages within the network were far lower.
Cohen said the business was not a matchmaking service, as described in the lawsuit, but rather gave members access to a video library. The national network, of which his business was a licensee, did have more than 100,000 members, he said.
"It was essentially their effort or lack of effort that would determine what kind of results they would get," he said.
Cohen said he was unfamiliar with the 70 percent success rate figure referred to in the lawsuit.
A listed number for Ellis could not be located on Friday. Mirarchi said he did not know whether Ellis was represented by a lawyer.
from the Courier News website www.c-n.com
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