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Millions of Americans have turned to online dating to find true love.
The ads promise "trust" and "long lasting relationships." But there's something companies are not advertising -- complaints like being matched to someone who's married, not receiving any matches, or worse. Here's the dirt on online dating.
A Chicago area teacher turned to eHamony to find her soul mate. After one year of using the service, she finally got a match. On the fourth date she says she got the shock of her life.
"He said he was a convicted sex offender," said Jodi. "I didn’t understand how they could match a convicted child offender with a teacher."
She complained to eHarmony but says she never heard from the site. That was two years ago.
After CBS 2 inquired, she received this e-mail: "Michael from Chicago has been removed from eHarmony.com.... we do not disclose the reasons for Michael's removal."
If you're looking online for love, understand most dating services do not do background checks.
After paying nearly $3,500 for a three-year membership to Great Expectations Patricia Fenoglio says she found "only two of the 50 profiles they showed me were actually active members. The others weren't even on the database."
Fenoglio says Great Expectations settled with her after she filed a lawsuit.
There is something else to keep in mind when dating online -- when it comes to men, the pickings may be slim.
"The dating services claim to be about 50/50 men to women, all the past employees we spoke to say it's closer to 20/80, 20 percent men, 80 percent women," said Joe Enoch at Consumersaffairs.com.
Microbiologist Valerie Benning was going through a divorce. She says she turned to Yahoo Personals to meet her Mr. Right.
"We would chat two or three times a day," Benning said.
He called himself Steve Reed and said he was a computer software engineer and single dad living in Lincoln Park.
"He started to send increasingly more and more romantic e-mails," Benning said.
Benning wanted to meet in person, but suddenly Reed had an emergency business trip to Nigeria. A few days later, he was begging for help.
"The hotel was going to throw him out… unless he got these money order cashed… about $5,000 each," Benning said.
Benning was torn and searched "romance scams" online and found this.
"People were cashing money orders and losing $30, 40, 50,000 worth of money because the banks were holding them responsible. And I knew at that point I was almost taken in," Benning said.
She's not alone. Three-hundred eighty five members of a romance scams support group reported in a survey that they lost an average of $7,500 each in similar scams. The U.S. Postal Service has confiscated millions of dollars in counterfeit money orders.
"This person that you have fallen in love with is probably carrying on this kind of cyber relationship with hundreds, if not thousands of people," said U.S. Postal Inspector David Colen.
Benning finally confronted her scammer
"I asked him, 'How could you do this?' And his answer was 'You Americans have plenty of money, you can send some to me,'" she said.
Benning reported Reed to Yahoo Personals, but it took two weeks for his profile to be removed. Yahoo Personals says it initially did not find that Reed had violated company policy.
Regarding the teacher who was matched to a convicted sex offender, eHarmony says, "We provide extensive and careful guidance to our users about proceeding safely... we were troubled to hear of this woman's experience and would like to remind everyone to follow basic guidelines when meeting someone new."
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