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The woman, who wanted to remain anonymous, said: “I was browsing the website and I was shocked to see a profile of a man who I knew had been convicted of sexually abusing girls.
“I know he is not breaking the law by advertising on a dating website but I think women should be aware there are people who register with these agencies who are not all they seem. A lot of women, including myself, are under the illusion that people who advertise on these sites have been checked out for any criminal convictions.”
Mr Shrimpton accepted his agency and others in the industry have no way of checking for criminal convictions.
“We take something like this very seriously but we don’t access criminal records and I don’t believe any agency in the UK does either,” he said.
“We have about 1,000 new profiles a day. In cases of a serious report like this one we will strike immediately, in others it comes down to a judgement about the seriousness of the report.
“The majority of reports we get are not genuine but we do look into each one,” he added. “Over the eight years the company has existed we have had more than four million people register on the site and we have never had to my knowledge an incident like this.”
In this case the man had not supplied his credit card details meaning he could not have contacted any members and they could not have contacted him.
Mr Shrimpton added: “Even in terms of a free profile it is manually checked by a member of our customer services team to make sure the photo is not obviously fake, that the photo corresponds in age to the one given, that someone who signs up as a male has not supplied a photo of a female.
“We also provide advice to our users on how they can make meetings with other users safer,” he added.
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