Cupid plc, a British-based company with offices in Ukraine, denied allegations of enticing clients to subscribe to their numerous dating sites through deceptive business practices.
The Kyiv Post, in its March 15 front-page story “Deceptive Love: Agency hires women to encourage men to pay,” described the experience of one of the newspaper’s journalists going undercover for a job interview for the position of “motivation manager” at Cupid’s Zaporizhya office in Ukraine.
During the interview, which took place in one of Cupid’s offices in Zaporizhya on Jan. 28, the recruiter told the journalist that the job involved posing as a female user of the dating site and encouraging male users online to buy memberships.
A young woman who introduced herself as Svitlana conducted the interview. She described the job as the following: “Of course we fool people, but it is only to show them that there are real people on the website, so that they would not be disappointed and eventually find somebody real.”
According to Svitlana, the employee is supposed to communicate with customers for three days, “keeping them interested and thus buying a monthly membership.”
Earlier the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, followed up on a large number of customers complaints, with a story on Cupid plc, having spoken to 11 users of Cupid plc’s sites who expressed doubts about whether many of the women “daters” they heard from are genuine.
They said they had lots of messages when they signed up to the sites as free users, but when they paid up, interest rapidly tailed off.
After the Kyiv Post story was picked up by several investment bloggers, company shares on London stock exchange where it has been listed since 2010 more than halved within hours, knocking £55 million off its value and closed down 57 percent at 49p.
Until these accusations, Cupid had been seen as a success story in London. The company boasts of more than 54 million members in 58 countries and revenues of $78 million in 2011.
In a March 22 statement, Cupid confirmed that it employs a motivation team of 24 people. But the firm said the team “does not communicate with free members. The team does communicate with new paying subscribers to help them get the most out of the site.”
Cupid said it “has now commissioned an independent audit by one of the big four accounting firms and will report the findings to the market as soon as possible.”
The release was followed by another, much more categorical denial on March 25 that helped its stock price partially recover.
The company said it “does not employ members of staff to create fake profiles, impersonate users or use any other dubious practice to encourage customers to take out subscriptions or in order to retain existing customers, nor would the company condone, promote or persuade employees to do so.”
Cupid has also said that it has commissioned an independent audit of its customer database and database management processes by a Big Four accounting firm. It also seeks legal advice regarding the publication.
The Kyiv Post stands by its story.
When contacted by the Kyiv Post on March 28, Cupid referred the inquiry to Redleaf Polhill, a public relations firm. Its director Rebecca Sanders-Hewett said: “The company refutes all allegations made in your previous article and have passed the matter to their lawyers – the company does not have any intention of engaging further with the Kyiv Post and you will be hearing from the company’s lawyers in due course.”
Aside from the Kyiv Post’s undercover job interview, a Kyiv Post journalist registered as a male from Ukraine at cupid.com, but received no emails. However, when registering from Belgium, using a local Internet protocol and posing as a Belgian male, the journalist immediately got three emails from two females who claimed to live nearby.
Only the subject headings of their emails were available, all in English. To read the full message one must pay 4.47 euros ($5.83) for a three-day trial membership. The terms and conditions state that unless the member cancels membership during the trial period, the system automatically subscribes the person for the monthly membership of 27.99 euros.
Not only the Kyiv Post and BBC were investigating Cupid. John Hempton, chief investment officer and founder of Bronte Capital, an Australian-based asset management firm, created a fake profile on girlsdateforfree.com – a Cupid-owned site.
On it, Hempton described himself as a “46-year-old computer programmer” who weights 280 kilograms, lives with his mother and is looking for someone to replace her and financially support him. He also indicated that he suffers from gonorrhoea and a “non-competent anal valve” that leaks “a viscous mixture of pus and fecal matter. It gets around everything – staining my beds and my clothes.”
Somehow, he got nearly 200 responses from 50 interested women, Hempton wrote.
“Strangely and almost immediately, a fair few age-appropriate and good-looking women want to talk to my false profile. Girls I could not get normally, I think. They look a little unrealistic to me…I am left with a choice. Either there are a bunch of hot women who want to date a morbidly obese, poor, venereal disease-infected and grotesquely smelly guy with psychological problems who needs someone to replace his mum. Or Bill Dobbie is misleading the investing public,” Hempton concluded. He told Kyiv Post he got no response from Cupid.
Kyiv Post staff writer Svitlana Tuchynska can be reached at [email protected]
