I came on this site to see whether my views of Match were common or unusual and, sad to say, it seems to be the former. If I could rate it lower than 1 star I would, it is a complete scam.

Like many here, my suspicions were first raised when I noted how few replies I was receiving to winks or emails. I'm the first to admit that I am no Pierce Brosnan, but even in real life I get a better response than this, and the whole reason for joining Match was to meet more women and, hopefuly, a partner.

After 5 months I was emailed by someone I had tried to contact a couple of months earlier, yet their email didn't even acknowledge my previous message, which I thought was a little strange, if not downright rude. A few email conversations later I discovered that this woman had only re-subscribed to Match a few days before she contacted me - and that is when the penny dropped: she had put her profile on the site about a year previously, signed up for a month subscription, which she had let lapse due to lack of responses and then decided to give it another chance almost a year later! My previous email had been sent while her subscription had lapsed and, because she still occasionally logged into Match, it looked like her profile was "active".

Match make a big thing about their huge membership, currently quoting about 8% of the entire UK population! (I suspect that is worldwide membership*, but Match are just as coy about that as they are about their definition of membership.) It seems that Match count anyone with a valid profile as a member, whether they have a fully subscribed account or not. Of course, all of these "members" with expired subscriptions as well as those who never even took out a subscription can't read or reply to any wink or email that you send. Even if they log into Match every day, they are blissfully unaware (as was the woman who eventually emailed me) that you have even tried to contact them!

To make matters worse, Match have recently changed their site considerably - at least here in Europe - to bring it into line with all of the net dating sites owned by Meetic, who bought the European part of Match in June last year. In doing so, they have eliminated many of the criteria previously available in searches for potential dates - including, but not limited to, distance.

Now, I am not saying that distance dating doesn't occasionally work, but my own experience is that it is hard enough to keep an established relationship going over a long term separation that the chances of starting a meaningful relationship at distance is next to negligible. Real life isn't like the movies - Sleepless in Seatle is a fantasy!

So now, a search thows up 50x as many "hits" but only 1 in 100 are actually local, or within reasonable travelling distance to date each other. Maybe it works in a large metropolitan conurbation, but I decided some time ago to trade that daily rat race for a more rural life. However the time spent sifting through all of those search "hits" to find the suitable ones, and probably missing most of them, is now ridiculous. How many of us signed up to Match because we don't have the time to spend in "conventional" dating venues?

Match have been extremely cavalier with the time - that irreplacable commodity - of their paying customers. In my opinion there recent behaviour has been too cavalier so I have cancelled my subscription so that it is not automatically debited from my account when the current subscription expires. (For those who hadn't noticed that little ploy - read the fine print in the "My Account" section!) I did ask for a complete refund of my current subscription since they are no longer providing the service that I paid for, but that has met with no reponse from Match, so I am debating whether to initiate proceedings in the Small Claims Court against them, to recover my money.

*IAC financial results for Q2 2009 (available from
http://iac.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=1700 )
shows that Match only have a total of 1,156,000 paid up subscribers - well short of the 5 million "members" they claim (whether in the UK as they imply or worldwide as I suspect). In the whole of Europe they had 291,000 paid up subscribers when they sold the business to Meetic.

Put in context, 4 out of every 5 contact attempts made by genuine Match subscribers go straight into the ethereal trash can at the end of the Internet. Is it any wonder that people complain about the lack of success with Match?

My advice to anyone genuinely looking for a partner is just to stay away from these scammers.