Ok, that is pretty damning.

If someone signs up and realises they've been duped, they probably won't even contest the CC charge due to a variation on the Small Penis Rule: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_penis_rule

They'll just cancel their account to avoid being rebilled.

I imagine that happens a lot, although that wasn't the case for me.

And actually, they handled the cancellation process well (at least for me).

I called them up and said I want to cancel because "their site is a scam" and in a no-nonsense way the person started helping me undo the payment (without defending the site). Since I paid through PayPal, I did have to dispute the payment via them (which took a month or two) but I eventually got all of my money back.

So I give the company (or at least the person I talked with) props for their cancellation process, although not everyone may experience it that way.

As much as I'm NOT here to stick up for Nic and his site, he is telling the truth that this is a 3rd party service. http://www.intellichat.com/demo is one of a number of services like that.

You put a tiny fake-ai-chatbot on the page to help with conversions.

Here in Toronto, I interviewed once with a dating site similar dating site similar to WooMee /* on second thought I won't link to them */ who "Seem" to be doing similar things (this is of course only alleged misconduct, as I have no proof)

There are also numerous accounts of the dating scam sites out there. I read one story of a "Sugar Daddies Dating" site that charged huge fees to sign up, then when you did a chargeback, they'd refer you to collections for many times what you originally pledged.

So it's either pay up or damage your credit rating. http://maxkle.in/how-elite-dating-sites-scam-people/ Max Klein has a good account of one such scam.

so the thing in the screencast is not a message from a user, nor does it claim to be.

It's actually an experiment with a 3rd party to see if an automated response system converts people to our paid service well.

Who are you trying to kid here? It's obvious to those here that it's an automated response system...a.k.a. a bot. Many of the users here could / have written such a bot at one time with far less nefarious reasoning behind doing so. You can't deny that the purpose of that bot is to fool people into thinking that they're talking to 'Jen', a user on your site (whether or not you specifically say so does not discard the intent).

Stop treating the people on this site like we're simply misinformed teenagers crying wolf.

> to our paid service well.

From your website: "it's 100% free"

right. I'm the CTO. I'm not sure what I can do to combat the perception that I sell snake oil. I don't sell snake oil. I help people meet each other.

If you really WANT snake oil I guess I could find some and get it to you.

You're right, that was totally unprofessional of me to lay such an ad hominem attack and run away...so let me expand upon my thought some more.

Your site either uses fake accounts to trick legitimate users into paying to view messages from these supposed hot women looking for dates with horses and guys who have just signed up yet haven't provided any personal details...or you have a very serious spam problem where bots are running rampant across your site with hordes of fake accounts trolling for new profiles to scam (or a combination therein).

As evidence, I just logged in to my woome account, which I haven't logged into in maybe 3 years, and immediately I got a request for a video chat from http://www.woome.com/sallyl3462/ . Who wants to get laid tonight? Sally does!

Thanks - I've cancelled that account. Some of these buggers are a pain to catch automatically

I can't say there aren't spammers using our site. that problem waxes and wanes and we try to deal with it as best we can. The user quoted is most definitely a spammer and I'll look into why we haven't caught that.

I don't think that's what robin is trying to say tho.

We are simply trying to make introductions happen as much as possible because that's what people use woome for. To meet new people.

It seems to work, to my knowledge our users are generally happy we have good time on site, repeat vistits and viping.

They appear to be spamming for the express purpose of converting free woome users to paid ones. Come on.

Dude, do you seriously think the people here at HN are stupid?

The same game as google plays with the adsense spam sites. As long as they make money, allow them to stay even though in public you say taht you will do everything to ban them.

It's not that hard to spot users messaging new users during the first few minutes. If one user does this multiple times, just ban him.

> I'm not sure what I can do to combat the perception that I sell snake oil.

1. Delete the fake bot accounts

2. Re-word your homepage so that it is clear to users that you need to pay money to do anything useful

3. Come out and say 'in an effort to ramp up user engagement we went too far and made a mistake. apologies'

I signed up for your site years ago. I have slowly watched it progress from something useful to a totally degenerate spam and bait site.

(Edit: I will add that if it is your affiliates who are doing the spamming, then ban them and put in better controls. I just logged into my account and got 3 messages in less than a second)