Meeting love cheats online is bad enough - but what if the dating site is also cheating you?
The European Consumer Centre has warned that online dating sites are cheating lovelorn consumers out of hundreds of euro because they don’t read the small print.
It has noted that complaints about online dating sites are highest in the first two months of the year and tend to spike around St Valentine’s Day.
“This is more Halloween than Valentine’s,” said its director, Ann Neville.
“Even when you cancel membership and delete your profile, some of these sites keep taking money from your bank account.”
Some dating websites automatically renew membership unless the consumer explicitly cancels the account within a certain period.
So if you have met your soulmate and are strolling hand-in-hand into the sunset, you might not notice that the dating website is still taking your money, months after you cancelled your membership.
In many cases, this practice is outlined in the website’s terms and conditions but in their haste to find the date of their dreams, people might not pause to read the small print.
While people might throw caution to the wind this week in a bid to find their Valentine, Ms Neville urged them to be extra cautious when signing up to dating websites.
The European Consumer Centre received 34 complaints about renewal practices on online dating websites last year and 20 per cent of those were made in January and February.
“Users should follow the instructions very carefully if they want to cancel,” Ms Neville said.
The law changed last June so people now have a 14-day cooling-off period after signing up to a dating website.
You can cancel the contract without having to specify a reason, so there’s no need to trot out the old line: “It’s not you, it’s me”.
If only it was that easy to escape from one of those particularly bad dates.
