"He just emailed you! You caught his eye and now he's expressed interest in you… Could he be the one?"

The short answer: Probably not.

On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission sued the company that owns online dating service Match.com, alleging that many of those you-caught-his-(or her)-eye notices "originated from accounts the company knew were likely fraudulent, rendering Match's claims misleading and unfair."

And also kind of mean. 

In the suit filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, FTC lawyers Zachary Alexander Keller, M Hasan Aijaz and Matthew James Wilshire offer an alarming statistic: As many as 25-30% of Match.com members who registered each day between 2013 and at least mid-2018 were using Match.com to perpetrate scams. 

"These scams include romance scams, stealing consumers' personal information through 'phishing,' promoting dubious or unlawful products or services, and extortion scams, in which a scammer will induce a consumer to send the scammer compromising videos or pictures of the consumer that the scammer then uses to extort money from the consumer by threatening to send the materials to the consumer's friends or family," the complaint states.

Eek.

According to the FTC, Match.com was aware of many of these suspect users and had flagged their accounts as likely fraudulent. The company blocked them from sending messages to paying members.

But according to the FTC, they let them hit on the non-paying members.

Users can set up a Match.com profile free of charge—they just can't respond to messages without upgrading to a paid subscription. 

And then—wow. A message from a mysterious stranger.

"Specifically, when nonsubscribers with free accounts received likes, favorites, emails, and instant messages on Match.com, they also received emailed ads from Match encouraging them to subscribe to Match.com to view the identity of the sender and the content of the communication," the FTC said. "Hundreds of thousands of consumers subscribed to Match.com shortly after receiving communications from fake profiles'—communications they wouldn't have gotten if they were already members."

Per the FTC, "consumers came into contact with the scammer if they subscribed before Match completed its fraud review process. If Match completed its review process and deleted the account as fraudulent before the consumer subscribed, the consumer received a notification that the profile was 'unavailable.' In either event, the consumer was left with a paid subscription to Match.com, as a result of a false advertisement."

Match Group in a statement said the FTC "has misrepresented internal emails and relied on cherry-picked data to make outrageous claims and we intend to vigorously defend ourselves against these claims in court."

The company continued, "The issues the FTC is focusing on have either been taken grossly out of context or permanently eliminated by Match. In several instances, the FTC is wildly overstating the impact of fraudulent accounts. For example, the FTC says that in some months between 2013 and 2016, more than half of instant message initiations and favorites that consumers received originated from accounts that we had identified as 'fraudulent.' We are not aware of any data that supports this contention and will challenge it in court.  

 "Furthermore," Match continued, "the FTC is mischaracterizing what is encompassed in 'fraudulent.' The vast majority of the users that the FTC characterizes as 'fraudulent' are not romance scams or similar types of fraudsters, but spam, bots, and other users attempting to use the service for their own commercial purposes."

The FTC also went after Match.com for other alleged violations of Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices.

For example, Match.com promises its customers a free six-month subscription if they don't "meet someone special."

But the FTC said Match.com failed to clearly explain what you had to do to get the free six months, such as start a conversation with at least five Match.com subscribers per month and maintain an approved public profile photo.

The FTC also said Match.com makes it too difficult to cancel subscriptions, and that the process is "convoluted and confusing."