Saturday, January 2, 2016

The Intricacies of Online Dating...

Over the years, not by choice mostly, I have found myself single and seeking members of the opposite sex for companionship. I've belonged to Matchmaker, Plenty of Fish, Match.com, something called Seniors Meet for about 2 days and finally, Zoosk. I learned that most of the smaller dating services are owned and operated by Apple. After 2 days on Seniors Meet, I learned that the people that I was seeing belonged to other dating services and that Seniors Meet didn't even have it's own client base. On day 3, they no longer recognized me as a customer and I was declined access, rejected by the site, so I contacted my bank and was credited my payment of about $75 back. Then I joined Zoosk and paid them about $85 for that membership. As a member, I discovered that it was only the beginning and they wanted MORE money to contact other members! To write to a lady, you had to pay coins that were available only from Zoosk for 100 more dollars for 2000 of them. Slapping my forehead, I dialed the, now memorized, number of my bank to get me out of this. They explained that the dating service was owned by Apple and Apple would not contest any request for a refund, but would not allow me access to any other Apple sites. I agreed without question as Apple seemed pretty illegitimate  at this point. I was happy to be off Zoosk, but suddenly I was no longer allowed to update my iPhone! Holy crap, talk about holding a corporate grudge!

I contacted a friend in Chicago that worked for a company that had an IT person who knew an employee at Apple and told me to call her. I did and she reversed everything. I could now update my iPhone and was allowed FREE access to Zoosk! HA! So I was a member of Zoosk for 6 months for free, but as it turned out, this was not a good thing. I've never experienced a more dishonest website in all of my years. I learned that you could earn "coins" by saying whether or not you liked a woman's appearance and could accumulate 40 coins a day. I used these coins to write to contact perspective members and learned that they only charge the men. Women have a free ride. Zoosk also contacts me in the form of a text message or email, both, to tell me that so and so wants to chat. When you contact so and so, she knows nothing about it and acts accordingly. (how embarrassing). Since it's all free, I did my share of complaining to other members, but put up with it. Everyone I spoke with agreed with me, it was awful.

My membership was over 1/1/16 and I worried the entire time that they would do an automatic renewal to my credit card even though I declined that option, which took a team of attorneys about 3 days to decipher how to do it. Now because there is a God and I wholeheartedly believe in him, about 2 weeks ago, my credit card was hacked and my bank stopped all charges to it and issued me a new card and number. Sure enough, 3 or 4 days ago, Zoosk contacted me and told me that there may be an interruption in my service because they cannot get an approval on my credit card. HOORAY!!! Even though I had declined renewal, they still tried to hammer my card! That phase of my life is over and I'll be just fine on my own.

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