New York, NY: Yuliana Avalos, a model from Florida, has filed a $1.5 billion consumer fraud
lawsuit against dating website match.com, alleging the popular site and other websites, posts thousands of fake profiles, using photographs of her.
Avalos alleges photos of her have been used without her consent in at least 200 fake profiles posted on Match.com and other websites run by co-defendant InterActiveCorp Manhattan, the New York Post reports.
According to The New York Daily News, Avalos, a mother and part-time model, claims she never joined Match.com. "Not a day goes by when someone doesn't tell me that they saw my pictures posted on Match.com or another website,"she said in a statement.
The lawsuit alleges "thousands" of pictures of celebrities, soldiers, and adult actresses have been taken off social media sites like Facebook and used to create fake profiles, even though those people were never members of Match's dating sites.
Further, the lawsuit claims that an "extensive investigation" of complaints made by hundreds of possible plaintiffs revealed that fraud is also being committed against Match.com subscribers because they are paying user fees to "criminals" working in Nigeria, Ghana, and Russia. According to the New York Daily News, the false profiles are often created in other countries for "criminal purposes" such as "romance scams" which "entice victims to send money to people outside of the country."
"The tragedy of this case is two-fold as the American victims of internet fraud on defendants' sites, (estimated to be at least thousands), mostly widows, widowers, and divorcees age 50 and over, have been defrauded out of as much as hundreds of millions of dollars over the past six-plus years through fraudulent dating profiles on the defendants' sites, and those of its competitors," the lawsuit states.
"In addition to the financial and emotional toll, these scams destroy relationships, families, and result in suicides, abductions and murder of victims in foreign countries."
Among the allegations, is the complaint that Match.com is "looking the other way", because it can tell fake profiles are being posted as the IP addresses are in foreign countries, and the IP addresses and the cities listed on the profiles don't match. The lawsuit is seeking a court order advocating that the sites keep international IP addresses from posting domestic profiles in the US, the New York Post reports.
The lawsuit is also seeking $1 billion in punitive damages and $500 million for non-members of Match.com whose photographs were used without their permission.
