Cengage Advantage Books: Fundamentals of Business Law Today 10th Edition by Roger LeRoy Miller

Exercise 19

Misrepresentation in Online Personals
If you type "online personals" into any search engine, you will get more than 15 million hits. In the past, a major player in the online personals matching business was Yahoo! Personals. Indeed, for a time, it called itself the "top online dating site." It offered two options-one for casual dates and another for people who wanted serious relationships. The latter was called Yahoo! Personals Primer. Users took a relationship test and then used Yahoo's matching system software to "zero in on marriage material."
Misrepresentation Reared Its Ugly Head
Anyone who uses online dating services is aware that people tend to exaggerate their positive features and downplay their negatives when they create their profiles. But users generally assume that the profiles are not completely made up. A few years ago, however, a disgruntled user of Yahoo! Personals Primer brought a lawsuit claiming that Yahoo had done exactly that. The suit alleged fraud and negligent misrepresentation, among other things.
Robert Anthony claimed that Yahoo deliberately and intentionally originated, created, and perpetuated false or nonexistent profiles. Not only did many profiles use exactly the same phrases to describe people, but the same photo appeared with different profiles. Anthony also claimed that when a subscription term neared its end, Yahoo would send the subscriber a fake profile, heralding it as a "potential new match."
The Court Disagreed with Yahoo
Yahoo asked the court to dismiss the complaint on the ground that it was barred by the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996, which protects Internet service providers from liability for material supplied by their users. The court rejected that argument and held that Yahoo had become an information content provider itself when it created bogus user profiles. The case was allowed to continue.
Match.com Faced Similar Charges Earlier, Match.com, another large online dating service, had faced a similar lawsuit. Matthew Evans claimed that he had obtained a date through Match.com with a woman who later confessed that she was actually an employee. The lawsuit claimed that Match.com "secretly employs people as 'date bait' to send bogus e-mails and to go on as many as 300 dates a month in order to keep customers paying for the use of the site." That suit was dismissed, however.
A class-action suit brought in 2009 accused Match.com of matching customers with individuals who were nonpaying customers or who were not customers at all. In 2012, a U.S. district court judge dismissed the majority of the class-action lawsuit, ruling that Match.com had not breached its user agreements. The judge noted that the language of the user agreement did not require Match.com to police or verify the accuracy of its profiles.
Assume that a user of Match.com or Yahoo discovered that each profile exaggerated the person's physical appearance, intelligence, and occupation. Would that user prevail if she or he brought a lawsuit for fraudulent misrepresentation? Why or why not ?