The brute force dating attack of a "math genius"

On Wire.com, Kevin Poulson wrote an interesting article about the Mathematician Chris McKinlay, who tried to - and finally found - a date on okcupid.

Unlike the majority of okcupid users, he wrote scripts to harvest the website with user data, then matched the user profiles with his own interests - and contacted them....

He then invited some of the women,  who wrote back, on a date....after a few unsuccessful attempts, he even met a woman he even married (probably by now).

You can read the whole story here:

http://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/all/

 

What I was wondering?

 

Did OkCupid sue him for financial compensation? Did any of the users report him as their "private" data was illegally copied to another server / pc ? (and might still kick around on a harddisk in his flat)

Or what that a viral marketing idea from OkCupid ?

If so, the viral marketing campaign really went viral - most sites picked up on this story.

Fat, lazy, poor sick guys with stds...get plenty of dates on Cupid.com ?

According to a recent BBC coverage, John Hempton of Bronte Capital, has revealed how even fat, lazy and poor guys with stds get many messages from beautiful women on a dating site called Cupid.com

He made his profile - headed "Fat, lazy, poor sick guy wants support" - as unpleasant as possible, including saying he suffered from a sexually transmitted disease, to see what sort of reaction he would get on the site.

"Strangely and almost immediately a fair few age-appropriate and good-looking women want to talk to my false profile. Girls I could not get normally I think," Mr Hempton said on his blog

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21904616

I personaly, was not surprised....my inbox was spammed by messages like "you have mail" - not only cupid.com or other cupid plc dating sites, but also dating sites like flirtomatic.com or basically any other dating site that charges membership fees.

There is one thing though, the BBC got wrong:

One of UK's biggest online dating providers has seen its shares fall by more than half after announcing an audit into the way it operates

To me this was not due to this, but rather as bosses from Cupid plc and other insiders or investors might have sold their stocks before the shares are worthless:

http://www.londonstockexchange.com/exchange/prices-and-markets/stocks/exchange-insight/company-news.html?fourWayKey=GB00B4NJ4984GBGBXAMSM

The funniest reaction from Cupid Plc was:

It also said it had commissioned an independent audit by one of the "big four accounting firms".
How ridicilous is this? Everyone knows what they are doing - and independent audit? Are they turning this "feature" now off for a a couple of days until the independent audit is over???

I have the strange feeling Cupid Plc might end like smartdate....and vanish in the not too distant future.

Update: Also check out this BBC Article here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21552566

Plentyoffish.com switched to pof.com

This explains everything: Plentyoffish.com is now re-directing users to www.pof.com:

So, pof.com now has an Alexa of 200 - which is a decent rank for a dating site.

I wonder how the mobile traffic compares to the website traffic. According to Android market/iTunes the mobile app has 500,000-1,000,000 downloads so far.