eHarmony Scams: Catfishing, Military Scams, and More

By Jen D., February 20, 2019

Learn all about eHarmony scams and the steps you need to take if you’ve been catfished in this popular online dating website.

How Does eHarmony Work?

eHarmony touts itself as the fall in love and gets a married site. It was co-founded by Dr. Neil Clarke Warren, a Clinical Psychologist with a Ph.D. who has a Master in Divinity degree from a Theological college. That’s code for it being about the furthest thing away from a hookup site, in theory.

You may have seen the commercials, saying that over a million couples have met and married due to the site. That’s roughly 236 marriages a day that has given produced, 100,000 babies. We are to assume they lived happily ever after, wink wink. The demographic tends to be a little older and more interested in long-term relationships and marriage, than other sites like OkCupid or, even Match.com.

eHarmony stakes their claim in being more scientific than other sites, by using compatibility tests. The website considers their self-evaluation questions paramount to producing higher quality matches, via their secret computer coded algorithms created by Ph.D. Psychologists and Mathematicians, amongst others.

How Does the Site Get You Interested?

The opening page of eHarmony is simple and immediately tells future daters that it is, “Now free to communicate.” Everyone, even people who want to get married, like free messaging. However, does free mean free?

Not when you’ve got a team of employees with Ph.D.’s to pay. Not to mention the fact that the self-evaluation questions can be three hundred or so. When you’ve invested 300 answers, you begin to want the dating site to work well.

What Free Messaging Means

Free messaging starts with “Guided Communication,” not gabbing about your heart and soul. First, they offer something called “Quick Questions” where you have preform questions to ask, such as, “How trusting are you?”.

If you like the answers of the match you’re talking to you can the answer 10 “Makes” and “Breaks, what you want the most and need to share in common. From there they let you answer and send more in-depth questions. Finally, right when you’re interested and have spent a lot of time on one person, you can progress to eHarmony mail, for subscribers only.

Complaints About eHarmony:   Subscriptions

This where you need to be cautious. eHarmony has subscriptions. You can sign up for one month up to twenty-four months. You will keep being billed until your subscription is complete and you cancel with the terms of the contract. If you don’t cancel correctly, expect to keep paying and endure the nightmare of customer service bickering, which, for the record, you can’t go through a phone line.

Which Brings Us to Customer Service

Dating site customer service is like the date you don’t like and don’t want to see again. eHarmony may be all about algorithms, but they make a considerable profit off people who forget to cancel service, sign up for more months than they mean to, or give up on the difficulties of trying to cancel an account.

It’s no accident that they don’t have a phone number to access quickly, for account cancellations. Many users claim to be billed for months longer than they wanted to be. If you’re waiting for a refund, you might have to stop waiting, as refunds are few and far between. Their monthly charge is higher than many other sites, as well.

Matches

Disgruntled eHarmony clients complain about the matches they received which were either subpar, too far away, or too few. Other times users were sent smokers when they don’t smoke – to name a few. Sometimes the overabundance of warm bodies looking for free dating on Plenty of Fish can lure away a sad but severe eHarmony user.

Don’t believe us?

Consider reading eHarmony’s Consumer Affairs reviews.

eHarmony Scams to Watch out For

Where people want to fall in love and get married, there will be catfish who want to capitalize off that. A catfish might be someone with a fake identity and an evil heart, who rejoices in tricking the lonely (or desperate) into “falling” for them. A catfish might be lone themselves or young, old, or insecure. All of that, alone, is bad enough. It gets worse when a catfish is looking for money, and many are.

Foreign catfishers might work at getting someone to wire money in the name of true love, but local catfish also exist. If you don’t want to end up on an episode of Dateline NBC, then be especially careful that your desire to find the right person doesn’t bring about the wrong one.

Online dating can be safe and fun, but it also leads to some unsuspecting people being tricked out of money. Even though eHarmony might cost you money in membership, they have enough catfish on their site to give users an FAQ guide of how to avoid being catfished.

Some of their advice rings true: Tell your friends and family about your online interests. Often, those less involved can recognize more red flags.

Be offensive!

Okay, eHarmony doesn’t word it like that but ask whatever you need to feel safe and secure. Also, unlike innocent until proven guilty, think of everyone online as a stranger until proven a true friend or love interest.

If You’re Catfished on eHarmony

Learn from it, but don’t spend too much time blaming yourself. Chalk it up to ‘live and learn.’ If you’re someone who isn’t afraid of the overshare, ask your social media friends if they’ve ever had a bad online experience or been catfished. Changes are that they, or someone they know, have interacted with a catfish and caught one in action, maybe even more than once!