A 65-year-old New York man is suing OkCupid after losing $70,000 to someone he met on the site.
Michael Z. Picciano, from Queens, is suing OkCupid and parent company IAC for not performing the requisite checks to detect scammers on their site.
The lawsuit says OkCupid did not conduct “even minimal screening of its subscribers and therefore deceptively creating the impression that their dating service was safe…when in fact…it was a trap for the unwary.”
The New York post reports that Picciano began an online relationship with “genuineguy62” after meeting him in February 2013, speaking via OkCupid, email and Skype.
After a few months, the 65-year-old agreed to send $24,000 to the man, Bruce Thompson, for expenses regarding a “computer parts business”, despite being asked to send the money to the accounts of Dennis E. Racer and Edmond Thebeau.
Picciano sent another $46,420 in April to the UK account of MacBenson Associates.
After sending this sum, he and a friend looked up Bruce Thompsons’s details on www.malescammers.com.
The suit says: “It was apparent that Mr. Thompson had used the same Cleveland, Ohio based phone number and the same email address, bthomsonb@yahoo.com, with Mr. Picciano that he had used to perpetrate other frauds.”
Picciano is suing OkCupid for not performing such checks on users before they join the site.
He is also suing his bank, Capital One, for failing “to comply with proper procedures for the transmission of wire funds.”