Legal proceedings against German dating company LOVOO have ended after the company agreed to pay a €1.2m fine.
The news comes four months after the dating brand’s offices were stormed by armed police, with computers and mobile phones seized and its founders taken into custody, in connection with allegations of customer deception.
Following the raid, LOVOO founder & CEO Benjamin Bak resigned from his position at the company on 27th June.
And now, LOVOO has agreed to pay a fine of €1.2m in return for legal proceedings against the accused employees of the company to be suspended.
In a statement, LOVOO said the accused consented to pay this considerable sum of money in order to “avert the burden” of an ongoing investigation as early as possible.
The Dresden-based business said a “large amount” of this money will go to non-profit organisations in Saxony.
The raid and police action was in connection with allegations of customer deception made by an “anonymous source”, which claimed the brand used fake profiles in 2013 and 2014 to lure customers into paying for the dating site’s premium service.
And with the legal proceedings now ended, LOVOO says it will commit to rebuilding the trust of its users, customers, partners and employees.
The brand said it would implement new user verification processes, technical improvements in the app, and new “internal security regulations” for all employees.
In a statement, LOVOO’s management said: “Despite the challenges of the past few months, the millions of users of LOVOO prove us their trust by still meeting new people with LOVOO every day. We are very grateful for this. In future, we are counting on proactive communication and transparency to give our users and the public an understanding of the challenging fight against fake profiles and spam faced by our company.”
And as part of this new leaf, LOVOO said it will begin to publish a quarterly “Fake and Spam Transparency Report” from October onwards.
Read more about the legal proceedings against LOVOO here, and read a new blog about “Fighting Fake & Spam” on its site.