Friends Worldwide

Non functioning site .take your money and no help – This site is not functioning . I paid premium membership fees and had not one interaction with another human being , so I emailed the company to let them know I was having trouble ..they got back to me and said my profile wasn't visible to other members . I asked for a refund if it could not be fixed . They told me no refunds and that now my profile worked . After another week of a no interaction after sending out 160 hellos to other members , I knew it's a problem .

I did a search in my area using a friends log in .I searched for women my age in my area and even added a few exact details ..Nothing, my profile is not a working one . After many messages asking for help and resolution I have been ignored by this company . I gave them money for a 3 month premium membership and got nothing from them . Criminals if you ask me .

Friends Worldwide no real people – About 3 months ago I signed up to Friends Worldwide. I made contact with several of the people profiled on the site and many made contact direct with me. I found that not one response was consistent with the online profile. I only contacted anglo-saxon looking people living in the USA, Australia and the UK including police and service men yet replies to me had very poor spelling and sentence construction indicating that English was not their first language. The people contacting me wanted me to give them an offline contact asap and I found over time the contacts I was receiving tried various angles based on my profile to try and get information from me and engage my interest.

I made a few complaints to Friends Worldwide and they put the onus on me and other users to spot and avoid fakers. They also told me that every dating site has fake profiles. This may be true but it should not be the case that every contact I had was a fake. There must be some onus on the company to weed out the majority of fake profiles before they are allowed to become online members.

It seemed to me that the fakers I was exposed to were very well organised and had a definite strategy to try and snare unsuspecting members by using a variety of tactics to obtain their interest.

I found the tone of the help line people at Friends Worldwide unhelpful and disinterested. I have since joined RSVP and the contrast in professionalism couldn’t be greater. I have had only one inconsistent profile on RSVP and they were promptly removed from the site. This is not the case with Friends Worldwide who often allow the ffake profiles to remain on the site.

I thought I had disassociated myself from Friends Worldwide and cancelled my membership so I was appalled to see that a few days ago they had automatically taken out a considerable sum from my PayPal account. It was not made clear that I was signing up for open-ended automatic payments to them without further authorisation.

Best practise membership renewals such as RSVP alert a member that they membership is about to expire.

I don’t think that PayPal should be associated with a shonky company like Friends Online. I complained to PayPal and they said the company was a legitimate one. At present however Friends Worldwide are an easily accessible vehicle for fake profilers to contact people who are possibly lonely and perhaps vulnerable.

I went on the site to try and find out why I was paying this latest amount and while there I changed my profile to Male looking for females. Within 24 hours I had emails from "Russian woman" wanting me to open a photo attachment. The site is obviously overrun by and totally vulnerable to fakers wishing to exploit.

The site is overrun by fake profiles the organisation is disinterested to fix it