Fling.com Promises sex with many horny women, but will steal your money instead. No actual women there, only spammers & scammers! Internet

I should have looked up Fling here on Ripoff Report before I thought of joining that scam. After two or three days membership on Fling, I found many posts here about them, and would like to share my experience with this total rip-off site. Maybe I can answer or clarify some things I've seen in other posts, but mostly I hope I can help expose what a total scam Fling is. For my almost $20, I got absolutely nothing in return but two E-mail accounts that now get spammed relentlessly (the address I gave to Fling, and the address I gave to the "women"). Good thing I used Yahoo, I can just delete them and set up others!

Fling.com, being such an illegitimate company and a total rip-off, must resort to advertising by spam. They create phony profiles on MySpace, BlackPlanet, and probably many other social networking sites. Then, these phony users send out as many messages as possible to the other members of these sites about how wonderful Fling is until those phony profiles get removed for spamming.

When I went to this site, I could hardly believe that there were so many women in Des Moines, Iowa, looking for everything from no-strings attached sex to long-term relationships. The three-month membership went for $60 with a promise of three more months for free if you don't hook-up with someone in the first three months because "THAT'S HOW WE ROLL!" The 7 day trial for $9.95 looked like a better option, so I went for that. After entering my personal info and card number, there was a final page to verify what I wanted. I had to check a box that said I agreed with their terms and conditions (which I had just looked at.)

Another box was already checked, which said, "$9.97 Non-Recurring Featured Profile to Fling.com." I left that checked because I thought that was the trial membership I was signing up for. Later, when I checked the charges on my card, there were two charges from them: $9.95 and $9.97. Fling's customer service told me that this was my fault because I had not unchecked the second box on the final page when I signed up. This was an extra feature that made my new membership a "featured profile" that would always appear on top of all of the other search results. I accepted that and let it go.

I then began to look around the site for these "women" near me. There were about 1,700 "women's" profiles in central Iowa, which really made me wonder about this site. I looked at the first page of 60 "women" who Fling said were in Des Moines, Iowa. Of the only 2 "women" whose PROFILES actually said where they lived, they were really in Denver and Virginia. Geo-targeting, it is called. They take lots of "women's" profiles and label them as being wherever you live. Probably even if you say you live at the south pole or on the moon! I did several searches for men's profiles to see how my "featured profile" looked. I saw plenty of different men in the "featured profiles" box, but never mine. What a shock!

After sending messages to several "women," I began to get some replies. All of these were requests to email them at a Yahoo or Hotmail address, even though I had already given them my E-mail address and telephone number. Some of these addresses were badly camouflaged, like they wanted me to think that they were trying to hide them from Fling. Something like X/Y/Z/1/2/3 at y/a/h/o/o d/o/t c/o/m, or XYZ123 at the site where mail is hot. After sending this info again to the other addresses, the replies were usually very nice, or impatient to hook up tonight. I heard the story about running to the dentist once, and another was leaving for a jog.

Most of these messages had forged headers so that I could not reply to them. Some of them had somebody else's address in the "To:" line, so I was apparently one of many blind carbon copy recipients (how sloppy!) They usually said something like Fling is too slow or they couldn't post their best pictures there, so "here's a link to my favorite site where I've posted my hottest pictures you'll really like and my cell phone number. You better call me!" These were all adult sites that expected more money for another membership. Sometimes several different "women" sent me links to the same adult site. Then these supposedly different "women" would all send me the same link to another adult web site, then another. Here are some of them (I'll bet Fling and all these sites are owned by the same crook):



datefor2night.com

dateloversfun.com

datemailwonder.com

datenightstop.com

datesnation.com

findlocalprofileslive.com

flirtsinbox.com

friskygirlsonline.com

funmeetlove.com

funmeetplace.com

getmatchesnow.com

hornyloversparadise.com

hostwebdot.net

hotfunworld.com

hotgirlspersonals.com

longsweetsex.com

mychatpageweb.com

officialdiscreetplaytime.com

Online-Taylor.com

onlyseriouspersonals.com

passionateinbox.com

playfulgirlsworld.com

singlesconnectnet.com

singlesmeetingnow.com

sluttybadgirls.com

smartmailnetwork.com

theloverslanded.com

therightdatesite.com

watch4dates.com

webbestpics.com

webblinddates.com

The "women" that did not send me links to pay sites all turned out to be in Nigeria, with the rather predictable hard luck stories and requests for money. None of these "women" ever tried to camouflage their E-mail addresses at all, but spelled them out perfectly. I could pretty much tell these scammers from the spammers that way. But, out of all of the "women" I have heard from there, not a single one was for real.

I did complain to Fling's abuse department about every spammer and scammer, only to get this form response, usually: "We have issued the member a warning of inappropriate behavior and added a note to his account. If the behavior continues, we will suspend the account." (Notice they said, "his" account. These were supposedly women!) Once I got this response: "We have disabled the members due to inappropriate behavior and added a note to their accounts." No accounts ever got disabled or suspended, though. Again, what a shock!

Since all of the "women" so far seemed to be spammers for other sites or Nigerian scammers, as a last ditch effort I thought I'd try sending hundreds of messages, trying to find out if there were any actual women on there. While doing this, I found different "women" with different usernames and pictures, but the exact same word for word profiles, just like one of the other posters said. I never had any difficulties logging in, but did reach my message limit for the day: 53. The next day's limit was 38, and the next, 48. I have no idea why it changed so much, I was sending the exact same message every time. This was their top of the line Gold Membership with the "featured profile" and there's a message limit per day. Isn't that special! I guess they don't want you to send messages to a significant number of their "women" and find out that they're all the same guy! Just another part of the ripoff.

After seven days of this, I was thoroughly disgusted and cancelled my seven day trial membership. I saw the posts about not being able to cancel your membership and was ready for that. I would just dispute the charge immediately and close the credit card account. The cancellation process was ridiculously long, but finally worked for me. At least I didn't just reach a page that would only hang, like the other poster.

So, to conclude, Fling is a total and complete scam. They get your attention in the first place through spam, since they probably can't advertise legitimately anywhere. They charge you extra for that bogus "featured profile" if you're not careful. The search results for your area are phony, extremely overinflated by Geo-targeting. There are no actual women on there, only spammers and Nigerian scammers, and they won't do anything about it. They even have a message limit per day!

Knowing all of this, I don't know who would want to join this total scam. If, for some reason, you do want to take a chance, be sure and set up some extra E-mail accounts you can delete. And use a credit card account you don't mind watching the activity on closely or closing.

In the unlikely event that any of the rest of those 178 "women" I haven't heard from yet turns out to be real, I will update this post. Don't hold your breath!

Randy
Des Moines, Iowa
U.S.A.