BettyDraper, can you stop with the hyperbole, please?
There is a huge difference between:
- background checks
- Birth certificates checks
- credit checks
- thinking a date a would-be adulterer, tax cheater, serial killer or identity thief
And just wanting the most basic of facts about someone you're supposed to be trying to connect with.
What does "If he would like about that, who knows what ELSE he would lie about," mean, then? He'd lie about his favorite TV show? What sports team he bet on in the last office pool? Of course not; the people who said that clearly were insinuating he'd lie about marital status or legal matters like taxes, and at least one person used the phrase "prey on" to describe a liar's behavior. I'm not the source of the hyperbole; the hyperbole is in claiming that one has been so put out by having a brief coffee date with a guy who kids himself he's 15 years younger that it's OK to try to thwart his future connections (or ability to "prey" on others by using an old photo or mis-stating is age.) It's OK to be irked or exasperated or pitying, just not to retaliate as the woman scorned. IMHO.
Let me put it another way: I would bet anything I own that if 50-plus percent of the people on online d@ting sites found out that someone they met whom they found totally hot, interesting, desirable, available, and fun to be with had lied about his age plus or minus 10 years, they would rationalize it one way or the other because of their strong attraction to the man. But let a dumpy middle-aged guy try it and bam! Report him to the authorities! Why not just let the guy go on his way? Maybe the next person he meets won't care.
Who knows what else he would lie about does, yes, refer to things like marital status. Like age, marital status is something that is often lied about on d@ting sites. Unlike age, which is fairly self-evident, marital system could be concealed for months or even years of a serious rel@tionship if the man was discreet or clever enough.
Let us not forget this man didn't merely put an old photo of himself on the site, he also listed an age in line with the photo and not in line with current reality. At a 10 year age difference that is fairly significant -- it can impact his ability to have and raise children, impact the likelihood of how soon age related illnesses effect him, and/or impact the dynamics of the rel@tionship. It's not misrepresenting himself on the level of lying about his favorite color or even his c*ck size. For a woman who is seeking a man of her own age only to discover a man significantly older than her this has served to completely waste her time. For a woman that shrugs it off, it may later come out that, yes, he is married or has a significant amount of debt he hasn't disclosed or any number of other things, or it may not. What IS a fact is that this man is willing to lie about basic, important facts about himself in order to make himself more attractive to potential dates (and I challenge you to categorize that in some other way than luring in potential mates by lying about basic facts one should reasonably be expected not to lie about). And, quite honestly, many -- the majority -- of people who use online d@ting pay sites are looking for more than someone to fool around with. For that they could use Craigslist or any number of free hook-up sites; a pay site, like Cupid, is an investment and that investment usually reflects the desire to become involved in a (romantic) rel@tionship with another person.
Either way, the man is almost certainly violating the EULA he signed when he began using the site and for that alone there is complete justification to report him -- and not as a "woman scorned" but as a person who feels that someone violating a EULA has no respect for what the site is all about and obviously doesn't care about following rules/keeping an agreement he made. Someone who violates a EULA like that doesn't belong on the site and the moderators/owners of the site should be made aware of it.