California, April 19: The dating website match.com has been forced to begin checking its clients against criminal databases after being sued by a Californian woman who claimed to have been raped by a convicted sex attacker she met on the site.
The management of match.com, whose almost two million members in the United States pay about $30 (£18.50) a month for access to its database of potential life partners, announced the move in an attempt to limit the public-relations damage after the woman said that her attacker, Alan Wurtzel, had “six previous sexual convictions for sexual battery” in Los Angeles, according to a class action lawsuit filed last week. He was able to use the site to arrange meetings with further unwitting victims.
The president of match.com, Mandy Ginsberg, admitted on Sunday that her decision to begin cross referencing the names of members with the national sex-offender registry had been hastened by the Wurtzel case being made public. But she added that plans to introduce screening had been in the works for some time.
Source: Independet.co.uk