The story
Founded in 2005 by Bill Dobbie and Max Polyakov, the company was originally made up of a range of dating websites operated from an off-shore base. In 2006, Polyakov and Dobbie acquired the EasyDate business, which had been experiencing growth. The company quickly grew its user base – by 2007 they had a million paying users, and a few years after that they hit 13 million paying users across all networks.
By early March 2010, the user base was growing at a rate of 300,000 per month, and new products were increasing these numbers. A year later, in May 2011, the company had 23 million members in 39 countries. The company was named as Scotland's fastest growing technology firm by Deloitte in its October 2011 Fast 500 listing, and in May 2012 went on to win the Best Travel & Leisure PLC award at the UK Stock Market Awards.
The company was listed in the Alternative Investment Market of the London Stock Exchange (AIM). Upon admission, the company had an approximate market capitalisation of £45 million. The capital raised by the listing enabled the company to undertake some strategic acquisitions in markets with growth potential. On 24 July 2012, Cupid plc announced that it had acquired the French dating site Assistance Genie Logiciel (AGL) for the sum of €3.7 million. The deal to buy the 1986-founded company included French dating sites amour.com, serencontrer.com and ulla.com. Also in 2012 Cupid acquired Uniform Dating, a niche website aimed at uniformed services personnel such as firefighters, nurses, armed forces and police.
BBC investigation
In February 2013, the company was the subject of BBC Radio 5live Investigates programme. Users told the BBC that they had received many messages from potential dates as free users of the site, but that when they paid for membership to be able to reply, the volume of messages dramatically decreased. The company denied that it was sending the messages to entice users to pay for membership and commissioned an independent audit into its operation. After a subsequent investigation into these claims, one of the sources of the accusations made a public apology regarding factual inaccuracies in his blog postings on the subject.
An investigation by Ukrainian newspaper Kyiv Post in March 2013 proved that fake profiles were being used by the company and confirmed that the company's 'social media managers', who were tempting users, were located in Ukraine. It was revealed that only about 20 employees of Cupid plc worked in the United Kingdom, with most based in Ukraine.
The company stated that its auditors KPMG had found 'no evidence of a company organised practice of staff enticing registered members to subscribe through the use of fake profiles'. Nevertheless, Cupid recognized that existing staff profiles 'were not clearly identifiable' to users and said it had replaced the motivation teams with dating advisors. In July 2013, the BBC published a new investigation, claiming that the problem of fake profiles still existed, and the company used real persons' data without their knowledge.
Such activities are subject to legal prosecution in some countries. Björn and Benjamin Bak, founders of German dating application Lovoo, and twelve members of their staff were arrested and accused of commercial deception due to similar tactics. Avid Life Media, founder of dating site Ashley Madison, was accused of using 'fembots' on a large scale.
From Wikipedia’s article on Cupid plc, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5