I just spoke to Jack from eHarmony and he has informed me that the amount of $143.76 has been refunded back to my PayPal account and verified by myself. He was sincerely apologetic and even listened to me vent a bit about the situation, which I appreciated. Thank you The Consumerist, its readers, PayPal and Jack from eHarmony.

Glad we could help!

(Photo: David Light Orchard)

The next day, David's bank account was hit with two charges for over $100 each, and now eHarmony is saying that either he didn't send them the money (what?) or that he deliberately opened two accounts.

Worst of all, they're not actually trying to help him. The CSR who promised he would make a note on the account to reverse any fee that showed up actually wrote, "The customer lacks the fundamental knowledge of how PayPal works."

On Saturday I sign-up for an eHarmony.com 6-month plan and thought everything went smoothly until I noticed it was still asking me to join. To ensure it wasn't a cache problem, I closed my browser, cleared the cache and tried again with no success. Before I decided to call eHarmony I checked my PayPal account to verify the payment was sent. Getting a hold of someone was relatively easy but when I provided them with account information and explained to them the problem everything went downhill from there.

I was promptly told, "I'm sorry sir, we do not show you made a transaction... are you sure you used this account to sign up?". After a few convincing arguments on my part they decided to look up the transaction in their PayPal account and sure enough they found it. But what I heard next I did not expect, "Sir, it's just a pre-approval and there's no need to worry about it.". After explaining to them that PayPal isn't a lending service and they do not pre-approve transactions she asked if I would like to speak to her supervisor Chad, I agreed.

Chad started the conversation off by trying to convince me it was just a 'pre-approval' and in the event it was a technical glitch on their end, the money would bounce off their account and end up in my PayPal account. After calling B.S. on that immediately, Chad promised to note in my account that if the money was successfully transferred from my PayPal account to eHarmony's, they would issue me an immediate refund for the amount of $143.76. I was convinced that Chad understood my issue and to reassure me he offered me a discounted 6-month plan at $110.85 and that he could sign me up over the phone to verify that it was successful and sure enough it was.

Yesterday I logged into my checking account and to no surprise, $143.76 was missing and so was $110.85. I immediately called eHarmony with the hope of receiving a refund and when I explained the issue again to the CS agent and mentioned that Chad noted on my account that I was due a refund if the transaction when through. Well, she said the only thing Chad noted on your account was "The customer lacks the fundamental knowledge of how PayPal works...", when I heard that I was livid and asked to speak to a supervisor immediately.

The supervisor I spoke to was not only rude but extremely condescending. She asked me repeatedly if I had multiple accounts and when I tried my best to assure her that I only had one she said the following "Sir, are you sure you sent us the money?". After hearing that I figured this is a complete waste of time and hung up the phone. I filed a dispute with PayPal but was told their Buyer Protection plan does not extend to Virtual Services and/or Goods. Nonetheless, PayPal is doing everything they can and they're the only people I have on my side at the moment.

Attached are photos of proof that the money was not only sent, but taken from my checking account too.

Here's a screencap from his PayPal account page, clearly showing that two separate transactions were made by eHarmony. (If you're not familiar with PayPal's notation, the double-listing for each transaction shows the funds being first transferred into your PayPal account, then paid out to the third party.)

Here's a screencap from his checking account, showing that yes, they did in fact both go through.

We hope one of David's 29 dimensions describes his ability to not have a brain aneurysm while dealing with the lies and insults coming from eHarmony's staff.

(Photo: David Light Orchard)

After revising my profile, I decided I’d try to add a bit of personality to these responses. For example, I answered:

Three things I am most thankful for:

1. Having a supportive family, i.e. my mom, who makes a mean chicken soup
2. Having great friends who have helped me through the thick, the thin, and the cheese-stuffed

   This didn’t last long, because two minutes after submitting these responses, I got this e-mail:

   Dear Chris,

   During regular site maintenance, we noticed some content written by you that violates our terms and conditions. Here is what we found:

   {ABOUT ME} Having a job, given the way I watch a friend get laid off nearly every week lately

   Because this violates the terms and conditions that you accepted when you joined eHarmony, we have turned off your matching. You will not receive any further matches.

   Yes, “get laid” is a phrase that is absolutely banned on eHarmony. Never mind that the next word is “off.” Never mind that the words preceding it as “watch a friend.” Oh, well, yeah, that’s pretty dirty. But if I was into that sort of thing, wouldn’t my matches have a right to know?

3. Having a job, given the way I watch a friend get laid off nearly every week lately

Eh, it's for the best. eHarmony's "patented Compatibility Matching System," widely feared for its crusading religious zeal, only found two available matches for Chris, and both of them lived far, far away in New Jersey.

At least he was taking advantage of eHarmony's free trial instead of paying for the full below-the-bible-belt experience.

The 24 Hours I Spent as an eHarmony Member [East Village Idiot]

Morgan writes:

Hello Consumerist. My mother, separated for around 7 years, applied to join eHarmony last year. She took the hour-and-some long questionnaire only to find she was rejected because she hadn't gotten the divorce yet. Well the divorce was finalized last year, and my mom was interested in joining eHarmony again. She sent them the following message:

To EHarmony

I was rejected when I was separated. Now I'm divorced. How can I change my status without retaking the questionnaire?

Thank you for contacting eHarmony Customer Care.

We're so happy to hear that you are thinking of using our service. It's a pleasure to assist you in changing your marital status. Since you are divorced, please reply with the county and state of your divorce proceedings, the name of the judge, and the date your divorce was finalized. We hope you understand that this information is very important in order to protect the integrity of our matching process. Once this information is received, we will be very happy to reset your Relationship Questionnaire for you. You will need to retake the questionnaire so that we can accurately assess your relationship needs and provide matches who are deeply compatible with you.

We look forward to helping you find the love of your life.

Sincerely,

Yan V.
Customer Care
eHarmony

To EHarmony

Wow. Nevermind.

"Wow" is right! I guess those Chemistry.com commercials weren't exaggerating!

Morgan

Anyone want to date Morgan's mom?

GUY: It's true. When I first saw her, I was like, Bam! True love can be bought on the internet! It's so simple.

GIRL: Before I use to worry and thought, maybe my standards were too high.

GUY: Or too low.

GIRL: But then we learned to let a computer set the standard for us, and here we are.

GUY: And it's careful, too! I mean, if she can fill out a 10 million survey question form, she can't be a total ax- wielding maniac, right?

GIRL: Being careful is important, because I have genital herpes.

GUY: And I don't. Wait, you genital herpes? Good thing I'm gay! Phew, dodged a bullet there.

DR: Remember, true love is something special and can't be added to a shopping cart. Join us online today and take our compatibility exam. But please remember to use a condom. Settling for less has never been so easy. Log on today.

• Shockingly, E-Harmony Found Electronic, Harmonious. Even more shocking is that we didn't see any ladies offering up the digits to Danilo. C'mon Orlando, single, well-spoken, good-looking guy available, enjoys shopping!
• Sony PSP: Racist? Everyone is missing the obvious Afrikaner references that informed this campaign.
• iPods Killed The Genius Bar. For those you of you playing the home version of our game, the correct answer is "Who are The Buggles?"
• Adelphia Makes Customer Pay For Porn She Never Ordered. Our grandpa said that liquor doesn't taste as good after you're twenty-one, unless it's free. We're sure that then porn for pay is like drinking a Long Island Iced Tea, steeped with actual water from Long Island.
• Sharper Image Dulled. You can take this nose hair trimmer and shove it where the sun don't shine, while enjoying the soothing yet precise blade action.

First they seemed to be discriminating against the recently unwed, then hot redhead Canadian chicks, and nearest and dearest to our hearts, heavy drinkers.

Lending a dissenting voice, Danilo actually tried out the service instead of mocking it from afar based on hearsay and anecdote. He says he had a fairly pleasant, though not perfect, experience.

Contrary to other reports, he didn't even get a crucifix shoved in his heart.

Always greatful for an opportunity to contradict ourselves, we let Danilo's letter unfold after the jump like the wings of angels...

Danilo writes:

"As previously established with my Amazon television caper, I'm living the single life. There are plenty of benefits to being single, but it's a little less fun for people who aren't any good at meeting women. Like me.

The internet has always solved my other problems, though, so naturally I turned to it to soften the pain of my transforming into a blithering idiot each time I'm confronted with the sort of woman who interests me. At the very least, I thought, I'd be able cut past the standard introductory crap and confine my energies to the sorts of sophisticated people I enjoy.

After staggering through the thumbnail-filled electronic meat markets for a few weeks, I grew frustrated. It wasn't always easy to find interesting people and the ones I thought might be interesting turned out to be pretty dull. Women in Orlando, it would seem, have an unhealthy preoccupation with excessive drinking and the caps lock key.

It was with heavy heart that I dragged myself to eHarmony, having heard something favorable about it from a coworker. I'd read a decent amount of negative things from Consumerist on the same subject, so I'd avoided the place. Still, I was ready to try something different and thus plunged into an SAT-style personality profile hell.

Chiefly, Consumerist voiced suspicion that eHarmony was a Christian-driven morals machine that would endeavor to leave you loveless and miserable if you weren't an avid bible thumper. This doesn't appear to be the case. I'm not at all religious and eHarmony played matchmaker nonetheless.

But in contrast to the Match.com-style sites, eHarmony seems to be playing up a quality angle rather than one of quantity. After a few weeks, I've only been handed a half-dozen matches — a paltry sum, compared to the hundreds you might find on Match. Still, while even some of those few eHarmony matches seemed pretty bland, one of them wasn't bad at all. In fact, thanks to eHarmony, my faith in women's ability to successfully combine attractiveness, intelligence and maturity has been enthusiastically restored, regardless of the outcome of any particular match I've found through the service.

So, Godless singles can take heart: they too can enjoy the benefits of someone's weird, mathematical people-matching scheme. It was definitely successful at figuring out the sorts of things that make people interesting to me. I'm nowhere near being able to tell if it can actually help you find your soulmate, but if you want some help finding something deeper than just casual sex, it certainly wouldn't hurt to give eHarmony a crack. Be patient, though — if you've got a particularly offbeat personality, as I do, it might take it a few weeks to come up with a useful match.

As far as the girl who's pretty all right: It's a little unusual or maybe cute. I think we got on the phone at 10:30 PM on Saturday night, after a couple weeks exchanging messages and jumping through these hoops eHarmony gives you to better qualify your matches. By the time we hung up from that first conversation, though, the sun was coming up and it was past 6:00 AM but neither of us had noticed the passage of time. I'm the sort of guy who is wildly curious and speculative about life, philosophy and science and stuff and through speaking with this person I am reassured that, hey, women can be like that too and still be attractive. She lives a few hours away, but I'll see if I can grab lunch with her on Saturday.

-Danilo
www.danilocampos.com

Oh, btw, I'm nowhere near as hot as Tamsen is, but I'll attach a photo to save you guys a trip to your discount stock photo DVD."

We would also like to take this opportunity to remind you that it's not just customer service complaints you can send in, we'd love for you to fink on the inner workings of your company (especially as it relates to consumers and customer service), whether past or present. All the anonymity or prominence you desire is yours for the asking.

But let's hear about them lovelorn atheists, after the jump...

UPDATE: Alan writes that he just went ahead and created a user profile on eHarmony for an atheist who "drinks regularly, willing to date anyone, and answered "no" to every religious question." He says he found plenty of matches in his area. So it would seem that eHarmony is not denying people based on religion but on other factors. The criteria are described by Dr. Warren, the founder of eHarmony.com, in this Salon article pointed to us by Jon.

"Back several years ago, I lived in Los Angeles. I had a couple of friends that worked for eHarmony. This was before the site went "live" and was still in the development stage. I was new to LA and these friends set me up for a job interview- and I was hired to be customer service. Since the site wasn't online yet, part of my job was to help test the site.

When I was interviewed and hired, at no point was it mentioned to me that it was a Christian dating service. I began to get a little suspicious when the only other customer service person they had hired was an old friend of Dr. Warren's. He sat behind me with a Bible on his desk.

Hmm...

As I went through the testing, repeatedly taking the personality profile test, no matter how I filled it out, I got rejected. The reason? I always checked the Atheist box. Granted, there were no members yet for them to "match" me with but I was still rejected. It didn't give a reason- such as "You're a big heathen and we don't like your kind."

But it was a paycheck. However, about two weeks into the job, when discussing my role in "customer service", I was informed that I'd more than likely be expected to pray with people over the phone when they called in, distraught over not having found a mate.

That's when I quit.

I have absolutely no problem with Christian dating services- to each his own and all that. My problem was that it felt to me that they were trying to hide what they were, instead of being up front about it. I honestly don't know if their model has changed since then... several times since then I've gone in and taken the test to see what would happen. Mostly I got rejected again, although most recently, I did get matches because I said I'd be willing to date Christians.

-B."

Maybe we should start the Consumerist.com dating service.

Don't drink.

One of the final questions reader Dave answered while filling out his eHarmony personality profile was "How much do you drink?"

"I, without thinking," he says, "answered that I drink daily without even thinking that a beer with dinner makes me sound to them like an alcoholic."

In its rejection letter, eHarmony wrote...

"Our matching model could not accurately predict with whom you would be best matched. This occurs for about 20% of potential users, so 1 in 5 people simply will not benefit from our service."

Contrary to Seinfield, eHarmony believes that 20% of the population is undateable.

The problem may be more with user expectations. The letter also notes, "eHarmony is based upon a complex matching system developed through extensive research with married couples." [emphasis added]. Don't got to eHarmony looking for someone to go the show with you this weekend. Go there if you're looking for someone to go with all the shows with you, for the rest of the forever of your life, until death do you part.

Dave asks, why doesn't eHarmony just put the weed-out questions at the front?

Previously:

• More eHarmony.com Discrimination Victims
  
• Married Man Sues E-harmony.com For a Date
  
• e-Disharmony.com

It's not that she's legally separated from a spouse, like that guy in California who's suing eHarmony, nor is it her shiny red locks nor that she's a part time model.

She wondered, was she simply unattractive? Unlovable? Does eHarmony hate Canadians?

Nope, it's something far worse...

"Hello,

I just wanted to add to your story regarding John Claasen's claim against eHarmony.

I, too, have been discriminated against by eHarmony though for a different reason.

I don't believe there's anything really wrong with me. I think I'm a fairly well-adjusted, healthy, edumacated, fun, hopefully interesting writer and part time model here in Toronto and yet, based on my personality profile, I was completely rejected by eHarmony. They said something to the effect that I was not suitable for any of their (1000's and 1000's) of members.

Let me tell you, that was a blow that I did not need after having a seriously tricky time out in the dating world. In my pea brained head, that basically said to me that not one of the men on their vast member list would like me - it was pretty disheartening and has really put a dent in my dating confidence.

I was down for a week or so, pondering my basic attractiveness to men in general when it dawned on me that it might be a discrimination thang. By that I mean, I am an atheist (or agnostic, when the mood strikes me) and I did not hide that fact when I went through their 'personality test' (that I obviously failed - I should have studied harder??). However, I did not say that I would only date like-minded men, I clearly checked off the boxes on Catholics, Presbyterians, Anglicans, and demon-worshippers as men that I would be more than happy to take home to mum and dad. My suspicion was confirmed when I asked a Christian friend if she knew anything about eHarmony and, if so, did she know if it was a religious site. she said that it was and that I should take my heathen ways to another site... ok, the last part isn't true, but she did say that it was a religious site.

So, I was feeling better that I was being simply discriminated based on my lack of religion and not that I was a horrid person who was completely unlovable. Hey, wait a minute, I hear that Americans are pretty big on people not being able to discriminate against others based on their religion (or lack thereof). Hmmm, now it sounds like I have the same claim as John Claasen "discrimination at the hands of eHarmony".

I don't think that I'm desperate, just disappointed (especially by the fact that I didn't print out their assessment of my personality and their resounding rejection).

Sincerely,
Tamsen
www.tamsenm.com"

We suggest that Tamsen email eHarmony and ask why they rejected her profile. Who knows, maybe it was a technical glitch and with a few swift keystrokes, she can be back in the club. Or maybe she's right, a site founded by a devout Christian, espousing certain Christian values, really doesn't like redheads.

Previously: Married Man Sues E-harmony.com For a Date

To vent her outrage, reader L.D. contacted customer service. John Claassen experienced the same discrimination and he's fighting back Cali-style; suing for $12,000.

"If I had my druthers, I'd be divorced by now. I'm emotionally in a different state than I am legally," the 36-year-old Emeryville lawyer said.

Imagine all the dates he can buy if he wins. Maybe we should hook him up with L.D.

Man sues e-dating service and there's one hitch, he's married [Ledger Enquirer via Fark] (Thanks to Thomas!)

Previously: e-Disharmony.com

I m not a pariah or a leper, not looking to hook up with someone for the rest of my life I was married for a long time and now I m not, it s a weird transititional state, she told The Consumerist. While not legally separated, all ties were definitely snipped. She wanted to date again but was uncertain where to begin. Encouraged by positive reviews from friends, L. signed up on eHarmony.com and began filling out their extensive profile. To get the best results, she went through the humiliating process of revealing herself to the computer questionnaire with honesty.

After spending over an hour she came to one of the final questions, Please describe your current status and was given the choice of married, divorced, single or separated. After clicking separated she got her reward, Unable to match you at this time. The kill screen continued something to the effect of how statistically speaking, separated peoples are not viable prospects as they may return to their partners. Focus groups participants voiced concerns for this possibility and eHarmony decided to make it a policy.

L.D. understands this from a business standpoint but wishes they d disclose that at the beginning.

On Friday, eHarmony.com sent her a Valentine s day email.

1. I do have to say I feel punished about my status, she wrote the company, particularly since it was one of the categories asked about at the very end. There must be a community of people who understand the transitional state of going from married to nonmarried. 2. I don't see a way to change my marital status once my divorce is final. 3. I got a valentine's day message email today. Since I cannot possibly find a match through your service at the moment, I find receiving email messages about having hope of finding someone particularly tacky.

An eHarmony lead agent, Carla W., responded to L. s complaint the same day, Once you are divorced, please reply with the county and state of your divorce proceedings, the name of the judge, and the date your divorce was finalized As an alternative, I can reset your personality profile test.

L. is not sure whether she will report the information in to eHarmony, already feeling chastened. She s heard that the founder has a Christian mission" and she finds that "really disturbing. L.D. considers their policy of excluding same-sex partnerships, offensive, to say the least. Also, since filling out the personality profile, she s noticed she seems to be receiving more Christian dating site spam.

As to whether she will continue to seek romance online, she s not sure. L.D. looked into services like Lavalife and Match but was turned off by their pay-to-survey model and their approach of hey what s your sign okay here s some matches, go! For that, you might as well head to Craigslist.

It s just so fucking complicated, reports L., I run a software company so I know all about designing a user friendly interface. Make it intuitive Otherwise I ll just go home and watch TV.

For Valentine s Day, L.D. plans on attending her daughter s parent-teacher conference.