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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Are those secret-admirer e-mails real -- or just the latest excrescence of an Internet marketing machine grown unfathomably sleazy?
Aug 7, 2002 | He has blond hair, blue eyes and a sarcastic sense of humor. He's an artist, writer or musician, between the ages of 28 and 32. His idea of fun on a first date is a walk in the park, but he hankers to go on an African safari.
And this man -- whoever he is -- likes me. The Internet told me so.
Just a few walks in the park from now, I could be on the savanna in Zaire with Mr. X, trading acerbic remarks about the redoubtable mating habits of wildebeests.
There's just one hitch: I'm not convinced that this secret admirer actually exists. He may just be the bot who loved me.
A flirty e-mail from matchmaker@someonelikesyou.com tipped me off to this mystery man's tender crush. "You have a secret admirer!" gushed the message. Like half a dozen similar Web sites -- eCrush, Crushlink and SecretAdmirer.com among them -- SomeoneLikesYou plays Internet go-between. The gimmick: An anonymous e-mail crush notification service can pave the way for romance without the risk of rejection.
But while most of these "crush" sites operate above-board, proudly listing the founders' names and e-mail addresses, the cupids behind SomeoneLikesYou and its corporate sister site, Crushlink, play hard to get. The sites conceal the identities not only of the source of your crush note, but also of the people who run the services. Even some of the publicly available domain-name registration information about the sites is fake.
This secrecy, along with the sheer volume of admiring messages spewing from crushmaster@crushlink.com and matchmaker@someonelikeyou.com, has raised speculation that there's less romance than savvy marketing going on here. Competitors accuse Crushlink and SomeoneLikesYou of spamming any old e-mail address they can scrape off the Net with love notes, building membership by preying on sad-sack lonely-hearts -- then peddling affiliate programs to those members to bring in some cash.
"My dog has gotten 'someone has a crush on you' e-mail messages -- she's a cute dog, but no one has a crush on her," says Karen Demars, co-founder of eCrush. "My belief is that they are sending 'someone has a crush on you' messages to people who have not been legitimately crushed."
One consumer advocacy group in California is even threatening a lawsuit against Crushlink for misleading consumers about their love lives. And vigilant webmasters and anti-spam crusaders, suspicious that the sites are simply cynical e-mail harvesters, charge "spam!"
Forget "Who's my crush?" The more interesting question is: who's the crushmaster?
Is Mr. Crush really Mr. Spammer in a cupid's costume, breeding false hopes among the lovelorn with fake messages about nascent crushes that don't really exist? Or could the crushmaster be a scorned lover turning his vindictive rage on the Net's lonely millions in a frenzy of mixed messages? Or, maybe, just maybe, there's actually this much latent love out there on the Web, just waiting for the right database to come along and play yenta.
All the accusations of nefarious behavior and the secrecy surrounding these sites has made unmasking the identities of the frenzied cupids behind them a true Internet whodunit. After all, for geeks, speculating about the identity of a mysterious webmaster is as captivating as thinking about who might have a crush on you.
By following the geeks' trail in the ether, I found out who the crushmaster is -- and just like Mr. Right, he's the kind of guy you'd least expect.
