"Warning: crushlink is a spam scam," warns "Steve," a geek who refuses to reveal his real identity for fear of being sued, on a Web page set up to discuss his experience with the site. After he received a "crush" message, he became convinced that Crushlink was a system for harvesting e-mail addresses, so he registered for the site with an account at his own domain that he'd never used for anything else. Several months later, this account got a message from something called "Jennyslist."

Justin Beech, the webmaster behind Broadbandreports.com, went on his own sleuthing mission to unmask Mr. Crush after webmasters on his site groused that Crushlink and SomeoneLikesYou were fomenting spam, not romance. Although the WHOIS records for both sites are at least partially fake -- for instance, the phone number for Crushlink is listed as 800-000-0000 -- their Web server IP addresses don't lie. Beech linked both sites to Jumpstart Technologies LLC, a "direct-marketing" company. His research led him to finger Johann Schleier-Smith, a Harvard graduate and currently a physics grad student at Stanford, as Mr. Crush.

But it was Rob Whelan, a 40-year-old CIO for a retailing company in Tennessee, who finally turned up the guy who will admit to being the president and co-owner of Crushlink, Mr. Crush himself.

When Whelan got his "crush" message from Crushlink, he was immediately suspicious: "I'm not 12, so it seemed odd that I would get a message like this," he says. He contacted anti-spam organizations, the Federal Trade Commission and CyberAngels, a group that protects children online. After a few weeks of mucking around, threats to sue prompted a nervous phone call from one G reg Tseng, another Stanford physics grad student, who also went to Harvard as an undergrad.

As a sophomore in college, Tseng started a dot-com called flyingchickens.com, which sought to take on Harvard's Coop by selling textbooks. (Johann Schleier-Smith, also then a student at Harvard. co-founded the site.) Flyingchickens soon merged with something called Limespot.com, a college-event listing site.

In short, these two embodied the late-'90s, dot-com poster-boy ideal -- techie, entrepreneurial undergrads so brimming with Big Ideas that they couldn't wait for graduation to start launching companies.

These weren't the stereotypical lowlife spammers that Whelan expected to find on the other end of his Crushmail. "Greg Tseng is a very bright young man, and unfortunately he's chosen this vocation for himself," sighs Whelan. "He does have a good entrepreneurial spirit, but I think that he's just misguided."

Whelan worries about the hurt feelings of kids who won't think twice about dumping their friends' e-mail addresses into a system that will send anonymous messages misleading them that romance is just at the other end of an "@" sign. "These guys think they're going to make a lot of money and not hurt anybody, but they're really just going to make a lot of money," says Whelan. "And they're not going to ever know or see or hear from the people who are hurt by this."

But worse than teenage false hopes, Whelan is concerned that parents have no way to opt their kids out. And he charges that the system lures kids to lie about their ages to Crushlink's and SomeoneLikesYou's marketing partners, who don't want 12-year-olds as customers. That's because one way to get "hints" to your admirer's identity on Crushlink is to register for an affiliated site's marketing program, like Netflix, which pays Crushlink a bounty for every person who signs up. SomeoneLikesYou takes this scheme even further. Even if you guess your crush correctly, you either have to sign up for an affiliate's program or pay $14.90 to find out who your admirer actually is.

After much stalking, both online and off, I finally tracked Tseng down. Although he demurely refused to speak to me on the phone or answer any specific questions about the charges leveled against his online love-note machines, he did send a few comments in one e-mail.

He maintained that the secrecy surrounding who's involved in the company is simply because they're in "stealth mode." But he outright denied spamming anyone with missives that might breed romantic delusions: "We do not sell or rent our user list to third parties (a.k.a. 'spam')," he wrote. "We do not purchase lists or harvest e-mail addresses. All of our outbound e-mails are either user-generated notices or communications with our registered users. We send precisely zero e-mail advertisements."

At least in one limited instance, this statement appears false. Remember Jennyslist, which messaged "Steve," after he registered for Crushlink with an address that he'd used for nothing else? A business acquaintance of Tseng's reveals that Jennyslist.com is a project of Jumpstart Technologies. Isn't this advertising? Tseng declined to comment.

Oh, maybe we're all just such doubting Thomases about the idea that anyone might actually like us that we can't face the possibility of new romance, even when it shows up right in our in boxes. Tseng seems to think so: "Some people may be confused about the origin of the 'Someone has a crush on you' notices but actually every single person that receives such a notice was listed as a crush by a registered user (and they should come to CrushLink to find out who!)."

Really? Then, prove to me that this person who claimed to admire me really exists, I demanded. But Tseng stayed mum. He had the perfect excuse, not that he bothered to offer it: Selling out the guy who likes me (if he exists) would violate the site's whole premise -- crush notification without the risk of rejection.

So maybe the evil genius of SomeoneLikesYou isn't that it's a love machine at all, but that it's an Internet Narcissus' pool. In this scenario, the love automaton feeds you hints about your "secret admirer," based on the profile you entered about yourself. You have so much in common!

More likely, the messages I got from SomeoneLikesYou came from someone who offered up my e-mail address when he or she tried to game the system to find out who likes them -- just as I did.

Or maybe there really is some blond-haired, blue-eyed, sarcastic guy biding his time surfing African safari Web sites, while he nurtures his fervent hope that the Internet will be our go-between.

Only the matchmaker knows for sure, and that pathological flirt's not telling.

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