A friend of mine mentioned that his friend ended up using a dating site for Cougars called CougarLife and had some marginal success. I heard about it here and there but never really bothered with it since typically those sites end up being scams or having a very shady component to them. Since it was my friend talking about it, I decided to give it a shot and signed up.
Almost immediately after signing up without adding any details like photos or personal information, I immediately received a message from an African American woman (according to her photo). I decided to check out the person’s profile after learning immediately that you can’t read any messages without being a paid member. The woman’s profile was for the most part blank and actually described the woman as being Caucasian in ethnicity. Naturally, the bells started to really sound off in my head.
I decided to put some more information in and even bothered uploading a recent photo. The photo isn’t a great photogenic image of myself but I figured that it was candid and would hopefully deter anyone from sending me messages. So the first thing I tried doing on the site was perusing through the large number of profiles. Initially, I found that the vast majority of photos on the site had images of women who I would not presume were anything remotely resembling cougars. Many of these women actually looked really good and were probably in their mid 30s at most. So in checking out a few profiles, more red flags started to shout out.
First, there is an odd age discrepancy between the photo and the actual listed age. This discrepancy can go both ways. You would see women who probably were in their 30s listed in their 50s. And sometimes vice versa. Next most of the profiles have no information at all. Maybe there’s a cheap headline that sounds like it came from a pick up artist’s book. The few profiles that had information provided still either came off as some generic psychological study to make you think of the stereotypical cougar.
Over the past few days then I began receiving various messages, “flirts” and even being favorited. When I would go back to some of these profiles, I became highly suspicious whether or not they were real or not. For instance, one profile was supposedly written by a woman in her 50’s (and she looked more like a 30 year old model) with incredibly high standards. Why would she bother with someone like myself unless she was horribly desperate?
Then today something else struck me in that all of these cougars’ names have numbers attached to them. Usually, when you’re picking a name, unless a website has an enormous number of users, there’s absolutely no need to choose a number with whatever identity you want. In my case, I was able to enter a name without conflicting with other members. In turn, I started to think that a lot of these profiles were automatically generated by either a third party system or even internally.
Certainly, there are people who probably are legitimate users and I have seen members with “normal” sounding names. But some names just seem so obvious as a trap when you hear sexual innuendos as their handles.
In turn, I decided to do some research to check out reviews from people. Sure enough, the vast majority of people out there have reported that the site is nothing more than a scam. No one can confirm whether it’s an internal or external scam. But some interesting things came up to indicate what a shady operation this is. For instance, if you do end up paying, most of those “messages” you receive are from a Nigerian scammer, trying to get you to click on a link to their site (which is nothing more than another porn or webcam sex site). The worst part is that the payment system is a lock and there isn’t any easy method to remove your subscription. The customer service intentionally is worse than AOL, the cable companies and government unemployment offices combined.
I’ve seen similar sites to these in Japan and I think that there’s a good chance that it’s all run by a network of scammers. While there is a CEO attached to CougarLife in particular, these systems all have similar features.
Unfortunately, despite the shadiness of this site, from what I understand it operates legally. I think that someone should investigate this company and operation though. I really feel that there’s a group out there that has managed to connect all these components together and run it through some shadow company.
Either way, bottom line is to stay away from sites like these and do the research first prior to signing up.