You may remember that, a little while ago, a woman decided that she was going to sue a dating agency for not having an eligible bachelor for her? Well, astonishingly, she's won.
Tereza Burki, a 47-year-old from London, decided to sue Seventy Thirty for deceit and misrepresentation after she found that there were only 100 active male users on the app, which had claimed that it had over 7,000 members.
According to Judge Richard Parkes, the matchmaker had misled Burki about the number of male members it had and, therefore, he chose to award her £12,600 ($16,000) in returned membership fees and £500 ($635) for "disappointment and sadness."
According to The Telegraph, Lemarc Thomas, who was Seventy Thirty's managing director at the time, had claimed that the service had a "substantial number" of potential matches.
But Judge Parkes found that out of the agency's 7,000 members, there were "at the very most perhaps 200 active members," of which at most 100 were men.
He said: "A membership of 100 active men cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as a substantial number."
Parkes said, according to The Guardian: "This case is about a woman looking for romantic happiness who says she was tricked into shopping in the wrong place, paying a large sum to a dating agency which, she says, made promises but failed to produce the goods."
INSIDER reports that the dating agencies services start at £12,000 and it's unclear if this is a recurring fee or a one-off payment.
Burki contacted Seventy Thirty in 2013, saying that she was looking for a spouse with "a lifestyle similar or more affluent than her own with multiple residences," the Mirror newspaper reported.
She claimed that she asked the service to match her with a "sophisticated gentleman" who was ideally employed in the finance industry and led a "wealthy lifestyle" while being "open to travelling internationally."
Burki says that Seventy Thirty promised her that it only made "creme de la creme" matches and that they could introduce her to "bachelors you dream of meeting."
Judge Parkes said that Burki's preferences were "not modest," and quoted the author, Gertrude Stein, saying: "Whoever said money can't buy happiness didn't know where to shop."
Susie Ambrose, the founder of Seventy Thirty, claimed that Burki had joined the dating agency with "lofty and unrealistic" expectations. She said, according to The Guardian:
"We are a niche, exclusive agency, not a mainstream, mass-market online dating service.
"We are not going to have thousands of members because there simply aren't thousands of single, wealthy, high-calibre prospects out there."
If this is a legitimate cause for suing, who knows what is yet to come. Other dating apps might do well to steel themselves if the number of first date horror stories that arise from the use of online dating mediums are to be believed.
