Many people who got burned by shady dating sites that display fake profiles, send fake winks/flirts and employ questionable billing practices, are naturally circumspect and it is understandable. However, at SantaMatch as you will soon see (or have seen if you have signed up) we guarantee you that 100% of profiles are real and by real people just like yourself. There are no winks/flirts on SantaMatch and our billing practices are very simple: as opposed to membership fees which are common on other dating sites, SantaMatch has only a one-time affordable profile approval fee which keeps SantaMatch scam and spam free with people who are looking to date. There are no auto-renewals or fine print.

We dedicate a significant portion of our resources to weed out the fake profiles created by Nigerian scammers. 99% of them get deleted before you even get to see them and the rest cannot contact and scam you because our profile approval requirement filters them out. If any of them use a stolen credit card, we usually catch those within minutes and mark them as scam profiles and delete them. In addition, we employ a flagging system which is used, among other things, to flag and mark suspected scammers.

What is The “Romance Scam?”

The plague known as the “Romance Scam” (typically originates from Nigeria but not exclusively so) involves creating a fake profile and then trying to con the victim into sending money using emotional manipulation. This plague has infested the entire dating site industry and is most common in free dating sites where there is no barrier to entry. The scam goes like this: the scammer creates a fake profile of an attractive male or a female. The scammer will then initiate contact and try to create an emotional bond with the victim. The scammer will appear to be “traveling” or “working abroad” or on a “business trip” to West Africa or any other country where the scammer is located. After creating an emotional bond (but never meeting in person), by some “great misfortune” the scammer will “get stranded” in a third world country, having “lost all his money” or even “detained by police”. The heart melting love letters will be accompanied by a plea for your financial assistance. As ridiculous as it sounds, thousands of victims fall prey to this ploy every year and find themselves driving to the nearest Western Union to make a wire transfer.

At SantaMatch the profile approval requirement eliminates this cesspool and keeps SantaMatch scam and spam free. The only fee on SantaMatch is the affordable mandatory profile approval fee, which is used to pay the staff who actually physically review each profile individually.

Comprehensive Privacy and Truste.org Certified

You can read our Privacy Policy and more importantly you can see Truste.org’s logo at the bottom of this page. That means our site gets reviewed annually by the non-profit organization Truste.org to make sure that our privacy policies comply with their standards. You can read more about our license at Truste.org’s website. Also, if you haven’t noticed yet, our home page does not allow for visitors to browse. Other dating sites that allow visitors to browse (or people who take 10 seconds to fill in their email address) make your profile visible to your office coworkers, exes, stalkers, family and the rest of the world. Not on SantaMatch. As you will see, our privacy settings are even more extensive but you will have to sign up to find out.

No Questionable Billing Practices

As mentioned already, the only fee at SantaMatch is the affordable one-time profile approval fee which lasts for one year and keeps SantaMatch scam-free with people who are looking to date. Other than that, SantaMatch is 100% free as there are no other charges or auto-renewals. The profile approval requirement is important because it also deters and eliminates pranksters, married people, “free dating site bums”, NSA seekers, etc. It is especially important for females’ safety since offenders can easily be traced “just in case” through their financial records. It also works to maintain a certain level of civility and quality among our members.

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Isn’t it a great thing when you can go to a dating site and browse profiles before you signed up? Wouldn’t that save you trouble? Well guess what. It may save you some work and you may know in advance who’s there but now take the position of those who are already on the site. Would you want your profile displayed to any passer-by at the site or someone who just fills in an email address and a couple of details? Would you like to have your office co-workers, exes, stalkers, family and acquaintances glancing over your dating profile as it is visible to the whole world? For most people the answer is no. We decided to respect that.

When we initially designed SantaMatch this was one of our basic premises and we vowed not to have browsing on our home page and make it as hard as possible for people to sign up so that no casual passer-by may be able to glance over your profiles. While we may have shot ourselves in the foot and it may have cost us and deterred some people from signing up, we are confident that we earned the appreciation of our members who are willing to pay the symbolic profile approval fee just to have their profiles kept private.

On SantaMatch you can even easily remove your profile from the view of other members. That means in full privacy settings your profile is visible only to 5 people at a time: your matches. Now that is a great thing!

It’s about time! This affiliate program is open to all website owners, Google AdWords publishers and legitimate email marketers who comply with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (i.e. not spammers!).

Just sign up! SantaMatch has the highest conversion rates in the business! The link is here: http://www.santamatch.com/idevaffiliate/

The full press release can be seen here:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/santamatch/online_dating/prweb2370774.htm

Yahoo Personals has blatantly copied some of our features without acknowledgement or request for permission.  Should we be complimented or outraged? Either way, they will never match SantaMatch (no pun intended) in effectiveness, efficiency and price! We have many features coming up which are all designed with one thing in mind: to help you find and connect with your perfect match with minimum hassle. In that, no relationship site can compete with America’s #1 Introduction Site.

We have incorporated some of your feedback into our matching module. As of November 27, we are allowing members to set their own matching radius with the minimum radius set to 50 miles and the maximum to 5000 miles (“any distance”). We do believe that love is worth traveling for a bit over an hour… but apparently for some of you it isn’t so there you are. You can set your matching radius by going to My Profile and scrolling down. Just keep in mind that if you set your radius to 50 miles and you do not live in a large metropolitan area, you may be limiting your number of matches.

We have also incorporated smoking into the matching algorithm. From now on, members who request only 100% perfect matches and do not date smokers will not be introduced to smokers, social smokers or smokers who are trying to quit. Checking “almost matches” though will override that feature.  In the past smoking was not part of the matching algorithm for the simple fact that it is a changeable lifestyle/habit.

SantaMatch – Hassle Free Online Dating

Okay, we’re back. So there it is, a few common rants we hear and the answers to them:

1. No, we do not guarantee that within 24 hours you will be hooked up with the love of your life. What the hell are you thinking? Even Santa cannot deliver that quick. Although it can happen, it sounds ridiculous that some people expect in one day, what sometimes takes a lifetime to achieve: finding a truly perfectly compatible partner.  What we can say with confidence, is that if you are patient enough, you will be introduced to someone you like and likes you back. We do our best.

2. Why do people who claim to be seriously looking not take a few minutes to read? SantaMatch is not a “search and bombard with emails” type of dating site. In fact, it’s not a dating site. There are a few difference but it’s not rocket science to figure them out. There is plenty of information on our website explaining every aspect of how it works and what you should do to maximize your odds of finding someone compatible. Take a few minutes to read, it will make a world of difference.

3. Yes, you are introduced also to “almost matches” by default but you can easily disable that. The reason for “almost matches” is that many people do not fill their profile criteria properly and unintentionally narrow their matches too much, then complain why they don’t get enough matches.

SantaMatch is 99% free but not 100% free – and that’s a good thing. 100% free dating sites – well, there are tons of them out there. Sounds like a good idea, right? Wrong! How do we know? We tried it. Currently, SantaMatch has a one time admission fee (“profile approval fee”), which if you compare it to traditional dating sites, represent a saving of 90%-98%. We think that’s cheap enough, especially considering the efficient and scientific introduction module that saves you time and hassle. After all, your time is worth something, isn’t it?

So what’s wrong with 100% free? In a perfect world, it would be a great idea. However, in the real world it is equivalent to leaving the door to your house open and expecting only nice people to show up. Unfortunately, that is not realistic. 100% free dating sites by nature will attract the lowest common denominator in society and people who shouldn’t be on dating sites in the first place: married people, teenage pranksters, scammers, spammers, stalkers, etc. Harrassment, bullying, scamming and spamming can be pervasive.  In addition, many sites make your profile public, i.e. your ex, your stalkers, your office-coworkers, etc. can all view your profile. Being familiar with the online dating world, that’s not something you’d want. So you do all that and for what? to save a few dollars? Worth it only if you are on welfare checks.

So what we say: if you are serious about dating and meeting someone special, spend those few bucks and go to a place which is both safer and has people who are seriously looking like you. And no, you don’t need to spend $30-$60/month like most paid dating sites. SantaMatch offers you the best features of any relationship site at a ridiculously low one time admission fee.

To begin with, I’d say that I truly hate writing blogs. Frankly, I never understood why people write blogs and who in the world would even bother reading, unless there’s something uniquely informative about it – like this one…. Oh well, I got the order from the boss (i.e. “Santa”) to write this blog and so I’ll do it, like any good elf.

And the subject of today’s post, my little minions, is transparency. Anyone of you who has ever tried a traditional dating site will tell you how much more transparent SantaMatch is compared to those dating sites (we will not mention by name). There’s a reason for that. SantaMatch was designed to take the hassle out of online dating, and a part of it is by making the site as transparent as possible. Here are a few examples (but not all because I am not Dostoyevsky):

1. Did you ever notice that on traditional dating sites you have to dig 9 pages deep and search with candle light to find the cost? Just look at the home page of SantaMatch and you will see the difference – we have nothing to hide. After all, it costs 90%-98% (!) less and provides a superior experience.

2. No questionable billing practices. We do not have auto-renewals – a practice common among most dating sites. In fact, even if you asked for it, we don’t offer that choice. That means at the end of the approval term (which is a standard 1 year) you can wait as long as you want to get approved if you wish so but you won’t have any surprises on your credit card report. We also do not have free trial periods which require your credit card and charge it at the end of the free trial. Many of these singles who got burned in the past by these kind of billing practices are many times surprised how simple and affordable it is at SantaMatch and how straight forward the site is.

3. SantaMatch is the only relationship site that tags profiles that are suspected to be inactive. What do we mean by “suspected”? Because there is no way of knowing. These are profiles of valid members (i.e. members who did not cancel their accounts) who for some reason didn’t check their mailbox for a couple of weeks. There can be a few reasons for that (for example, member is not getting our notifications for some reasons)  and many times those members become active again. Either way, that’s another hassle that we save our members.

4. We spend a significant part of our resources and time to fight the plague known as the Nigerian scam/scum to save you from having to deal with those low-lives. Small, less known dating sites will typically have hoards of scam profiles because they help them fool people into paying. No such thing at SantaMatch. We spend a significant part of our time and resources to fight that cesspool, and although they are rarely approved so you can easily avoid them, we still don’t want our members to become prey to those wretched criminals. This is a subject for another blog post but either way, if you only knew how much effort we make to weed out those scumbags, you’d probably appreciate SantaMatch even more. It’s not as simple as you might think – most African countries are blocked from accessing SantaMatch but the scammers use proxy servers and possibly even full time employees in the US to keep creating those fake profiles that we delete (we believe we delete about 99% of them before any of you even gets to see them – the rest are flagged by you folks and get deleted).

Anyway, enough for now, I think you are getting the gist of it: SantaMatch has the highest transparency of any dating site that you may have tried and please challenge us if it’s not the case.

Yes, it is real and 100% of profiles are real by real people who signed up just like you! I guess we get that question fairly often because of Santa, which some of you believe is not a real person…  but would you ask the same question if the site was called cupidmatch.com? Cupid is not real either.

So now to the second question: why Santa? Well, you try to pay your bills and making ends meet working 2 days a year with those ungrateful kids. Add to that soaring heating bills and quite understanbly good ole Santa was broke and looking for ways to complement his income, so we offered him to introduce singles. He took us on the offer.

Next question, please.

And now another one of my favorite videos but you probably have seen it already (and if not, where the hell have you been??): Leave Britney Alone

So here we are SantaMatchers. I was given this task of writing a blog for SantaMatch, but if one of you has better writing skills and has a few minutes to spend every week, contact me through the comments here or through our santamatch.com email address and maybe you could help.

Anyway, this blog was just created to help communicate, explain and address your issues, SantaMatchers.

The most important thing we wish to communicate is how SantaMatch works. Although it is on our website (http://www.santamatch.com/gd.php?content=include/howitworks.html), I suspect few of you bothered reading, so here it is in short:

SantaMatch was created as an improvement on traditional dating sites. We tried dating sites like match.com and Eharmony and decided that we can combine the best features of each, get rid of the annoying features and add add some improvements of our own and come up with a more effective system. The result: an introduction site.  What it means is that instead of searching for hours and writing/receiving hundreds of emails to/from people you have nothing in common with, you are introduced to perfect matches (“almost perfect matches” was added later and you can change that in your member settings) on a one-on-one basis. You either indicate interest or remove that match and move on. The idea was initially to have only one active introduction at a time but we figured that would be too much pressure. So 5 sounded like a nice number so we arbitrarily set the maximum number of active introductions to 5. This is as hassle-free as it gets and since we assume that your time is worth money – SantaMatch will save you a lot of time and hassle. In traditional dating sites, the fact that people bulk mail, results in a lot of frustration since over 80% of emails get no reply.

You will see the the words “hassle” and “hassle-free” are mentioned frequently on SantaMatch. That’s because we believe that “hassle” on traditional dating sites, the fact that people spend too much time, writing too many emails – is what causes frustration which in turn makes people rude and offensive all too often. Add to that monthly membership fees (there are none on SantaMatch) and you can see why most people typically leave traditional dating sites after a short time.

Well, this is it for now, I am already getting tired from writing so much.

Oh yes, and read this if you just joined: http://www.santamatch.com/gd.php?content=include/howitreallyworks.html

Now to my favorite internet video (no, that’s not really related to anything): Charlie Bit Me