(U.S.A.) Army lieutenant Peter Burks was killed in Iraq in 2007 but that didn’t stop dating website True.com from swiping his picture and using it in ads to attract women to their website.
The picture was spotted on two ad spots at free dating site PlentyofFish.com with the words ”Military Man Searching for Love” and ”Soldiers Want You!”
The Burks family is now planning to sue both PlentyOfFish.com and True.com for their parts in using the photo without permission.
The family says Burks died just days after the photo was taken and that he definitely didn’t upload the photograph to the website. In fact the photo was being used on a website to help raise funds to provide supplies to troops in Burks’ honor which is likely where the picture was stolen from.
The Burks family also notes that Peter Burks was engaged when he died which makes True.com’s claims of “Soldier’s Want You!” nothing more than a scam to attract users to the site through the use of fake profiles.
In the meantime a representative for PlentyOfFish notes that the website displays ads from hundreds of thousands of advertisers and is not in charge of the ads for those websites. True.com ads were quickly blocked by PlentyOfFish.com after the Burks family notified the website of the issue.
In the meantime True.com’s potential members might want to look for a dating site that doesn’t create fake profiles in order to lure them in.
What might be the most tragic part of the entire ordeal is that True.com founder Herb Vest attacked other dating websites during a 2006 Forbes interview, as he put it at that time:
“We had to establish a wholesome environment for courtship. Internet dating is populated, to a large degree, by criminals and married people.”
It looks like True.com has turned into the exact type of company it hoped to fight against just five years earlier.
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