{"id":107643,"date":"2011-06-21T14:53:47","date_gmt":"2011-06-21T09:53:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/?p=107643"},"modified":"2011-06-21T14:53:47","modified_gmt":"2011-06-21T09:53:47","slug":"beautiful-people-dating-website-denies-pr-stunt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2011\/06\/21\/beautiful-people-dating-website-denies-pr-stunt.html","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Beautiful People&#8217; Dating Website Denies PR Stunt"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A PR firm has denied claims a story about a dating website banning 30,000 ugly people was just a publicity stunt, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/newsbeat\/13841257\"><strong><span style=\"color: #000080;\">reports the BBC&#8217;s Newsbeat<\/span><\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Beautifulpeople.com gets existing users to vote on whether or not someone&#8217;s attractive enough to join. But the site&#8217;s boss says it was hit by a virus which let tens of thousands of people join without passing that test.<\/p>\n<p>An internet security expert had raised concerns about the story but the site&#8217;s PR company, Golden Goose, has hit back insisting it&#8217;s true.<\/p>\n<p>Felicity Hardingham, a spokeswoman for the firm said: &#8220;Beautiful People had to refund over \u00a361,000 to people who paid for premium services who were then rejected.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;37,000 people signed up when the rating system was down, and 30,000 of them were rejected.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Most of them have now been sent an email apologizing and saying they were &#8220;wrongly admitted.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In total 5.5 million people have been rejected by the site which claims to have 700,000 members around the world.<\/p>\n<p>In the original statement Greg Hodge, the site&#8217;s managing director, said: &#8220;We got suspicious when tens of thousands of new members were accepted, many of whom were no oil painting.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We responded immediately, repairing the damage from the Shrek virus and putting every new member [to the vote].<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We have sincere regret for the unfortunate people who were wrongly admitted to the site and who believed, albeit for a short while, that they were beautiful,&#8221; he added.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Beautifulpeople.com gets existing users to vote on whether or not someone&#8217;s attractive enough to join. But the&#8230;<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":107543,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[28599,28596,28597,28598],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107643"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}