LOS ANGELES (Legal Newsline) – A Florida man has filed a class action lawsuit against the popular dating app Tinder over its recent announcement that it will be charging users $2.99 per month.
Billy Warner filed his lawsuit March 6 in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. He claims he would have reconsidered his decision to download and use the Tinder app if he had known that it would one day no longer be free.
Warner is represented by the Law Offices of Todd M. Friedman in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Warner says he is “entrenched in the use” of Tinder and has foregone the use of other online dating sites.
A screenshot included in Billy Warner’s complaint
“Defendant offered these free services with the goal in mind of enlisting a user base of tens or hundreds of millions of users, with the ultimate goal of later changing the rules of participation and deceptively and forcibly migrating a substantially percentage of its user based to a paid subscription model,” the complaint says.
“Had Defendant warned Plaintiff that additional fees may apply, Plaintiff would have reconsidered Plaintiff’s use of Defendant’s app.
“Failure to disclose that additional fees may apply unfairly induced Plaintiff’s downloading of Defendant’s app, as he reasonably believed it to be a ‘free’ service.”
Warner was notified by the app that he was out of “likes” on March 5, and that he could purchase unlimited “likes” for $2.99 per month.
He called it a bait-and-switch ploy and says the app’s users became addicted to it.
He alleges violations of the California False Advertising Act and the Business and Professions Code.
The suit seeks statutory penalties and restitutions of funds obtained by Tinder.
U.S. District Court for the Central District of California case number 2:15-cv-01668.
From Legal Newsline: Reach editor John O’Brien at [email protected].
