Badoo

Badoo begs you for money far too much and offers you a poor initial experience if you're an average male. Harassing me for cash, when you've given me a terrible experience up front by giving me zero replies or interaction, is a joke. I am a decent, tall, good looking guy, but on Badoo I get no messages, no replies, no likes, and no favourites. And yet Badoo expects me to gamble on spending what is a small fortune on the 'chance' of finding a lady I like. I've literally got better luck with putting my money down a drain, as a passing lady may ask me what/why I'm doing that!

1) You have to pay to message someone if you've made the mistake of 'liking' them first. Unless they 'like' you back.

2) You have to pay to see your favourites, and to clear the notification.

3) You have to pay to get a large number of likes per day.

4) You have to pay to get up the rankings.

5) You have to pay for any of the super power features, which aren't super.

6) You have to pay to 'Increase Popularity' and come up earlier on the matches.

7) You have to pay just to get the super power icon, otherwise you look cheap.

8) You have to pay to start new conversations with an absurdly low number of people, meaning it mostly will be men paying for this feature as men tend to get nothing.

9) Even WITH all this begging, if you're using the web version, they show you adverts too!

Finally, if someone from Badoo is reading this: get rid of the "Free" credits joke. "FREE" IS NOT FREE WHEN YOU HAVE TO PAY.

Just to clarify: My favourite was a friend, we agreed we would favourite each other just to test if it really worked. I got zero real favourites from others.

This company can be sumarized in one word - scummy

Lets forget about the fake profiles and all the other stuff that should make you get premium etc.

Lets talk about the payment system.
I am unaware about purchasing anything in this app, yet it had my credit card details (now granted, i might be wrong, but i know for sure that i did not save the details)

The whole payment system is designed around the idea of user buying the most expensive service in error. (I know badoo, dont bother, its designed to make purchases more convenient to the user)

When selecting any premium service, it automaticly selects lifetime premium account for roughly 100 euros with big green button in the middle - proceed. If you click it in mistake, well... say goodbye to your money as the app has one click payment set up.

Requesting an refund is pointless even though consumer has right to a refund of digital service within 14 days of purchase. They claim that as you recieve the benefits of the premium right away, you lose the right to a refund. This would not stand in court and i am starting to think that collective lawsuit is in order as this happens way to often to a lot of people.

Even if this payment was not performed by you, without your presence or consent (somebody gets a hold of your phone for example) this company just ignores it and refuses to refund you anything. I have reported this to their support staff 3 times and it was ignored every single time. This is once again, illegal.

The only way for you to get a refund, is to go to your bank directly and file a refund request, but you can do that only in case that this payment was not done by you as in my case.

Sadly, Badoo is just another generic dating site that preys on lonely people.

The site proclaims that the site is free to use which is erroneously misleading and wrong. Sure, you can join the site free of charge and you can look through profiles free of charge but that's all you can do unless you pay. You can't send messages, you can't see who 'liked' you as the people's faces are all blurred, you can't send gifts or a crush and you can't see who added you as a favourite. Therefore, this site is completely useless unless you pay. If I could see who liked me and I was interested in them I'd perhaps be more inclined to possibly pay; seeing a blurred face is not going to get me to part with my money.

The search facility is truly awful with the site having an 'encounter' and 'people nearby' feature with both using very limited search settings. The encounter search is merely a swipe left or right while the people nearby is a search for people within a set distance from your town/city. Encounter uses - gender, age and distance while People Nearby merely uses – gender and age. There's no body size, height, race etc so you have to trawl through countless profiles of people whom you have no interest in.

While using the people nearby search you can add someone as a favourite so you can find them again on your favourites list. However, when using the encounters, you can't add someone to your favourite list and you'll have to trawl through 100's of profiles using people nearby in the hope you can find that person. Why you can't favourite someone using both methods seems a bit ridiculous.

There are some real people on Badoo as my sociopath ex is on there but there's so many fake profiles, profiles with nothing on them and dead profiles that haven't been logged in to for a long time that it's not worth your time and effort.

Overall, I can't recommend this site as it offers very little and is just one more dating site that puts all of its limited features and ability to message behind a paywall. The days of dating sites genuinely trying to be a low cost service to help people find a partner is over and are now nothing more corporate entities that use every method to make as much money as possible.