Husband has emails from Match.com

[CluelesslyCurious]

Hi all, have name changed for this one as quite frankly it’s embarrassing! For the sake of this thread I will refer to husband as “DH” although he’s far from that.

Was getting the DC ready for school yesterday when DD handed me DH’s phone. I was reaching to put it on the bedside table and happened to glance down at the screen and see that he had an email from Match.com. Just for context I’ve never looked through his phone or felt the need to. Immediately my heart began to race for reasons that are obvious!

I waited until he had come back from dropping the kids off and confronted him about it. He acted confused and said “I don’t know why would I be on match.com? It’s a spam email.” I told him to pass me his phone so I could see if it was just spam as I feel I was entitled to look to see if what he was saying was true. I typed in “Match.com” in the search bar of his emails so I could scroll through.

There were lots of emails, most of them unopened but they all mentioned him by NAME! For example, Hi , you have two profile views. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I clicked on the link and it did in fact take me to the match.com login page. I told him to login and he claimed there’s nothing for him to login to. I continued to scroll through the emails in an attempt to find a potential email that would show if he had signed up but couldn’t find anything.

May I add whilst I was doing this he was berating me calling me “insecure” and “crazy” although I hadn’t gone fishing for anything nor suspected him of such a thing up until I happened to see the email. I feel I had the right to look as his wife because if I had emails from a dating website I am pretty sure he would have something to say. I felt like I was being gaslighted. As I had somewhere to be I left it at that and as for now he thinks I believe his version of events but I have a horrible feeling in my gut that there is so much more to uncover.

Wise users of Mumsnet please give me some advice! Am I crazy?

I'm only speaking from my experience of cheaters, liars, gamblers, addicts, and so on. Feel free to have your own life experience.

I was signed up in Match.com very briefly. I realised I had to pay and so I switched to other apps. This makes me raise two points:
If I got mails from Match.com afterwards I would quickly classified it as spam, because they send emails very often. So odd that he didn’t, especially if he didn’t sign up himself.

Secondly, you could try to retrieve password in other dating apps/websites. If he used his email in match.com, chances are he used it in other sites and you can usually find out if the account exists in the retrieve password part. If the email doesn’t exist in their database it tells you.

Please don’t trivialise my experience either. Berating me, calling me “crazy and insecure” and telling me how “unattractive” it is to be so insecure when I was merely calmly asking him what the email was, in my opinion is a form a gaslighting. If the shoe was on the other foot I couldn’t imagine reacting so angrily and could understand his concerns by dating website emails on how wife’s phone.

Excuse the typos that meant to say “of dating websites on his wife’s phone”

Thank you all for your responses. There are a lot of people here who seem to have been getting similar emails without joining either. So I am conflicted here.

Unfortunately, unless he has an iPad / computer linked to his phone, it is too late to "check his phone" he will either change his phone log in, keep it glued to his thigh, or have already erased any inscriptions.
You could try logging into tinder with his dating email address & ask for email reset, just to check. But he will get the alert to that request.
You could search for his name with your location, that might find him.
But my feeling is its too late
You could go through his phone contacts, for anomalies
Look at his bank statements...
Its all pretty horrible.

He may have joined the free service. So no bank records. Easier to join yourself with a throwaway email account and look for him...

@Retz1212 i couldn't cope

100% agree! It's a little bit scary isn't it 😅

I came across your thread yesterday and thought it's a bit weird that he's getting this email....BUT - what are the chances - this morning I had a completely unexpected email in my mailbox, starting with 'Hello MY NAME', from a dating service. Generic 'come attend our next event' email promotion. At first I had no idea where this is coming from, then I remembered that I went on a sort of speed dating/singles mingle event that was organised by them many years ago. I don't even remember when, but I am with my current partner for more than 4 years and I didn't attend any such events, or interacted with this website/provider, since meeting him. Obviously impossible to say for me whether or not your partner is innocent, but just wanted to chip in that sometimes such promotions can come through even if it's literally been years since the last interaction.

There’s a bunch of people on this thread who sound like they’d fall for the Microsoft tech support scam as long as the caller used their real name.

Yeah, that was my first thought. The people suggesting you can't possibly get named emails or emails saying you've got notifications unless you sign up seem to have no clue how spam works. Even big sites do this (linkedin is terrible for harvesting your email from other people).

I've got gmail (which has an excellent spam filter), never sign up for mailing lists and unsubscribe from everything but I still get a couple of these month in my spam folder and the odd few a year get through.

One way to rule it out completely would be to find out if the profile is on the American site or not. I only found that out because I emailed the UK help address (I couldn't get on the site because my internet provider was blocking it for some reason), but if there is a way you can try to log into his profile on both sites, or at least the UK one, that could help.

But also even if there is a profile doesn't mean he signed up, just that his email address was used...I had a profile but couldn't access it, and have no idea whether it had a photo or any other details.

Yes I get emails from LinkedIn saying people have been looking at my profile. I’m not on there.

Somebody on this thread basically accused me of falling for phishing from match.com.

I didn't it was a genuine account that was set up with my email address, I spoke to customer service in UK and then they sent me to the US customer service where it was sorted out for a time.

I am a computer scientist.

Did you mean to quote me on this?

I was thinking that if he's not read them he's obvs not looking so not active but then I realised that he will get the email but will also be in the match.com inbox where he could read them there.

Calling someone ‘crazy’ and ‘insecure’ for reacting to something they are actually doing, but using those words to deny doing it - is a form of gaslighting.

exactly what happened to me @ClaireEclair 🤷🏼‍♀️

Fwiw, one of my email addresses was used to set up a Match.com account recently and I was absolutely bombarded with emails for a few days until I could get it shut down. It was really quite upsetting as my first thought was that it was a horrible joke by someone I knew- the email address was one I used to use on LinkedIn. Fortunately the emails had “my” profile photo on, and it wasn’t me, or anything like me. I haven’t RTWT, sorry, so I don’t know if you’ve updated with more evidence, but this clearly does happen to innocent people occasionally because it happened to me.

LOL @Courtjobby - Computer Scientist here too - while I quite enjoyed the process of working out what had happened, and knew enough to able to use a VPN to get access to the US site, I couldn't close down the account as I didnt have a US phone number. Interesting that the UK Match.co.uk people helped you - I just got told it was not their problem as they were separate companies.....

I've had a few US company signups with a "version" of my gmail account (which is from the first days of gmail so no chance anyone else had it) not including the dot between my first and second names. I still can't work out how they are verifying that email address with their customer, unless there is an option to do verification via phone only for those companies.....

Please keep us updated OP

I've had these emails (with my name, which is also I my email) and I've 100% never signed up.

Please don’t just forget about this. If he was a good partner with nothing to hide he wouldn’t react nastily and would understand why you were concerned and try to reassure you. Putting his phone on aeroplane mode is a big red flag. Then add to this the email from match.com 🚩 🚩🚩. I’d insist on looking through his phone. His password for match might be saved on his phone (you know when you log into a website and iPhone let’s you see your passwords, have a look at them and see if he’s saved the log in for match, or any other dodgy sites!)
What were the other apps you found?

If he was a good partner with nothing to hide he wouldn’t react nastily and would understand why you were concerned and try to reassure you. Putting his phone on aeroplane mode is a big red flag.

Sorry but this is bullshit. There is no way to tell guilt or innocence by reaction. Just as many cheaters would turn on a charm offensive and be all like “oh babe I’d never do that, you know me, I love you” “you’re the best thing ever to happen in my life, I’d not risk that” blah blah blah. If it were that easy to tell lie from truth, no woman would ever be hoodwinked, con artists would not exist, and politicians would actually do what they said they would.

And aeroplane mode is not a red flag at all. It’s just a way to have silent mode without the screen lighting up with banners, without vibration and saves your battery power. Tons of people use it as their silent mode. I do.