Online dating can be an exhausting and frustrating process no matter what the app is, your putting yourself out there and maybe your simply not getting the results you want back. There is consistent complaints from both men and women that I know that someone can be creepy or simply unattractive in text responses or the roles are reversed and you simply don’t know how to turn an online interaction into a real date.

Enter the controversial service called VIDA (Virtual Dating Assistants). A service where users can paying a company to have “closers” run their dating profiles so they don’t have endure tedious trials and tribulations of it all. Yes, you can pay someone to run your Tinder, OK Cupid, etc. The site does offer the service to men and women, but Quartz which covered VIDA in deep detail in this article says most of the customers are men.

The ‘Closers’ get $1.75 for every phone number they get for their customers. It’s a website founded by dating expert Scott Valdez, who has authored the books Women On Demand and The Automatic Date Transition. 

The company also provides ‘matchmakers’ and ‘profile writers’ to handle other tasks in the quest to turn swipes into “ok, let’s meet at (INSERT PLACE) for drinks”.

It’s a pretty ethically questionable practice, but when there are over 12 million Tinder matches in a day, why should we be surprised by this? It’s not an entirely new concept as services like have been around for some time, but their interior practices have never been revealed nearly as much in this Quartz article in which author Chole Rose Stuart-Ulin worked as a ‘closer’ to get a full grasp of what VIDA does for it’s clients.

Let’s just be happy we don’t have to date like they did in the 80’s with this HILARIOUS vhs dating service….. it’s cringe comedy at it’s finest!