Here in England Yahoo's Personals service has suddenly been discontinued. If you now try to contact somebody on Yahoo UK Personals you are re-directed to a Match.com site and invited to take out a subscription there, for real money, the implication being that you will then be able to contact the person you want.

Unfortunately however Yahoo 'forgot' to move all their customers over to Match.com, so that even if you do pay Match's subscription you very probably won't be able to contact the person you want, because they are not on Match's database. They are still on Yahoo's.

I complained about this to Yahoo Customer Service, giving the Personals ID of the person I wanted to contact by email, and got a reply that I would simply not be able to contact that person at all. End of story!

Except that it isn't. Because to take money for a service (i.e. putting people in contact with each other) knowing that you cannot provide it (which Yahoo have admitted to me they cannot) is fraud. Fraud is a criminal offence in most jurisdictions of the world, and conspiracy to defraud, of which it seems to me that Yahoo and Match.com are jointly guilty, is even worse. In the UK, a conviction for Fraud carries up to 12 years in prison, and in a post-Enron era it is no longer possible for Chief Executives to use the excuse that they didn't know what was going on in their own company.

I am considering a formal complaint to our Office of Fair Trading who have the power to prosecute, and I should be interested to know from others here if Yahoo are doing the same thing elsewhere? Is Yahoo Personals where you live now re-directing to somebody else's database? Because if not, it may be soon.