Flirtlocal is a dating site that claims to be 100% free. Intrigued as to how effective it is, our reviewers joined and took this site for a spin. Here is our eye-opening Flirtlocal review.

— Pros and Cons —

Pros

• Fast registration process

Cons

• No mobile apps available
• While marketed as “100% free” — it is not
• Full of fake profiles and chat-bots

— Full FlirtLocal Review —

If you’re single and looking, a site dedicated to bringing flirtatious local people together sounds like a dream come true. After all, there must be hundreds — if not thousands — of like-minded people who live within a reasonable distance that are looking for the same thing that you are, right? This notion is generally true. That is one of the main reasons why there are so many dating and hookup sites based on that premise. Recently we came across yet another one. This site is called FlirtLocal.com. It markets itself as being “100% free” with “fun guaranteed.”

Here are the basic facts about FlirtLocal. It claims to have over 1.7 million members as of mid-2017. It is accessible via desktop web browsers and has no mobile-specific apps. The site uses a simple design style offering new members a fast-tracked registration process. The user interface is generic by industry standards, offering a level of search and messaging functionality that most expert online daters would rate as “standard” at best, and “outmoded” at worst. While FlirtLocal does not look cheap, it doesn’t give you the impression of being a cutting edge dating site either.

— Registration Process —

As we had mentioned, the site uses fast-tracked registration. During our evaluation, our testers were able to register on the site in under three minutes. Most of this time was spent waiting for the obligatory email containing a validation link to confirm the registration. In terms of information that you must submit, all of it is account related — selected username and password, date of birth, gender, etc. There are no questionnaires regarding your personality, nor are there any prompts to build a personal profile. Once you click on your validation link, you are in.

— What About My Profile? —

Building a profile, inclusive of uploading a profile picture, is not mandatory on FlirtLocal. Yes, the site does encourage it, but how detailed a profile you have is left entirely up to you. During our testing, half of our testers created highly detailed profiles and the other half purposefully left them blank. This was done to determine if the complexity of a profile played a role in the results obtained from FlirtLocal.

— First Signs of Trouble —

It did not take long for our testers to start detecting the first signs of trouble on the site. Within minutes of entering the member’s area, all of our testers started receiving private messages from supposed registered users of the site. This was the case even with the testers that had blank profiles. That is always a bad sign.

Suspecting chat-bots and fake profiles were at play, we read through FlirtLocal’s terms of service and sure enough had our suspicions validated. The site clearly states that they reserve the right to use fictitious personas and automated messages for marketing and entertainment purposes.

— Wait, Isn’t Flirtlocal Supposed to Be Free? —

When you first visit the welcome page for FlirtLocal it clearly states that it is “100% free.” If you stumble upon some of their promotional pop-up ads across the internet, they all state the same thing. This is why we were perplexed to discover that when you attempted to respond to a message (chat-bot messages, of course) you would immediately be redirected to a membership upgrade page. There you are informed that in order to have access to the site’s full communication feature you had to be a paid member.

The cost for a monthly membership is $29.95. You can also opt to pay $99.95 for six months in advance or $59.95 for three months.

The way that FlirtLocal reconciles the “100% free” claim with reality is that users can join for free. The site claims that paid membership is entirely optional. In our opinion, while technically true, it is grossly disrespectful to its new users. There is nothing that can be done on the site, apart from glancing through partial profiles with the free version. The unmitigated gall of blatantly touting that it is “100% free” when it is not is what irks us most.

— Are There Any Real Women on Flirtlocal? —

The moment we encountered the chat-bot messages and we read the TOS, we began to doubt the entire FlirtLocal platform. We conducted searches as free users and were unable to determine the authenticity or quality of its membership base. When we became paid members the search results were more detailed. This allowed us to properly gauge the users of the site. Unfortunately, what we discovered led us to conclude that FlirtLocal is compromised almost entirely of fake profiles.

Profiles that appeared in the search results of one of our testers also appeared in the search results of other testers claiming to be from an entirely different geographic region. When we cross-referenced the profile pictures found on the site through a reverse image search, we found that many are generic images used on multiple dating sites. Nearly every female profile on the site displayed signs of being disingenuous.

— Paid Sex Cams —

Just when we thought that FlirtLocal could not get worse — guess what? It did. One of the features predominantly displayed on its platform is a section titled “cams.” If you are under the impression that the feature is related to webcam chats with other members, you are wrong. Clicking on that tab redirects you to an access portal for another website that is dedicated to providing live sex cam models for “chat and play.”

On its own, there is nothing wrong with that. At first, we thought to ourselves, at least they give you something for your membership fee. Then we realized, you have to pay extra for this service. Each model charges a different rate by the minute. This can range from 99 cents to $9.99 per minute. Just like you probably are right now, we were left speechless.