When a hookup site states that you can “sign up for free” and “get laid for life,” well, sir, that’s gonna grab everyone’s attention. That’s what LocalHookup.com claims to do. Could this site be the answer to your desires? After all, LocalHookup states on its welcome page, “make your free profile now and get laid tonight.” We figure this site is either the best thing since flavored condoms or a complete letdown. Read our review of LocalHookup and find out — does it really get you laid?

— Pros and Cons —

Pros

• Insert crickets chirping here; there are no pros.

Cons

• Exceedingly difficult to access the “free” version of the site
• Difficult to cancel the three-day trial before it auto-renews
• Full of fake profiles
• Constant upsell offers for other services

— In-Depth LocalHookup Review —

For millennia, apart from securing food sources, finding shelter and safeguarding the knowledge base received from the elders, the male brain has been preoccupied with one thing — getting laid.

In the modern age, it no longer requires demonstrative feats of strength and brawn — such as slaying a wooly mammoth with your bare hands. No, we are fortunate enough to live in the digital age. Nowadays all you need is a good “digital game” to get laid. The key to this modern quest for “mates” is finding a reliable hookup site.

As you know, we do a lot of the dirty work for you. We comb through hundreds of hookup sites to find those gems, those precious sites that will actually help you hook up in the real world. Recently, we turned our eyes on LocalHookup.com. This site is quite boastful and full of promises about how you can get laid the same day that you sign up. Having been around the block a few times, such promises only serve to raise our suspicions. Here is what we found out.

— Is It Really Free? —

One of the things that LocalHookup touts the most — besides its promises of getting you laid — is that it is free. After all, the word “free” appears at least ten times on its welcome page. You see it in phrases such as “simply fill out your free profile, upload your pictures, and start hooking up with hotties near you.” There is even a pink-colored banner across its registration form that reads “100% FREE!”

We don’t know about you, but we took that to mean that LocalHookup was free — and a few of us even have some bonafide book learnin’ under our belts.

The sad reality is that LocalHookup is in fact (please take a seat gentlemen, or place some soft pillows around you — we wouldn’t want you to hurt yourselves when you hear the news) is NOT free.

“How can that be?” you must be asking. “If it’s on the internet, it must be true,” some others must be arguing. Allow us to shed some light on this issue. LocalHookup takes to an extreme the concept of baiting users with a free trial membership only to upsell them later. To be honest, that is common with hookup sites — it’s not a bad thing in and of itself — as long as they are not overtly and grossly sneaky about it.

LocalHookup goes out of its way to create a false impression of being free — far more than any other site that we have seen before. Technically, if you read their TOS you will find that they are not defrauding you. They are just using well-crafted verbiage to create the impression that they want on an impressionable audience. Let’s be honest, who is more impressionable than a horny guy wanting to get laid.

— How LocalHookup Tries to “Get You” —

Filling out the registration form is fast and simple. The site asks very little of you beyond your choice for username, password, valid email and date of birth. You can complete the registration form in 30 seconds or less.

However, once you submit your data, you are redirected to a page that offers you FOUR payment options. One is a 3-day trial for $2.97. Hidden in very faint and small print is the disclaimer that this “trial” automatically renews at the rate of $39.95 per month. You are also presented with one-month, three-month and six-month memberships at a cost of $29.95, $74.85 and $ 119.70, respectively.

Hidden, like a cowardly mouse in the upper right-hand corner of the page, is a hypertext link that reads, “No thanks, remind me later.” If you think that by clicking on that you will be taken to the “free” version, guess again.

All five of our testers were never redirected to the free version. Instead, they were sent to a page advising them to check their email for a validation link. The funny part was that they had already validated their registration by clicking on the verification links sent to them. They were caught in this endless loop where the only option was to leave or to go back to the upgrade page and pay for a membership plan.

Maybe our testers were outliers. Maybe accessing the free version of LocalHookup is easier for others — we won’t discard that possibility. However, having been covering the online dating industry for years, all we can tell you is that our impression was that LocalHookup makes accessing the free version as difficult as possible (in our case, impossible) in order to wear new users down and have them pay for a membership.

— There’s More —

While in real life we would avoid LocalHookup merely for the experience that we had at registration, in order to provide our readers with an in-depth look, we had to get past the site’s front door. Of the five testers that paid for the 3-day trial membership, all of them were charged for a full month at the price of $39.95. Two of them received subsequent charges of $28.87.

Again, it is not LocalHookup defrauding its users, they spell it out in the fine print and TOS. The “trial” membership needs to be canceled at least 48 hours before it expires. Since it only lasts 72 hours, unless you cancel it immediately after purchasing it, you are on the hook for the full $39.95. Also, if you do not cancel a supplemental service that by default you are signed up for at registration, you are billed another $28.87 three weeks later on top of the $39.95. This secondary product is some sort of sex cam service that you deactivate by unchecking a very small checkbox at the bottom of the registration screen.

Yes, we were pissed off and we assume you would be too. However, we must say it again, they do disclose all of this, so they are within the law.

— Features and User Experience —

Honestly, what sort of features and user experience do you think we got out of LocalHookup? It was an absolute joke. It is basically a cesspool of fake profiles intermingled with “promotional offers” that try to lure you into other services that require you to pay additional money. The user experience was so grotesque that we had to bail on our testing after only one day. Keep in mind, we usually test other sites for a minimum of three days. Yes, LocalHookup was that bad in our eyes.