Bad press is roiling the wedding industry yet again. Here’s what Eventective does to stay out of the headlines.
Post highlights:
- The wedding industry is under renewed scrutiny, with recent federal investigations and media attention highlighting fraud concerns.
- Scams and digital fraud are evolving, making both user vigilance and platform protection essential.
- Eventective handles 47K+ event inquiries each month. Most are verified automatically through smart tech, while our team personally reviews the rest.
- Eventective’s focus on quality and proactive safeguards protects event businesses and builds lasting trust.
Last month, one of the longest-serving senators in the history of the United States Senate put the wedding industry squarely in his crosshairs, calling on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the business practices of The Knot.
It’s not the first time a spotlight has been cast on alleged fraud and deception in the industry, and, with a whistleblower campaign ongoing, it will surely not be the last.
Of course, scams and fraud are a part of the digital landscape that is unlikely to go away any time soon, if ever. Anyone who has ever gotten an email from a “Nigerian prince” or looked two or three times at an all-too convincing phishing attempt knows well enough that scams on the internet are as old as the commercial availability of the internet itself, and that they will keep evolving.
So, sure, stay vigilant out there as scammers adjust their tactics and grow ever more sophisticated. But don’t confuse the ongoing need to cultivate your own digital savviness with the notion that no one else out there has your back, at least as far as Eventective is concerned. When you trust a digital product or platform with sensitive information, you should absolutely expect that platform to be doing a great deal behind the curtain to protect you from the schemes of the moment.
Those unfortunate headlines in mind, here’s a peek behind our particular curtain at what we do to shield the businesses who use us from bad actors masquerading as party planners.
Blending technology and people to stamp out scams
Keeping up with scammers is a never-ending game of Whac-a-Mole, but, aggravating as it is, it isn’t particularly difficult or resource-intensive one to win most of the time, especially once you’ve got a basic system in place.
Of course, the most important ingredient of success isn’t time or people or tools. Rather, it’s the relentless resolve to deliver quality that is paramount.
Here at Eventective, we start with the expectation that our people will not cut those corners and we support them with technology that filters their focus toward the tougher calls.
In 2025, we’ve fielded an average of almost 47,000 inquiries from party, wedding, and event planners per month.
The vast majority of those inquiries can be handled on the tech side, using things like IP address detection, names, contact information, etc. to ferret out the real from the fake. More than three quarters of those inquiries are approved automatically, while about 1% are automatically canceled.
Of course, that still leaves more than 20 percent of the leads, or 10,000 inquiries per month(!), somewhere in between—not clearly fake, but not obviously real either. And that’s where our content and outreach team comes into the picture.
They are trained on the common tells of a scam, and they go through those unapproved leads one by one throughout the course of the day, including after hours. Only around 5 to 10 percent of those typically get removed from our platform, but, to us, we’d rather be right that the lead is real than deliver it right away and risk passing along junk to the businesses that trust us.
There’s one other secret weapon that helps us catch scams: the feedback loop from our own community of event businesses. By regularly engaging with them and encouraging them to report anything that seems suspicious, we’re able to detect scams that may be simmering at a “low boil” before they go far and wide. Yes, the old see-something, say-something rule applies to digital spaces too. By the way, if you do, here’s how to let us know. Just in the last few weeks, we spotted and shut down a Zoom scam thanks in part to our own tipsters.
When it’s a scam vs. when it’s “ghosting”
Despite having all of these safety measures in place, we know the next new scam is around the corner and some of those will inevitably slip through the cracks. Elbow grease—in the form of regularly adjusted filters and frequently adjusted documentation—is what helps us stay on top of things.
Even so, we also spend a fair amount of time educating our businesses on best practices.
Just because a party planner reaches out and then disappears, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve fallen prey to a scam. Most planners prize speedy replies, and once they’ve found what they need, they may very well go radio silent.
That’s why—in parallel to all our efforts around fraud prevention—we preach the importance of quick response times by phone or by email to avoid the feeling of being “ghosted.” Sure, if you don’t hear back from a planner on our platform, it’s possible that the planner might not be real. But because of the guardrails we have in place, it’s far, far more likely that someone else made the connection first.
Proof in our plan options
Our passion for quality and our pride in the platform we’ve built is what allows us to pair the best customer service in the industry with the best prices and most flexible terms.
Don’t just take our word for it. Here’s what our clients are saying:
We know how important lead quality is to the businesses that advertise with us, and we want those businesses to be able to see it for themselves without an enormous financial commitment. That’s why we offer a courtesy profile option and discounted promotional offers that span months not weeks. It’s also why our terms include a generous and straightforward cancellation policy.
We want to make sure you have every opportunity possible to determine whether Eventective will actually work for your business when you’re starting out. And if you find that you aren’t getting much value out of the platform at any point, we’re not going to make you stick around.
