A DATING WEBSITE which screens applicants before they join, attempting to ensure that only good-looking people are able to join, has admitted to being hit by a malicious attack that allowed ‘ugly’ people to become members.

BeautifulPeople.com only allows people to gain access to its dating functions once they have submitted a photograph of themselves, which is then voted on by full members – with only those deemed attractive then given full permission.

The exclusivity of the site has been its main draw – and the site gained much prominence on these shores after it emerged that Irish and Polish people were the ‘ugliest’ in terms of rejected applicants.

But today the site admitted that its applications procedure had been circumvented as a result of an attack on it last month – which led to tens of thousands of new members being accepted in a very short time.

Some of those members were “no oil painting”, the website’s managing director Greg Hodge said, referring to the attack as “the Shrek virus”.

He told the Telegraph:

We responded immediately, repairing the damage from the Shrek virus and putting every new member back into the rating module for a legitimate and democratic vote. The result is that we have lost over 30,000 recent members.

We have sincere regret for the unfortunate people who were wrongly admitted to the site and who believed, albeit for a short while, that they were beautiful.

Hodge offered some only-slightly-comforting words of sympathy for the members who had lost their status:

It must be a bitter pill to swallow, but better to have had a slice of heaven then never to have tasted it at all.

An investigation into the source of the attack is ongoing; it is thought that the attack may have been engineered by a former member of staff.

Security experts have questioned whether the ‘attack’ may actually be an elaborate publicity stunt – the site has apparently not informed any security companies of a vulnerability, and existing members have not been warned about any breach of their personal details.

A support line has been set up for users who were removed from the site.