Scams

Have you ever swiped right on a Tinder match only to discover her profile isn’t real? Since the famous dating app partnered with mobile identity company TeleSign, it claims spam is down as much as 90%.

Spam has been a growing problem for Tinder– prostitutes masquerading as potential love matches eager to sell their services, hackers using the dating app to obtain valuable user information, and even companies like The Gap aiming to capitalize on the 18-25 market with clever marketing campaigns. (Last month they set up their campaign ads as Tinder user profiles without explicit permission from the company – and were asked to take them down.) Also, there was the incident of a hacker tinkering with their API to match straight men with other straight men, which ended up confusing and embarrassing a lot of users.

Even though Tinder verifies people through their Facebook accounts, many people have become adept at creating fake social media accounts, too. So Tinder’s new deal with Telesign seems to be alleviating the problem.

Telesign works by analyzing massive amounts of real-time and historical data on phone numbers, including associated contact information, phone types, geographies, and carriers. Their technology uses PhoneID verification to determine how potentially risky a phone number is, and whether the number really belongs to the person creating the account. If the score is high (meaning high risk), the user is blocked. Telesign also recommended that Tinder implement rate limits. This means that Tinder can set a limit for the number of accounts created using the same phone number. The companies did not say whether the analyzed information from Tinder users is kept private, or how it could be used by TeleSign or Tinder.

Ryan Ogle, Tinder’s CTO said in a statement: “Once we had TeleSign in place, we were able to block fraudulent accounts in a much more sophisticated way. It’s been 100 percent accurate and we’ve seen about a 90 percent reduction in spam traffic as a result, from day one.”

Tinder has taken other steps to cut back on spammers, including limiting the amount of swipes people can do in a 24-hour period with the free service. If they want to swipe indefinitely (as spam bots often do), they will have to pay for Tinder Plus.

This is another big step for the company, which seems to be making significant changes in recent months. IAC, the parent company of Tinder, has brought in a new CEO, and in March, Tinder rolled out its first paid service, Tinder Plus.

Check out our review of Tinder for more information on this popular dating app.

The FTC has filed its first lawsuit against an online dating company, accusing UK-based JDI Dating of luring customers to pay money through fake profiles the company created.

A settlement between the FTC and JDI Dating prohibits the company from using fake profiles and requires it to refund more than $616,000 to customers. JDI operates 18 websites including cupidswand.com, flirtcrowd.com and findmelove.com.

According to a press release distributed by the FTC on the matter, JDI was tricking customers by offering them a free plan and allowing them to set up profiles and upload photos. Once customers completed this process, they began to receive messages supposedly from other users, but were unable to respond until they bought a paid membership. Membership for the sites ranged anywhere from $10 to $30 per month.

Unfortunately, the profiles that usually attracted paying customers were often virtually generated, so once new members were paying for their subscriptions, they weren't able to communicate with the matches they thought they were getting - because they never existed.

“JDI Dating used fake profiles to make people think they were hearing from real love interests and to trick them into upgrading to paid memberships,” said Jessica Rich, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

The prevalence of fake profiles has long been an issue for online daters, but this new lawsuit is finally shedding some legal light on the problem. Because of this, more online dating companies will probably be re-thinking their freemium services (attracting users with free services and later asking them to pay for certain "privileges" on the site.) Freemium services are often based on how many members join the site - numbers are key in the online dating world, because high numbers attract more people. The more valuable a company's user database, the more likely people would be willing to pay for their matches, because they feel that they are getting more choices.

In addition to generating fake profiles, the FTC found that JDI was also misleading consumers about payments. The company did not inform customers that subscriptions would have recurring charges until the customer canceled the service (which was tricky to find on the site), so many people paid for the site after they stopped using it without realizing it.

Rich added, “Users were charged automatically to renew their subscriptions – often without their consent.”

Again, this is a common practice among online dating sites. Several do have recurring charges, and it's often difficult to figure out how and where on a site to fully cancel services and erase your profile. For example, free dating sites like Plenty of Fish have kept profiles of members who are no longer using the service without clearly explaining to customers how to fully delete them. Although they are not charging for their services, it could be misleading to other daters.

The FTC lawsuit is a positive step in helping companies in the online dating industry clean up their databases and be more honest with the services they provide. We'll see if other companies are named in the future.

Dating app Tinder has had to deal with a lot of security issues, despite the app’s verification system using Facebook Connect.  In theory, because of Facebook’s security measures, only “real people” can join Tinder, so users can sign up with some reassurance the profiles they'll encounter will be real. But lately, this has not been the case.

Spammers and scammers have been able to lure users away from Tinder and onto their sites, typically, with spam bots - fake accounts pretending to be real people that flirt with users in order to redirect them to adult sites - and take their money. In the past, Tinder users could block profiles, but they couldn’t report spam.

According to website Tech Crunch, things have changed. Users can now not only block accounts but also report spam. Tinder also made a technical update to address the issue, and the update was effective at cutting down on the in-app spam. Unfortunately, the spam bots just found another avenue - SMS. Phone spam for Tinder users skyrocketed.

Instead of luring Tinder users away while they are inside the app, the spam bots changed their scripts and started collecting mobile numbers from the users, sending those users text messages with links to the spammers’ websites. 

It can be really misleading for users to receive text messages from spammers who are pretending to be people. One example Tech Crunch used that came from a spam bot read like this: “sorry my phone’s almost dead and out of mins too. If you go on Tinderpages.com ill be there. Im sweetgirl4u on it. Sorry its free tho if you confirm your email.”

Tinder is still racking up complaints, so it seems the technical update hasn’t actually made a difference. According to security researchers, this is beacuse Tinder was successful in getting rid of the in-app spam bots but not the spam bots themselves. Lead researcher Raj Bandyopadhyay explained to how they conducted their research, and what it meant for Tinder:

“Our topic modeler looks for phone number related complaints, and then classifies them using Data Scientist to validate correlation. In this case, we isolated complaints related to Tinder, and then compared them to historical complaints. This gives us a high degree of confidence that the spike is specific to Tinder activity and not just an overall spike in spam. In addition, it is important to re-emphasize that this is a pattern we have frequently seen – fraudsters migrating to phone after being thwarted online.”

So it seems text messages are becoming the spam bot avenue of choice, since online technology has improved so much. Now, mobile security needs to catch up.

It seems dating site Plenty of Fish (POF) is staying true to its word of turning its image around. Known by many daters as a hook-up site, in the last couple of years the company's founder has promised that the site is cleaning up and wants to go back to its original purpose - helping singles meet people for relationships, not one-night stands.

The company recently shared on its blog exactly how they are enforcing their mission, and it seems they are doing this by deleting the accounts of members who violate site rules. According to POF, many users are in the dark about why their accounts are deleted, but they don't have the staff to respond to these requests individually. Just how many people are violating POF rules? About 5% of members, which considering the thousands of people signing up for the free site on a regular basis, amounts to more than its 75-person staff can handle. So, they decided to post the most common reasons on their blog.

Following are some of the rules that POF enforces. Be warned, if you violate their rules, the company claims that it can find out through its technology and advanced software. They can even detect if you're a scammer when you sign up.

Here are some reasons why your POF account may have been deleted:

1. You were looking for casual sex. The example the site gives is pretty cut and dry - one user was asking another user if he could pay her for having sex with him. While many lewd messages have double meaning and can be argued, if you are propositioning anyone on the site, you won't have your account for long.

2. You're married. The site is strict about this, and if POF discovers you are married, your account will be deleted.

3. You are a "scammer, a spammer, a fake, underage, or are soliciting a business." This can get a little murky, as scammers generally tend to hide beneath their online dating persona. But POF claims to catch 98% of them before they can even sign up on the website, captured through their "sophisticated spam detection system."

4. You are rude to users. If you put someone down because of how they look, or make discriminating remarks, or are blocked by other users often, you risk being deleted.

5. You post inappropriate photos. This includes the infamous "shirtless" photo that guys tend to gravitate to in online dating. If you are a woman, don't advertise your body with revealing clothing. If you question whether you should upload a particular photo, then don't.

6. You login from a country where POF doesn't exist yet. While POF is in many countries, they aren't in all and they can't support a user account in places where they aren't set up. So, check the site to see if your country is included before attempting to sign up.

According to online security firm Symantec, everybody’s favorite mobile dating app is suffering from an “influx of spam bots and fake profiles.”

The presence of spammers and scammers isn't new to online dating sites, but so far it hasn't been a major concern for Tinder users. There are three kinds of spam campaigns currently targeting Tinder users. The first is adult webcam spam, in which bots engage real users in conversation and then try to persuade them to click on links to adult webcam websites.

A second common spam campaign promotes mobile apps, especially games, to Tinder users. Instead of directing people to adult webcam sites, this kind of spam tries to entice them into downloading and playing games like Castle Clash.

The third, and most common according to Symantec, kind of spam campaign involves fake prostitution profiles. These are typically identifiable by photos of women overlaid with text that details services, rates, and contact info. By including the info in photos rather than text, spammers can evade detection from spam filters searching for undesirable keywords in Tinder’s profiles.

What all three kinds of spam have in common is affiliate programs. In each case, the promoted destinations offer spammers money in exchange for converting leads. Spammers stand to make something like $6.00 per lead for a successful sign-up, and up to $60.00 for leads that become premium members. It may sound easy to avoid spammers, but plenty of people are falling for it. Symantec found that some spam links can get hundreds of thousands of clicks.

"For instance,” writes Satnam Narang for Symantec, “from the end of January 2014 until mid-April 2014, a campaign associated with a site called blamcams resulted in nearly half a million clicks across seven URLs. Depending on the offers given by the affiliate program and the number of successful conversions of leads, this particular spammer likely earned quite a bit of money."

So what can you do about it?

Report fake profiles to Tinder. Beneath every profile image there are three red dots. Click that icon to find the option to report the user. From there, a dialog window will open with three options. Select “Feels like SPAM”. It’s up to users themselves to police the Tinder community, so stay alert for fake profiles and spam bots and alert the app’s team so they are detected and eliminated as quickly as possible.

For more on this dating app you can check out our review of Tinder.

We’ve been warned of scandals when it comes to online dating. Some people post fake profiles and create stories of financial hardship to extract money or financial information from other users, hoping to cash in on someone’s vulnerability or desire for love. This can compromise our security, but it’s within our control to not respond or to report the abuse. But what about the information we voluntarily offer without even knowing how it will be used?

Mobile dating and location-based apps operate and match you with others according to where you physically are, which means they need to collect data from you, usually through your phone’s GPS. But then what happens to the information? Is it used only for matching purposes to benefit the users of the site, or are companies using this valuable information in other ways?

New legislation aims to protect users from themselves and the online dating sites who collect location and other personal information. Senator Al Franken is leading the charge, advocating for more privacy for users.

"This stuff is advancing at a faster and faster rate, and we've got to try and catch up," Franken tells USA Today. "This is about Americans' right to privacy and one of the most private things is your location."

Considering how many people have used online dating sites – a recent Pew report indicated 38% of singles – it makes sense that companies offering services for daters operate with security and privacy in mind. Unfortunately, most people don’t realize how much information they are voluntarily sharing when they sign up and post photos on their phone.

Members also might not realize what information a dating website or app is collecting about them and their social media networks, say if a Facebook login is used to sign up. Though most companies will outline what information they can collect about you and your friends, the fine print is often overlooked by users just trying to download and check out a new app.

A few states require online dating sites to disclose whether they conduct criminal background checks on members, including Illinois, New York, New Jersey and Texas. eHarmony, Match, and Sparks Networks signed an agreement with the California District Attorney’s office in 2012 to check subscribers against national sex offender registries and provide a rapid abuse reporting system for members. Security precautions are being taken to protect users, but legislators like Al Franken and privacy advocates don’t think it’s enough.

Rainey Reitman of the San Francisco, Calif.-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for user privacy amid technology development, told USA Today: "People don't realize how much information they're exposing even by doing something as slight as uploading a photograph. Many online apps are very cavalier about collecting that information and perhaps exposing it in a way that would make you uncomfortable."