Goodbye dating, hello good deeds. Tinder co-founder and former CEO Sean Rad announced his newest venture at the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 Summit: Good Today, a nonprofit service that makes it easy to support charitable organizations through small daily donations. Rad has joined the company as a founding board member alongside several other notable figures from the business, tech and entrepreneurship worlds.

Good Today users sign up and select a recurring giving plan — 25¢, 50¢ or $1 a day, paid in monthly or yearly installments. Each morning, they receive an email highlighting the cause of the day and two relevant charities to choose from. They can elect to pick the charity that will receive that day’s donation or opt to have their donation roll over to the next day. Good Today is a 501(c)3 organization, as are all the charities it features, and subscriptions are tax deductible.

You swipe right on someone special on a dating app. You start communicating, and soon they want to move the conversation off the app to email or phone calls. The relationship progresses. You can feel yourself falling for them. They tell you they love you. But they live far away — as close as you think you’ve become, you’ve never actually met in person.

Then they ask you for money. They say it’s for a family emergency. Or an unexpected medical expense. Or a plane ticket to finally visit you. Their scam is almost complete.

Millions of men and women turn to online dating services to meet someone. But instead of finding the love of their life, many find a scammer trying to dupe them out of money. In 2018, people reported losing $143 million to romance scams — a higher total than for any other type of scam reported to the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network, an online database of millions of consumer complaints.

Blackstone Acquires Majority Stake in MagicLab

Russian billionaire Andrey Andreev is ending his relationship with MagicLab, the company that owns Bumble, Badoo, Chappy and Lumen. Andreev is set to sell his majority stake in MagicLab to Blackstone in a deal that values the company at $3 billion. As part of the transaction, Andreev will step away from the business and Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd will take over as CEO.

In a prepared statement, Andreev said:

Blackstone presented MagicLab with a great opportunity to further develop the brands and platform, and I am confident Blackstone will take MagicLab to the next level in terms of growth and expansion. I am incredibly proud of the company, and of how we have connected millions of people around the world. At MagicLab, I have had the pleasure of working with some of the best and most talented entrepreneurs. My aim now is to ensure a smooth and successful transition before I embark on a new business venture in search of innovative leaders with new and exciting ideas. I am grateful for all the support of my partners and employees over the years as we couldn’t have gotten to this point without them. I wish MagicLab and Blackstone every success.

Verifying your account on POF.com

POF recently added a new feature that affects all members that use the website to access the Plenty of Fish dating service. Members are now required to verify their account by providing their mobile phone number. When a member logs into the POF.com website they will see the page with the following request:

Please Verify your Account

We need to send you a text to verify that you're human. To help keep your account safe, we'll keep your number in case we need to re-verify you and make sure a stranger isn't trying to login. Don't worry though, that's all we ever use your number for.

So once you enter your number and click the "Get Started" button POF will then send you a text with a code which you enter in Step 2 of the verification process.

Hornet Profile Verification Badge

Image: Hornet

If you’ve ever spoken to someone on a dating app and thought, “This person is too good to be real,” you are not alone... and you might be right. The virtual world is full of scammers and other shady characters, including the notorious “catfish” — a person who creates a fictitious online identity to lure unsuspecting mates on dating services. The ever-increasing popularity of online dating means that catfishing, too, is increasing at an alarming rate, and more and more singles are falling victim to the cons.

Hornet has a solution. In a bid to stop would-be fraudsters in their tracks, the popular gay dating app has announced that will let users earn a badge of authenticity, akin to the blue checkmarks of verified profiles on Instagram and Twitter. Hornet is the first major gay dating app to intoduce a veification symbol to identify genuine users.

Shares of Match Group fell 15 percent after the company announced it will miss revenue goals for the fourth quarter. Shares of IAC also fell by 11 percent, according to Reuters.

The company expects fourth quarter revenue to be between $545 and $555 million, short of the $559.3 million goal according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

This news comes on the heels of a complaint filed by the U.S. Federal Trading Commission that Match Group offered fake profiles to entice customers to purchase paid subscriptions to its services, among other “deceptive and unfair practices,” as said in the lawsuit. Match Group is also facing legal entanglements with former Tinder employees, including founder Sean Rad, who said the company cheated him out of rightful payment after undervaluing his stock options.