VIDEO: Tinder: A Predators' Playground
Four Corners
12 October 2020
Tinder: A Predators’ Playground
REPORTER, AVANI DIAS: What dating apps have you been on?
YOUNG WOMEN: Tinder!
YOUNG MAN: Grindr, Tinder... Bumble as well...
COUPLE: Hinge, Bumble... What ones do you have? Tinder.
YOUNG WOMAN: I think Tinder’s a little bit more of a casual relationship thing...
YOUNG MAN: Tinder.
YOUNG MAN: Tinder! (laughs)
AVANI DIAS: As you’re watching this... millions of people are looking for partners on Tinder... the dating app that’s changed how an entire generation meets new people.
YOUNG WOMAN: Yeah, I met my current partner on Tinder.
AVANI DIAS: And how long have you been together?
YOUNG WOMAN: About two years!
YOUNG WOMAN: I know some friends who got married from Tinder, and they’re really happy.
YOUNG MAN: It’s the future I guess, you can’t meet a girl at a bar anymore, it’s all on apps.
AVANI DIAS: This catalogue of love interests at our fingertips has obvious appeal. But the app that’s made meeting up with strangers the new normal is hiding a sinister problem.
BETH: He looked down on me, and he just said straight-faced to me, "Well, you're not allowed to leave until I come."
BROOKE: He then pulled his pants off. And just went for it. And just raped me.
EMILY: It was horrifying. It was so terrifying to know that this man hadn't stopped what he was doing.
AVANI DIAS: One of the top earning apps in the world has created a playground for sex offenders, leaving victims neglected.
EMILY: It makes me mad that this platform is making money off the people that are being hurt, and then they can't even respond properly when people are hurt. What are you doing with your money?
AVANI DIAS: Tonight on Four Corners, in a joint investigation with Hack on triple j, we look at how the dating app Tinder has built a business model that exposes its users to assault... and how it’s allowing serial sexual predators to thrive on its platform. Since it was launched in 2012, Tinder has been downloaded more than a hundred million times around the world. Last year, it clocked almost 1.7 billion dollars in revenue.
STEVE DEAN, DATING INDUSTRY CONSULTANT: Tinder is the shooting star. It is far and away the most used dating app and the most lucrative dating app. It, I believe, outgrosses even Netflix in the app store. The design, user interface design, is geared to get us hooked and to keep us swiping into oblivion. Tinder made it so easy to meet up that it actually was less safe, because you spent way less time vetting people.
AVANI DIAS: Do you guys feel safe on dating apps?
YOUNG MAN: If you’re a woman you may not feel you’re safe, or as safe...
YOUNG WOMAN: I still need to be cautious I need to send my friends a location. I need to think about my reputation after that. It is safe in a way but the way I need to think about being safe makes it different for me.
YOUNG WOMAN: The problem with dating apps isn’t that they’re dating apps, the interaction that you have with them, meeting up with people, it’s that people use this the wrong way. I know people on Tinder have met amazing people. But unfortunately for a lot of people, it doesn’t end the way they want it to be.
AVANI DIAS: Hello, Avani Dias with you for Hack. Ten years ago, no one had even heard of dating apps. Now, it's the number one way Australians meet their partners, but it’s not all weddings and Tinder babies... In March, we asked triple j Hack listeners to tell us about their experiences with dating apps and sexual assault.
So we're launching a major investigation today to find out what's going on, and we want your help to share your stories. And if you ever had an experience on a dating app that made you feel unsafe, I'd love to know what happened. Get in touch on the Hack website. More than 400 people responded. 175 of them told us they’d experienced a sex offence by someone they’d met on Tinder.
Brooke was one of those people who thought she’d found her match on Tinder.
BROOKE: When I first got on Tinder, I guess I was trying to find love, or to try and find someone to be in a relationship with. I first matched with him in 2017, I was in my last year of uni. I guess my first impression was that he seemed like a really chill, down-to-earth kind of guy. He was living with his grandma. He moved down to the area to live with his grandma and help take care of her. I was like, well he's obviously like a really kind, caring guy. When he asked if I wanted to go back to his place to have tea on the second date, I was like, "Yeah, sure." And we had tea and chilled. And then I went home. The next time we caught up he picked me up from my place, and we went for a drive outside of Geelong and into this sort of really rural town where there were no streetlights or nothing.
AVANI DIAS: The man pulled up in a secluded spot. When Brooke got nervous and asked to be taken home, he threw her phone out the car window.
BROOKE: Once the phone smashed, I was like, oh crap. Now I'm in the middle of nowhere. I didn't actually know where we were, which was sort of out bush. And with no working phone, no way to message any friends or anything, and no actual idea of where I was. And then it was sort of like, okay, this is an episode from like a true crime show where you can't actually phone for help, and then it's like something bad may happen, may not happen. And I guess unfortunately for me, that's just where something bad did end up happening.
AVANI DIAS: The man persuaded Brooke to get into the back seat of the car.
BROOKE: He pinned me down, I was like, "I don't want to do this, you know? I'm not in the mood." And then when he pulled my shorts off I was like, "No, like, I'm really not in the mood. I don't want this." And he just didn't say anything. He, yeah, then pulled his pants off. And just went for it. And just raped me. I was trying not to cry, because it was so painful, but I also didn't want to show him any emotion, because clearly, you know, he was getting off on having all the power. In my head, I was also, you don't know where you are or how you're getting home. And if this is what he wants, and this is what it would take for you to get home, then you need to do it. After he was done, he gave me like a serviette from the console of his car to clean myself up, because there was blood. And then I just put my shorts on and climbed through and sat in the passenger seat and just didn't talk. And then he dropped me home.
AVANI DIAS: The next morning, Brooke decided to report the attack to Tinder... but she says the man had blocked her by using the unmatch function, deleting their entire chat history.
BROOKE: I searched for his name, but it didn't come up. So obviously he had gone into our messages. And you can unmatch. That means that the conversation is gone. And I didn't even have a picture of him, I was definitely gutted, because I was like, well, this was the only to identify who he was and what he did. And he's taken that away. And just completely erased any evidence of himself. I guess that was one of, probably the main reason that I didn't go to the police, was because there was, I didn't have his number, I didn't know his last name. I didn't have any photos or proof that we'd even spoken to each other before. It would be like, I just picked a random guy out almost and said that he'd done this.
AVANI DIAS: As we sifted through our public callout, this was something that came up again and again... perpetrators who unmatched or blocked their victim on Tinder after sexually assaulting them, meaning they were unable to be traced.
RESPONDENT 1: He raped me twice while I cried and begged him to stop... I wanted to report him to Tinder but he unmatched me within an hour so I had no way of bringing up his profile again.
RESPONDENT 2: He ended up trying to take the condom off without me knowing. I couldn’t report him on Tinder because he had already blocked me.
RESPONDENT 3: I lost consciousness as he choked me out... He was penetrating me digitally when I regained consciousness… He had unmatched and his profile disappeared.
BROOKE: It's like they're sort of beating the system, where they can just sort of re-offend almost. And be matched with all these other new girls who don't have any idea of their behaviors, which is just, it's heart breaking really that all these girls are going through it.
STEVE DEAN, DATING INDUSTRY CONSULTANT: The feature which was designed with benevolent intent, it was designed so that if someone is making you miserable, you can just unmatch them and never have to think about them again and never see them again. So, it was designed essentially with victims in mind, but the fact that perpetrators are now getting a little bit wise to this and realising that it's their way of escaping any kind of accountability, that's just unacceptable.
AVANI DIAS: Steve Dean is a consultant to the dating app industry.
STEVE DEAN: I think that's actually one of the most frustrating components of the current Tinder and dating app experience. I don't think that that should ever be a possibility, that someone can simply escape their bad behaviour by blocking the person they just abused.
AVANI DIAS: Clinical forensic doctor Janine Rowse works closely with police in assessing victims of sexual violence. And two years ago she detected an increase in sexual assaults resulting from dating apps.
DR JANINE ROWSE, VICTORIAN INSTITUTE OF FORENSIC MEDICINE: I started noticing that some of the sexual assault forensic examinations I was doing, the victims were telling me that they had met their offender through a dating app.
AVANI DIAS: So she began documenting cases.
DR JANINE ROWSE: Most of these sexual assaults were occurring on the first face-to-face meeting between parties, and the majority were occurring at the alleged offender’s home. I think we are really only seeing the tip of the iceberg. I think there are some additional barriers to these sexual assaults being reported, and I think the real number that's occurring is much greater than what we're seeing.
AVANI DIAS: Despite the growing problem, there are no national figures on the number of sexual assaults facilitated by dating apps. In late 2019, NSW Police launched a project looking at different ways to address sexual assault... with links to dating apps being one small part of it.
ASSISTANT COMMISSIONER STUART SMITH, NSW POLICE STATE CRIME COMMANDER: What we now have, obviously, with the dating app is a new emerging way to meet. And people need to understand, victims, people that are going to use these systems, need to understand that you're meeting someone, the dating app may draw you into a false sense of security where you are happy to meet and you think you know the person better than you do.
AVANI DIAS: All you need to sign up for Tinder is a phone number and an email. And with no ID verification, it’s almost impossible to know if the person you’re messaging is who they say they are.
DR JANINE ROWSE, VICTORIAN INSTITUTE OF FORENSIC MEDICINE: So I think if you are going to use these dating apps, then by all means swipe right but do so with caution. Be aware that online communication with someone means that they're effectively still a real-life stranger.
EMILY: I wanted to meet new people, I wanted to date, I wanted new experiences. All of my friends had been using it at the time, and they all said it was amazing, and it was a perfect and honestly probably the only way at the moment to meet people. I remember I matched with him on a Saturday morning. I remember when his profile first came up that he was incredibly buff. He was a firefighter who was on a hot firefighters’ calendar. I remember seeing that and thinking, oh my God, that's impressive. That's, I guess, a respectable job. That's something that people think oh my gosh, that's a firefighter. He's a good person.
AVANI DIAS: Then they started messaging.
EMILY: He wanted very explicit videos and photos straight away. I felt nervous, I didn't feel okay about it. I told him pretty much straight away. He said, "Oh, it won't be like that. I'm sorry. If we meet up, we don't even have to do anything, we can just hang. It doesn't matter. It'll be okay, it'll be fine."
AVANI DIAS: The next morning Emily agreed to meet the firefighter at his apartment near the beach.
EMILY: Basically, as soon as we went into his house, he was very forthright with what he wanted. He wanted to have sex. He wanted to take my clothes off. He wanted to do the things to me that I said that I didn't feel comfortable with. And then he just began to have sex with me. It wasn't something that I wanted. It wasn't something that I said he could do. He just started to rape me. I didn't say no, because I was completely petrified. He was so rough, that the only thing that I could say was ow, over and over again. And he just didn't stop. Halfway through when he was assaulting me, he picked up his phone from the table and said, "Just hold on, I just need to take some photos." He kept his hand holding me down as I tried to squirm and get out of the camera lens.
AVANI DIAS: He raped Emily three times that morning… filming her each time.
EMILY: He was so forceful and so rough and hard that it was so painful. Following, I bled for days. There was blood everywhere.
AVANI DIAS: Four days later, Emily walked into her local police station and reported the sexual assault. Emily says Police told her that because she hadn’t explicitly said no during the assault, there was little they could do. She says police told her they would get a warrant to get the videos of the sexual assault off the man’s phone. Instead they went to his home and gave him a warning.
EMILY: It didn't seem like anything was going to happen. They didn't do their jobs to check that this man wasn't going to hurt anyone else. If they had gotten his phone, they might have seen that. Maybe he might have kept those videos. I have no idea if he still has those videos, what he does with those videos.
AVANI DIAS: Emily was told by NSW Police that officers had gone to this alleged perpetrator's house and told him he needed to delete this video. Was that the case?
ASSISTANT COMMISSIONER STUART SMITH, NSW POLICE STATE CRIME COMMANDER: Look, I can't go into the specific case, but I will certainly follow that matter up. I understand there was interaction with the offender or the alleged offender in this case. I just can't comment further at this time.
AVANI DIAS: Our understanding is, there was no warrant to search this man's phone to get the video as part of the investigation. Why would that be?
ASSISTANT COMMISSIONER STUART SMITH: Look, again, we're talking about specifics of a case, in terms of it. And specifically we're talking about a dating app offending that may have involved the filming privately of another individual, which is a different offence than sexual assault. So look, all I can say is, I'm happy to take this case to have a look at it and come back to you.
AVANI DIAS: Emily says she later reported the man to Tinder.
EMILY: It took me a long time even trying to find how to block, or how to report someone. I had to scroll through and the website wasn't clear, and eventually I just had to google “report Tinder” and find it. I wrote down his name. I wrote down his age. I wrote down where he lived. I wrote down his occupation, everything, and said, "This man is dangerous. This man is a threat and will hurt people if given the chance." I just got an automated response, just a refresh of the page saying, "Thanks for submitting”. I never heard anything else.
AVANI DIAS: How did you feel just getting just a random automatic response like that?
EMILY: It felt like a waste of time. It just felt like, why bother? Why did I bother? Nothing is going to happen from this if it's just an automated response.
AVANI DIAS: After Emily discovered he’d been sending abusive messages to other women he met on Tinder, she reported him again. This time she did get a response from Tinder... telling her the man’s account had been removed from the app.
EMILY: It shouldn't take more than one woman to take someone off a dating app if he has assaulted someone. Why is it so hard? Why did nothing happen the last time? It makes me mad that this platform is making money off the people that are being hurt, and then they can't even respond properly when people are hurt. What are you doing with your money?
AVANI DIAS: In response to our public callout, 48 people told us that, like Emily, they also reported a sexual offence to Tinder. Of those, only 11 said they received a response.
RESPONDENT 4: I contacted Tinder after blocking this guy and received a generic stock standard, bullshit response. I contacted them again, wanting to know what the follow up was or would be, and received no response. This was distressing.
REPSONDENT 5: I got a generic response that they were looking into it but I would not be informed of the outcome.
RESPONDENT 6: No response. "Thanks. We can't tell you what happens from here but we take this seriously."
ROSALIE GILLETT, QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY: In my research, the women described receiving this message, but they didn't actually receive anything to follow up from that, and that made them feel like they were ignored and nothing had actually been done to address that problem.
AVANI DIAS: Rosalie Gillett from the Queensland University of Technology spent years researching women’s safety on Tinder. She says the company’s failure to respond to reports of sexual assault is creating an online environment that further enables perpetrators.
ROSALIE GILLETT: This is really quite significant, because it tells those women who have made their reports that they're actually not justified, and that they weren't serious enough to actually warrant a report. And it's also really dangerous, because it tells users who are engaging in that harassing and abusive behaviour, that it is acceptable, and they don't need to change anything on that platform.
BETH: I essentially started using it to meet people for casual sex. Because it was private and it was to myself, and I could choose who I liked the look of or liked the sound of. Initially it was very much just the ego boost. Just like seeing who would match with you and who found you maybe attractive or... I was quite funny in my profile, I tried to be funny. Swiping through people on Tinder almost feels like a game. Very picky! Oh god, oh god... (laughs) I saw this guy on Tinder and I thought he was reasonably attractive, not outstandingly in my opinion. But he had a few nice photos, one with assumably like a nephew or something like that, and I loved that, I thought that was really cute. And we matched and instantly started chatting. I think maybe after a month or so of just being very casual like, "Hey, how are you?" That type of thing, it got a bit more flirtatious.
AVANI DIAS: After messaging for six months on and off, this man asked Beth over to his place.
BETH: I opened the door and immediately I just noticed he was huge, a lot bigger than he looked on his profile. Definitely not as attractive as his profile. But as soon as I walked in the door there was no conversation essentially, it was come to the bedroom now and he leaded me in that direction. We then started to have sex, and progressively it got rougher as it went on. There was a moment in the sex where he was pushing my head so far into the bed that my glasses were coming up to my face and I felt like they were about to break. So, and that was when I just asked to stop. And then he stopped and I just said, "Ah, I don't think I really want to do this anymore. I think I might go home." And he looked down on me, and he just said straight-faced to me, "Well, you're not allowed to leave until I come." And in that moment it was really like... I think I was just shocked, and it was a real moment where I felt like I didn't have any options. So, the sex continued. And when it finished I immediately got up and got changed, and I asked for a glass of water just so I could get him away from me. I noticed on the kitchen table, just sort of in between me and him, was a really large knife. And he sort of moved the knife close to my neck, and then just started laughing. I felt like I was in some real serious trouble and I was really helpless in that situation because he was so much bigger than me.
AVANI DIAS: Beth got out of his house and ran to her car.
BETH: The second I got in the car I burst into tears, and it wasn't just a sob to myself, it was wailing, hysterical crying.
AVANI DIAS: Beth says she pulled over, opened Tinder and used the app’s function to report him for sexual assault.
BETH: And the response from Tinder was, it was an automated response immediately where they sort of said, "We'll look into this and we'll get back to you." But there was no follow up, there was no nothing.
AVANI DIAS: Did you ever hear from Tinder after that?
BETH: No, no.
ROSALIE GILLETT, QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY: One of the women who participated in my research, actually, she reported a man who had engaged in really harassing and abusive behaviour towards her. She reported him to the platform, but a couple of days after this experience, she actually saw that the man was available still on Tinder, and she even had the ability to match with him again. And so, this suggested to her that Tinder really hadn't done anything about that issue.
AVANI DIAS: In 2020, the loneliness and isolation of COVID-19 lockdowns have meant more people are desperate for company. Paid Tinder subscriptions increased almost 20 percent in the year to June. The company says Tinder is the highest grossing non-gaming app in the world. And Tinder's built to be addictive.
STEVE DEAN, DATING INDUSTRY CONSULTANT: It makes it so that you're always on the hamster wheel. You're always trying to see who's next, who else is available. They just get stuck in swiping mode, and then they'll hit their end of the day where they have no more swipes left, and maybe they'll pay for more.
AVANI DIAS: Tinder is a free app but it makes money by getting you to pay for extra features, like boosting your profile for 30 minutes to increase your chance of a match, or allowing you to see who’s liked you. Users who don’t pay are bombarded with notifications encouraging them to become a paid subscriber.
ERIN TURNER, DIRECTOR OF CAMPIAGNS, CHOICE: It's designed to get people to subscribe and never leave, making it really hard for them to opt out, to cancel their subscription. You can see where they're investing, they're putting their money and their time to getting people to pay more. They're not necessarily investing in consumer protections or safety features.
STEVE DEAN: I think the other frustrating one is when they say that you missed someone who liked you, and try to get you in that way, you don't know as a user whether that's true. It's an example of a feature where the site could be lying outright and manipulating their users into paying more money when they really shouldn't have had to do that.
AVANI DIAS: Tinder is owned by US dating conglomerate Match Group. A dominant industry player, the company has nearly 2000 employees and owns many of the world's most popular dating platforms. As well as Tinder, there’s Hinge, OK Cupid and Plenty of Fish. Last year, the US Federal Trade Commission launched legal action against Match Group for using fake love interest ads to trick hundreds of thousands of users into paying for subscriptions, using messages the company knew were from scammers.
ERIN TURNER: Tinder acts like it's above the law. And I think this goes across its behavior, whether that's about dealing with scammers, using our data to set prices, or dealing with people who've faced harassment or abuse. This company has the resources, it's offering a service, it needs to just meet the bare minimum to look after people on the platform.
ROSALIE GILLETT, QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY: Unfortunately, we really don't know much about the way that Tinder addresses complaints, and that's because it makes all its decisions in an opaque black box. So that means the public really doesn't know how many reports are made, what these reports are about, and what the platform's actually doing to address the problem.
AVANI DIAS: Match Group declined our requests for an interview, but provided a statement saying:
MATCH GROUP STATEMENT: “We’re outraged that singles anywhere may experience fear, discomfort, or worse when looking to meet someone special, and we will always work to improve our systems to make sure everyone on our apps feels respected and safe.”
AVANI DIAS: In 2015 this woman became the target of a serial rapist who found his victims on Tinder. She doesn’t want to be identified, so we'll call her Lauren.
LAUREN: Initially when I saw his profile he said that he was a lawyer and a journalist, and a snowboarder, and I thought, oh, that's interesting. He started messaging me, like as soon as the match happened.
AVANI DIAS: Lauren went on two Tinder dates with this man, who she knew as “Dylan”. On the second date, they went to the pub with his friends.
LAUREN: I went to the bathroom after I'd said I'm going to go home, I'm just going to go to the bathroom. And that's when he followed me in.
AVANI DIAS: He forced her into a toilet cubicle and tried to have sex with her, but she escaped.
LAUREN: I'd left my jacket and my bag at the tables that we were sitting at. And I went back to get it. Dylan had ripped my underwear off in the bathroom and he had them in his hands, and he made this big gesture that, because I was going home, and he stuck my underwear under his friend's nose. And I just gathered my things, got in a cab and went home.
AVANI DIAS: Police contacted Lauren after another victim came forward. The man’s real name was Glenn Hartland. In 2017, Glenn Hartland was charged with raping three women and indecently assaulting Lauren. While on bail, Lauren says Glenn Hartland continued to try to lure women on the platforms using multiple profiles under different names.
LAUREN: That was really scary. It was really scary that here was a man that was violent towards all of us, who he knew we were part of the case against him.
AVANI DIAS: One of the women Glenn Hartland raped was Paula. Paula met Glenn Hartland on Tinder in 2014... and after dating him for three months, she broke it off. It was then that he came to her apartment and raped her.
BARBARA: She started to realise through Facebook that he was interacting with other women. And that's when she felt strongly then, "I have to come forward. I have to warn these other women, people can't go through what I've been through."
SIMON: We're all proud of her for doing that. Would've been a hard thing to do. You've got to overcome the embarrassment of it and feeling that maybe you contributed to what happened and she overcame that and she was quite strong in her view to pursue it and get a result.
BARBARA: And then it was just a long process of gathering evidence. And I think, I said, it was a four-year effort with the police doggedly following leads. That whole time was very frightening for all the girls, because a lot at the time he was before they could actually charge him, they were frightened. And that takes a toll on them.
NEWS REPORT: Hartland’s trial was meant to start next week but in a surprise move he admitted to the sexual assault in the county court today...
AVANI DIAS: Finally, in October 2018 Glenn Hartland was convicted. Paula was shattered by the whole ordeal.
BARBARA: We were satisfied enough, we got a conviction, we just wanted it behind us and yeah.
SIMON: But we don't think she was ever the same after what happened to her.
BARBARA: No, there was changes in her.
SIMON: She had mental health issues that led from that and we could see the changes.
AVANI DIAS: But before the sentencing,Paula took her own life.
SIMON: She didn't get to see the end result. Yeah, so that was obviously sad.
BARBARA: We thought she was through the worst of it but um yeah. I mean, our life will never be the same for us. A big part of our life has gone. Her smiley face, her, my little “me too” she was. We could be doing something and it was always, "Me too!" I think one of the things she felt, because she was quite an intelligent young woman, she felt ashamed that she was duped. And she wanted that message to get across, to not feel ashamed of whatever happened to you, whether it was the sexual assault or the decisions you made. It's not your fault that this happened to you.
AVANI DIAS: Glenn Hartland was sentenced to 14 years and 9 months in jail. The judge’s remarks could have been a judgement on Tinder itself.
JUDGE PAUL HIGHAM: You met all of your victims through dating apps where people seek partners either for transactional sexual encounters or more meaningful relationships. Such an online world provides a fertile landscape in which predators can roam...
SIMON: It's like a minefield and sites like Tinder they create those minefields and give you a few safety warnings. But mostly, you're on your own. //37.18 It's a perfect platform for predators and scammers, it's the way I see it.
AVANI DIAS: Match Group’s Safety Policy says the company prides itself on its “support to and cooperation with law enforcement”, and that it stands “ready to assist in any active investigations”. But NSW Police told Four Corners that dating app companies frequently fail to provide information in sexual assault investigations.
ASSISTANT COMMISSIONER STUART SMITH, NSW POLICE STATE CRIME COMMANDER: In terms of the dating apps, there's a contact email and they're supposed to get back to us. There's always difficulties with that process. Some have what's called liaison officers, some of the big social media operators, and we work with those. They tend to be offshore. Or we’ll work with our federal counterparts. Having said that, it's always difficult, it’s always difficult to get the information.
ERIN TURNER, DIRECTOR OF CAMPIAGNS, CHOICE: Often, tech companies, particularly the big United States ones that have an international presence, they throw their weight around. They act like they can't be held accountable, and they're not subject to local laws, particularly for smaller countries like Australia. They're not. They can be held accountable.
STEVE DEAN, DATING INDUSTRY CONSULTANT: The idea that these people who are coming to Tinder looking for a good experience, looking for love, looking for friendship, can have such negative experiences when Tinder is making hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars, that's just unacceptable.
AVANI DIAS: Tinder has made billions of dollars off our pursuit of love and sex. But the app that’s redefined how we date is failing to keep us safe.
BETH: Tinder I think has a huge responsibility to understand that their whole app is causing people to be vulnerable time and time again. But I don't think they take it seriously, even though it appears to happen all the time, they just do not take it seriously, they don't care.
"It's like a minefield...It's a perfect platform for predators and scammers." Father
Tinder is the dating app that has reinvented the way we meet new people. Some are looking for love, others, are after a casual fling. The app has been downloaded more than 100 million times worldwide and it's the most popular dating app in Australia.
"Tinder is the shooting star. It is far and away the most used dating app and the most lucrative dating app. It, I believe, outgrosses even Netflix in the app store." Dating app consultant
Billed as "the largest, hottest community of singles in the world", Tinder urges users "When in doubt, give a Swipe Right. Trust us, the more options you have, the better-looking life becomes".
"Initially it was very much just the ego boost. Just like seeing who would match with you and who found you maybe attractive...I was quite funny in my profile, I tried to be funny." Tinder user, Adelaide
The app generates enormous revenue for its parent company Match Group but there's alarming evidence that Tinder is putting users at great risk.
"It makes me mad that this platform is making money off the people that are being hurt, and then they can't even respond properly when people are hurt. What are you doing with your money?" Tinder user, Sydney
In a joint investigation, Four Corners and triple j Hack reveal that the dating app has become a playground for sex offenders.
"Tinder, I think, has a huge responsibility to understand that their whole app is causing people to be vulnerable time and time again... they just do not take it seriously, they don't care." Tinder user, Adelaide
Earlier this year Hack invited its audience to share their dating app experiences; hundreds responded. The results raised red flags.
"I think we are really only seeing the tip of the iceberg. I think there are some additional barriers to these sexual assaults being reported, and I think the real number that's occurring is much greater than what we're seeing." Forensic doctor
A joint investigation was launched with Four Corners. It has uncovered a deeply troubling pattern of sexual assault and rape facilitated by the use of Tinder.
"The dating app may draw you into a false sense of security where you are happy to meet and you think you know the person better than you do." Police officer
Multiple women have come forward to speak with Four Corners guest reporter and Hack presenter Avani Dias. They tell their stories of assault at the hands of those they have matched with on Tinder.
"It's like they're sort of beating the system, where they can just sort of re-offend almost. And be matched with all these other new girls who don't have any idea of their behaviours, which is just, it's heart breaking really that all these girls are going through it." Tinder user, Regional Victoria
Their accounts reveal how the app's aggressive business model is enabling predators to operate freely and perpetrators are using the app's own design to avoid detection.
"You can see where they're investing, they're putting their money and their time to getting people to pay more. They're not necessarily investing in consumer protections or safety features." Consumer advocate
"Perpetrators are now getting a little bit wise to this and realising that it's their way of escaping any kind of accountability, that's just unacceptable." Dating app consultant
Those who are tasked with investigating these types of cases are urging users to be vigilant.
"If you are going to use these dating apps, then by all means swipe right but do so with caution. Be aware that online communication with someone means that they're effectively still a real-life stranger." Forensic doctor
Tinder, reported by Avani Dias, goes to air on Monday 12th October at 8.30pm. It is replayed on Tuesday 13th October at 10.00am and Wednesday 14th at 11.20pm. It can also be seen on ABC NEWS channel on Saturday at 8.10pm AEST, ABC iview and at abc.net.au/4corners.