You’d have to be punchy not to rumble Rumblr

WASHINGTON: Rumblr, the “Tinder for fighting”, promises to bring fight club straight to your smartphone screen. When the app launches on Monday, its founders promise, it will let users schedule consensual, recreational fights with local strangers for free.

The app has been covered by the likes of Venture Beat, Business Insider and New York magazine. The New York Daily News reported on Sunday that private investors were lining up to fund it.

There’s only one problem with the Rumblr hype: there’s no way that the app is real. In fact, it looks far more likely that we are being trolled by a couple of precocious teenagers.

Let’s start with the app’s most obvious problem: its questionable legality. “Rumblr Inc” supposedly has its headquarters in New York, where street fighting can be prosecuted as disorderly conduct – at the very least.

New York state law allows for certain types of organised, consensual fighting – as in boxing or karate. That means that, if you’re in a high school wrestling tournament and your opponent is killed in a freak accident, you are not criminally responsible for that. And if someone breaks into your home, you’re not responsible for their injuries: you can claim self-defence.

But criminal attorneys say that is not the case when it comes to street fights in New York, which aren’t recognised by law, and you could be charged with crimes ranging from misdemeanour assault to murder.

In that scenario, Rumblr also could be criminally liable, said Peter Tilem, a New York lawyer and former senior prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

“Under New York State law, it’s extremely problematic,” Tilem said.

In other words, it’s unlikely that anyone would line up to fund such an app, even if start-up types were oblivious enough to create it.

Speaking of start- up types, the pair behind Rum- blr raise a few suspicions themselves.

Getrumblr.com is registered to Jack Kim, a skinny National Merit Scholar whose LinkedIn profile describes him as a third-year student at Stanford.

Matt Henderson, meanwhile, owns a nascent online marketing firm called Juhász & Associates and has purportedly logged a number of fancy-sounding Coursera university classes since graduating from high school... five months ago.

Kim and Henderson,in an e-mail, insisted the app was real and would be delivered on schedule. Our bet? Rumblr is a marketing stunt, a prank or (best case) an unsubtle parody. – Washington Post

NONSENSE: A couple of children made a fake 'Tinder for fighting' app.