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It may have revolutionised dating but a recent Australian murder trial has revealed a darker side to the smartphone app

N Australian bodybuilder was this week acquitted of the murder of a female tourist who plunged to her death from his 14th-floor balcony in the early hours. Gable Tostee had hooked up with New Zealander Warriena Wright in August 2014 after the pair had made contact via the dating app Tinder.

Few would have considered them a match in the normal course of events. Wright was a petite animal lover and daughter of a church deacon while Tostee was a laddish man-mountain with questionable attitudes to women and sex.

The case has once again thrown a spotlight on Tinder, which has suffered its fair share of controversy since its launch four years ago. Detractors blame it for everything from an epidemic of promiscuity to a rise in sex offences. Tinder was launched in September 2012 when it was known as “Grindr for straight people” after the gay dating app that preceded it. It first took off on college campuses in the US but it now has more than 50million users in 140 countries and is available in 30 languages. Like dating sites match.com and OkCupid it is owned by Match group, which was floated on the Nasdaq stock exchange in November 2015. The smartphone app allows users to browse pictures of fellow users in their vicinity and then signal their interest or lack of interest by swiping right if they think they are attractive, or left if they don’t. If the right-swiped person feels the same way they then right-swipe too and the duo can message each other.

One of Tinder’s founders, Sean Rad, said the inspiration for the app came from the observation that “no matter who you are, you feel more comfortable approaching somebody if you know they want you to approach them”.

The app has been criticised for promoting shallow relationships because users see little more than a photo and a short tagline before committing to a swipe. As one user put it: “You’re pretty much judging someone on their picture alone.”

Recent refinements include a Super Like button that will allow you to show that you really like someone. The basic app is free but users can upgrade to Tinder Plus, a version that allows people to undo swipes, switch locations and use more than one Super Like a day. So if you accidentally swiped left on someone you wanted to get to know they are no longer lost in the Tindersphere for ever. You can get them back at the touch of a button. And you can change your location to match up with people around the world.

Controversially Tinder charges “older people” more for this service. Under-28s get it for £3.99 a month, anyone over 28 pays £14.99.

As of June 30 Tinder had 1.23million paid users. Early on more than 90 per cent of Tinder users were aged between 18 and 24. Today this demographic comprises about 50 per cent of the user base. People in the 25 to 32-year-old bracket account for about 32 per cent, with 35 to 44-year-olds on around 6.5 per cent and the remainder over 45.

There have been 100million downloads of the app worldwide and roughly 10million users employ it every day. Users generate 1.4bn swipes daily, which lead to 26million matches, and the CLICKING: Tinder puts admirers easily in touch with each other; inset, Gable Tostee and Warriena Wright average user spends 35 minutes per day on the app. The US takes the top spot, with 40 per cent of all users in North America. The UK is the second biggest market, with Brazil third. Tinder launched verified accounts for celebrities in July last year. This means that if Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie swipes right on your picture you will know if they’re the real deal and not some pervy imposter.

Celebrities who have admitted to being on Tinder include the pop star Katy Perry, actor and singer Hillary Duff and actress Lindsay Lohan. In a notorious Vanity Fair article last year journalist Nancy Jo Sales described Tinder as an “all-day, every-day, hand-held singles club” and claimed it was responsible for a “dating apocalypse”, with men using it to find multiple sexual partners that they dubbed Tinderellas.

Tinder instantly responded with a Twitterstorm. The thrust of this was that while some people used it for one-night stands, many were searching for meaningful relationships. Far from 30 per cent of its user base being married, just 1.7 per cent were. Amy Williams, who won gold for Britain in the bob skeleton at the 2010 Winter Games, met her soldier husband Crag Hamm on Tinder. She is just one of a growing number of Tinder brides. “While we don’t keep a record of the total number of Tinder success stories,” a spokesperson for the app said last year, “we receive hundreds of stories each month from people who met on Tinder and are now engaged or married.” The number of crime reports containing a mention of Tinder or Grindr increased more than seven-fold between 2013 and 2015.

Police in England and Wales received 55 such reports in 2013. This increased to 204 in 2014 and 412 in the year to October 2015, according to the 30 police forces who gave figures. Reports involving violent and sexual crimes were the most common, with 253 allegations of violence and 152 reports of sex offences, including grooming, rapes and the sexual exploitation of children.

The figures do not automatically mean the app was used directly by the criminal. The problem of interacting with people in cyberspace is that they may not be who they say they are. Scammers have taken to using pictures of attractive men and women – often obtained from Facebook, Instagram or other social media sites – to lure victims into swiping right and engaging in online conversation.

Some achieve so much intimacy that they are able to persuade their targets to share explicit photos and videos of themselves. They then threaten to distribute these to their Facebook or Skype contacts unless a ransom is paid.

Shakedowns such as this fiddled online romantics out of $200million (£163million) last year, according to the FBI.

How do I protect myself in the world of online dating?

Andy Cooke, deputy chief constable of Merseyside Police and national police lead on violence and public protection, says: “I would urge those who use online dating apps to be as security conscious as possible and not to share personal data with anyone until they are sure about those they are communicating with.

“Similarly, individuals should stop all communication with anyone who attempts to pressure them into something they are not comfortable with.”