TOO EASY FOR PREDATORS TO FIND THEIR NEXT VICTIM
THE secret of Tinder’s success is obvious: online dating apps can provide a greater chance of finding love than ‘real-life’ attempts. You don’t need to pay for an expensive night out because many dating apps are free to use, and you can also browse dozens of potential suitors before even making contact with them.
Perhaps most importantly, you don’t have to risk chatting to a stranger in a bar when you are a bit tipsy and can instead sit in the safety of your own home, happily swiping left or right trying to find ‘the one’.
But that same convenience is available to the sexual predators and criminals who also use the apps to find their next victim.
Behind the innocent search for a soulmate lie dark forces who exploit the lack of checks on dating apps, which do not require users to verify who they really are.
It means that instead of finding love, innocent women – and most victims are women – innocently invite dangerous men into their lives, all too often with horrifying consequences.
As The Mail on Sunday has found, stalkers, serial sex attackers, murderers and fraudsters are all abusing these sites.
It should serve as a wake-up call to the technology giants which cream vast profits from Tinder and similar apps.
As a lawyer, I can foresee a case being brought in the near future in which a woman sues Tinder because she has been stalked by a serial offender whom she met on the app.
Sadly, it might take that before these firms start taking the issue seriously.
That was the case in America where Match Group, which owns several dating sites including Tinder, agreed to carry out background checks on members in order to settle a lawsuit brought by Carole Markin. She was raped by a man she met on one of its other dating sites.
The man had six previous convictions for sexual offences.
In America, users are cross-referenced with the sex offenders’ register. While that is less simple in Britain because the equivalent register isn’t publicly available, Match Group has chosen not to introduce any meaningful controls here.
Instead, a predator can sign up to Tinder without giving their real name.
All they need is an email address and a phone number, both of which can be obtained anonymously.
Even if you don’t agree to meet them, these dangerous men can stalk dozens of women remotely by collecting information about their identity and personal details through exchanges on Tinder.
It’s all too easy to match up a photo profile to a Facebook profile and then identify the area where they live by checking local restaurants that they have liked, for example. By adding that to other snippets of information, a predator can soon obtain a home address.
As the chairman of Paladin – the National Stalking Advocacy Service – there is not a day that I don’t hear about a woman who has been stalked or abused by someone she has met online.
My organisation is campaigning for a serial stalker and domestic abuser register to monitor and impose conditions on perpetrators in the same way as the sex offenders’ register does for sex attackers.
Despite this being recommended by the Home Affairs Select Committee, the Government has unfortunately not yet included this in its domestic abuse bill.
Those who operate dating apps have a responsibility to make it more difficult for predators to use their sites.
AGOOD initial step would be to force dating app users to upload their passport or driving licence to prove who they are. This would also prevent offenders from having multiple profiles on the sites. For those who worry about privacy, remember that you have to provide identification to join the library, so why not to use a dating app? I’m sure most people would feel more comfortable if the app at least had a record of who it was they were communicating with.
Because if nothing changes, predators will continue to use them to snare unsuspecting victims.