Tinder is owned by internet giant IAC/InterActiveCorp, which also owns dating sites and OKCupid. In February, the company was criticised by Inside Security for its sluggishness in fixing a flaw that enabled hackers to identify the location of individual Tinder users to within 100 feet.
Tinder has faced scrutiny from the security industry before. Symantec is advising Tinder users to report fake profiles to Tinder, in order to help the company clean up its network.
"Depending on the offers given by the affiliate program and the number of successful conversions of leads, this particular spammer likely earned quite a bit of money." "Some of the sites pay $6.00 per lead for a successful sign-up and up to $60 if a lead becomes a premium member," wrote Narang, citing one campaign for a website called Blamcams that generated nearly half a million clicks across seven separate URLs.
The report notes that all three kinds of Tinder spam are hoping to make money from affiliate fees if people download the games or sign up to the adult websites that they are directed to. "If a user manually inputs one of the URLs listed on the image overlay into their address bar and visits the site, they will be redirected to an explicit personals website for casual dating and hookups," explained security response manager Satnam Narang.
However, the report claims that the "overwhelming majority" of Tinder spam is now fake prostitution profiles: images of women with overlaid text giving details of services and rates, as well as website addresses. The second type of Tinder spammer is also a bot, but this time one that tries to direct people to mobile games and adult websites.Ī campaign to drive downloads of a game called Castle Clash was exposed by technology site TechCrunch in April, but Symantec says the script behind it has since been repurposed to promote a website called Slut Roulette. The report suggests that adult webcam spammers continue to operate on Tinder: bots that engage people in conversation, then try to persuade them to click on links to webcam sites.