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Ask HN: Tinder is full of fake profiles, posted by Tinder. How to prove?

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Ask HN: Tinder is full of fake profiles, posted by Tinder. How to prove?

#1
Tinder is full of gorgeous women and well, the profiles just don’t seem right somehow.

Compared to genuine profiles which have ordinary looking women, with profiles that have narrative text, real locations, it’s easy to see which are the fakes and which are real.

Obviously it’s Tinder posting the fake profiles because they want men using their software.

But I wonder is there any way to prove that Tinder is cat fishing it’s own users?

Re: Ask HN: Tinder is full of fake profiles, posted by Tinder. How to prove?

#2
"the profiles just don’t seem right somehow"

Is any evidence for your belief? Not having a bio text doesn't indicate a fake profile.

Alternatively, you could try setting up a fake profile of a really handsome guy. I think you will see that the girls you thought were fake, are not only real, but happy to text, engage, and even call or meet up with you.

Re: Ask HN: Tinder is full of fake profiles, posted by Tinder. How to prove?

#3
Also a lot of fake profiles put an URL on their images, to scam sites. I don't get why Tinder can't use OCR to detect this. Some profiles also put the URL in a video, which makes it slightly harder to detect, because not all of the URL is in the first frames.

Re: Ask HN: Tinder is full of fake profiles, posted by Tinder. How to prove?

#6
> Obviously it’s Tinder posting the fake profiles because they want men using their software.

How is this at all obvious? I mean, even if we assume they're definitely fake profiles, wouldn't the more likely explanation be that they're individuals engaged in catfishing?

Re: Ask HN: Tinder is full of fake profiles, posted by Tinder. How to prove?

#9
A lifetime ago I worked at FriendFinder.com. We boasted of our 30 million customers, but in reality we had less than a milliom active customers in a given year.the other 29 million were either fraudulent affiliate sign ups or created by a team in china who were also paid to flirt two hours per day.

70% of our actual users were men. About 1/3 of our active female users were prostitutes.

Re: Ask HN: Tinder is full of fake profiles, posted by Tinder. How to prove?

#10
post #3

Also a lot of fake profiles put an URL on their images, to scam sites. I don't get why Tinder can't use OCR to detect this. Some profiles also put the URL in a video, which makes it slightly harder to detect, because not all of the URL is in the first frames.

Regarding OCR detection, "Sometimes it's not that can't, they don't (may not) want to."
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