Tinder: Investigation reveals the dark side of the dating app | Four Corners

this program contains descriptions of sexual assault that some viewers may find [Music] disturbing [Music] what dating apps have you guys been on tinder grinder tinder uh just those two we're talking about as well uh bumble yeah that's the one hinge bumble white ones tinder i think tinder is a little bit more of a casual relationship thing tender as you're watching this millions of people are looking for partners on tinder the dating app that's changed how an entire generation meets new people yeah i'm my partner on tinder yeah um how long have you guys been together about two years i know some friends that got married from tinder and they're really happy that's the future i guess you know it's not so much like i can't meet a girl the bar anymore it's all on apps this catalogue of love interests at our fingertips has obvious appeal but the app that's made meeting up with strangers the new normal is hiding a sinister problem he looked down on me and he just said straight face to me well you're not allowed to leave until i come he yeah then pulled his pants off um and just sort of just went for it and just um raped me it was horrifying it was so terrifying to know that this man hadn't stopped what he was doing one of the top earning apps in the world has created a playground for sex offenders leaving victims neglected it makes me mad that this platform is making money off of people that are being hurt and then they can't even respond properly when people are hurt what are you doing with your money tonight on four corners in a joint investigation with hack on triple j we look at the dating app tinder and how it's built a business model that exposes its users to assault and how it's allowing serial sexual predators to thrive on its platform [Music] [Music] since it was launched in 2012 tinder has been downloaded more than a hundred million times around the world last year it clocked almost 1.7 billion dollars in revenue tinder is the shooting star it is far and away the most used dating app and the most lucrative dating app it i believe is even netflix in the app store the user interface design is geared to get us hooked and to keep us swiping into oblivion tinder made it so easy to meet up that it actually was less safe because you spent way less time vetting people do you guys feel safe on dating apps yeah personally i think it's probably if you're a woman you might find it's not as safe or you don't feel as safe i still need to be cautious so i still need to like set my friend's location i still need to think about my reputation after that so in that sense it is safe in a way but the fact that i have to think about these things wouldn't make it completely safe the problem with dating apps isn't that they're dating apps the interaction you have with them meeting up with people is that people use this the wrong way i know people that have met through tinder they've met amazing people but unfortunately for a lot of people it doesn't end the way they want it to be be concerned not alarmed chuck the headband on get in there and have a crack that's ridiculous to me start talking about it bill that's gross on this existential level hello i have any dice with you for hack 10 years ago no one had even heard of dating apps now it's the number one way australians meet their partners but it's not all weddings and tinder babies in march we asked triple j hack listeners to tell us about their experiences with dating apps and sexual assault so we're launching a major investigation today to find out what's going on and we want your help to share your stories if you've ever had an experience on a dating app that made you feel unsafe i'd love to know what happened get in touch on the hack website more than 400 people responded 175 of them told us they'd experienced a sex offense by someone they'd met on tinder brooke was one of those people who thought she'd found her match on tinder [Music] when i first got on tinder i guess i was trying to find love or to try and find someone to be in a relationship with i first matched with him in 2017 i was in my last year of uni i guess my first impression was that he seemed like a really chill down-to-earth kind of guy um he was living with his grandma he'd move sort of down to the area to live with his grandma and help take care of her and um so i was like oh well he's obviously like a really kind caring guy when he asked if i wanted to you know go back to his place to have tea on the second date i was like yep sure and we had tea and chilled and then i went home the next time we caught up he picked me up from my place and we went for a drive outside of geelong and into sort of like this sort of really rural town where there was like no street lights no nothing the man pulled up in a secluded spot when brooke got nervous and asked to be taken home he threw her phone out the car window [Music] once the phone smashed i was like oh crap now i'm in the middle of you know nowhere like i didn't actually know where we were we just sort of like out bush um and with no working phone no way to message any friends or anything and no actual idea where i was um and then it was sort of like oh okay this is an episode from like a true crimes show where you can't actually phone for help and then it's like something bad may happen may not happen um and i guess unfortunately for me that's just where something bad did end up happening the man persuaded brook to get into the back seat of the car he um pinned me down i was like i don't want to do this you know like i'm not in the mood and then when he pulled my shorts off i was like no like i'm really not in the mood i don't want this and he just didn't say anything he yeah then pulled his pants off and just sort of just went for it and just um raped me [Music] i was trying not to cry because it was so painful but i also didn't want to show him any emotion because clearly you know he was getting off on having all the power in my head it was also you don't know where you are or how you're getting home um and if this is what he wants and this is what it would take for you to get home then you need to do it after he was done he gave me a soviet from the console of his car to clean myself up um because there was blood and then i just put my shorts on and climbed through and sat in the passenger seat and just didn't talk and then he dropped me home the next morning brooke decided to report the attack to tinder but she says the man had blocked her by using the unmatched function deleting their entire chat history i searched for his name um but it didn't come up so obviously he had gone into our messages and you can unmatch so that means that the conversation is gone and i didn't even have a picture of him i was definitely gutted because i was like well this was the only way to identify who he was and what he did and he's taken that away and just completely um sort of erased any evidence of himself i guess that was one of um probably the main reason that i didn't go to the police was because there was i didn't have his number i didn't know his last name um i didn't have any photos or proof that we'd even spoken to each other before so it would be like i just picked a random guy out almost and said that he'd done this as we sifted through our public call out this was something that came up again and again perpetrators who had unmatched or blocked their victims on tinder after sexually assaulting them meaning they were unable to be traced he raped me twice while i cried and begged him to stop i wanted to report him to tinder but he unmatched me within an hour so i had no way of bringing up his profile again he ended up trying to take the condom off without me knowing i couldn't report him on tinder because he'd already blocked me i lost consciousness as he choked me out he was penetrating me digitally when i regained consciousness he had unmatched and his profile disappeared it's like they're sort of beating the system where they can just sort of reoffend almost and be matched with all these other new girls who don't have any idea of their sort of behaviors which is just it's heartbreaking really that all these girls are going through it the feature which was designed with benevolent intent it was designed so that if someone is making you miserable you can just unmatch them and never have to think about them again and never see them again so it was designed essentially with victims in mind but the fact that perpetrators are now getting a little bit wise to this and realizing that it's their way of escaping any kind of accountability that's just unacceptable steve dean is a consultant to the dating app industry i think that's actually one of the most frustrating components of the current tinder and dating app experience and i don't think that that should ever be a possibility that someone can simply escape their bad behavior by blocking the person they just abused clinical forensic doctor janine rouse works closely with police in assessing victims of sexual violence and two years ago she detected an increase in sexual assaults resulting from dating apps i started noticing that some of the sexual assault forensic examinations i was doing the victims were telling me that they had met their offender through a dating app [Music] so she began documenting cases [Music] most of the sexual assaults were occurring on the first face-to-face meeting between parties and the majority were occurring at the alleged offenders home i think we are really only seeing the tip of the iceberg [Music] i think there are some additional barriers to these sexual assaults being reported and i think the real number that's occurring is much greater than what we're seeing despite the growing problem there are no national figures on the number of sexual assaults facilitated by dating apps in late 2019 new south wales police launched a project looking at different ways to address sexual assault with links to dating apps being one small part of it what we now have obviously with the dating app is a new emerging way to meet and people need to understand victims you know people that are going to use these systems need to understand that you're meeting someone the dating app may draw you into a false sense of a security where you're happy to meet and you think you know the person better than you do all you need to sign up for tinder is a phone number and an email and with no id verification it's almost impossible to know if the person you're messaging is who they say they are so i think if you are going to use these use dating apps um then by all means swipe right but do so with caution be aware that online communication with someone means that they're effectively still a real life stranger [Music] i wanted to meet new people i wanted to date i wanted new experiences all of my friends had been using it at the time and they all said it was amazing and it was a perfect and honestly probably the only way at the moment to meet people i remember i matched with him on a saturday morning i remember when his profile first came up that he was incredibly buff he was a firefighter he was on the hot firefighters calendar i remember seeing that and thinking oh my god that's impressive that's i guess a respectable job that's something that people think oh my gosh that's a firefighter he's a good person then they started messaging he wanted very explicit videos and photos straight away i felt nervous i didn't feel okay about it i told him pretty much straight away he said oh it won't be like that i'm sorry you know if we meet up we don't even have to do anything we can just hang it doesn't doesn't matter it'll be it'll be okay i'll be fine the next morning emily agreed to meet the firefighter at his apartment near the beach [Music] basically as soon as we went into his house he was very forthright with what he wanted he wanted to have sex he wanted to take my clothes off he wanted to do the things to me that i said that i didn't feel comfortable with and then he just began to have sex with me [Music] it wasn't something that i wanted it wasn't something that i said he could do he just started to rape me and i didn't say no because i was completely petrified he was so rough that the only thing that i could say was ow over and over again and he was he just didn't stop halfway through when he was assaulting me he picked up his phone from the table and said just hold on i just need to take some photos and he kept his hand holding me down as i tried to squirm and get out of the camera lens he raped emily three times that morning filming her each time he was so forceful and so rough and hard that it was so painful and following i bled for days there was blood everywhere four days later emily walked into her local police station and reported the sexual assault emily says police told her that because she hadn't explicitly said no during the assault there was little they could do she says police told her they would get a warrant to get the videos of the sexual assault off the man's phone instead they went to his home and gave him a warning doesn't seem like anything was gonna happen they didn't do their jobs to check that this man wasn't gonna hurt anyone else if they had gotten his phone they might have seen that he might have kept those videos i have no idea if he still has those videos what he does with those videos emily was told by new south wales police that officers had gone to this alleged perpetrator's house and told him he needed to delete this video was that the case um look i just i can't i can't go into the specific case but i'll certainly follow that matter up i understand that there's interaction with the offend or the alleged offender in this case i just can't comment further at this time our understanding is there was no warrant to search this man's phone to get the video as part of the investigation why would that be uh look again we're talking about specifics of a case you know in terms of it and specifically we're talking about a dating app you know offending um that may have involved the filming you know privately of another individual which is a different offense than sexual assault yeah so look all i can say is i'm happy to take this case to have a look at it and and come back to you emily says she later reported the man to tinder it took me a long time to even trying to find how to report someone i had to scroll through and the website wasn't clear and eventually i just had to google report tinder and find it i wrote down his name i wrote down his age i wrote down where he lived i wrote down his occupation everything and said this man is dangerous this man is a threat and will hurt people if given the chance and i just got an automated response just a refresh of the page saying thanks for submitting and i never heard anything else how did you feel just getting like just a random automatic response like that felt like a waste of time it just felt like why bother why did i bother like nothing is gonna happen from this if it's just an automated response after emily discovered he'd been sending abusive messages to other women he met on tinder she reported him again this time she did get a response from tinder telling her the man's account had been removed from the app [Music] it shouldn't take more than one woman to take someone off a dating app if he has assaulted someone why why is it so hard why did nothing happen the last time it makes me mad that this platform is making money off of people that are being hurt and then they can't even respond properly when people are hurt what are you doing with your money in response to our public call out 48 people told us that like emily they also reported a sexual offense to tinder of those only 11 said they received a response i contacted tinder after blocking this guy and received a generic stock standard [ __ ] response i contacted them again wanting to know what the follow-up was or would be and received no response this was distressing i got a generic response that they were looking into it but that i would not be informed of the outcome no response thanks we can't tell you what happens from here but we take this seriously in my research the women described receiving this message but they didn't actually receive anything to follow up from that and that made them feel like they were ignored and nothing had actually been done to address that problem rosalie glet from the queensland university of technology spent years researching women's safety on tinder she says the company's failure to respond to reports of sexual assault is creating an online environment that further enables perpetrators this is really quite significant because it tells those women who have made the reports that they're actually not justified and that they weren't serious enough to actually um warrant a report and it's also really dangerous because it tells users who are engaging in that harassing and abusive behaviour that it is acceptable and they don't need to change anything on that platform [Music] i essentially started using it to uh meet people for casual sex because it was private and it was to myself and i could choose who i liked the look of or liked the sound of initially it was very much just the ego boost you know just like seeing who would match with you and who found you maybe attractive or i was quite funny in my profile i tried to be funny swiping through people on tinder almost feels like a game no very picky oh god oh god i saw this guy on tinder and um i thought he was reasonably attractive not outstandingly in my opinion um but he had a few nice photos um one with assumably like a nephew or a something like that and you know i loved that i thought that was really cute and we matched and instantly started chatting i think maybe after a month or so of just being very casual like hey how are you that type of thing it got a bit more uh flirtatious after messaging for six months on and off this man asked beth over to his place and i opened the door and immediately i just noticed he was huge like a lot bigger than he looked on his profile definitely not as attractive as his profile but as soon as i walked in the door there was no conversation essentially it was come to the bedroom now and he leaded me in that direction we then started to have sex and progressively it got rougher as it went on there was a moment in the sex where he was pushing my head so far into the um into the bed that my glasses were coming up to my face and i felt like they were about to break so and that was when i just i just asked to stop and uh and then he stopped and i just said oh i don't think i really want to do this anymore like i'm i think i might go home and he just he looked down on me and he just said straight face to me well you're not allowed to leave until i come and in that moment it was it was really like uh i was like i think i was just shocked and it was it was a real a real moment where i felt like i didn't have any options [Music] so the sex continued and when it finished i immediately got up and got changed and i asked for a glass of water just so i could get him away from me i sort of noticed on the kitchen table just sort of in between me and him was a really large knife and he sort of moved the knife close to my neck and then um then just started laughing i felt like i was in some real serious trouble and i was really hopeless in that situation because he was so much bigger than me beth got out of his house and ran to her car the second i got in the car i burst into tears and like it wasn't just a you know a sob to myself it was like wailing hysterical crying beth says she pulled over open tinder and used the app's function to report him for sexual assault [Music] and um the response from tinder was it was an automated response immediately where they sort of said um we'll look into this and we'll get back to you but there was no follow-up there was no nothing did you ever hear from tinder after that no no one of the women who participated in my research she was actually she reported a man who had engaged in really harassing an abusive behaviour towards her she reported him to the platform but a couple of days after this experience she actually saw that the man was available still on tinder and she even had the ability to match with him again and so you know this suggested to her that tinder really hadn't done anything about that issue [Music] in 2020 the loneliness and isolation of covert 19 lockdowns have meant more people are desperate for company paid tinder subscriptions increased almost 20 percent in the year to june the company says tinder is the highest grossing non-gaming app in the world [Applause] and tinder's built to be addictive [Music] it makes it so that you're always on this hamster wheel you're always stuck trying to see who's next who else is available they just get stuck in swiping mode and then they'll hit their end of the day where they have no more swipes left and maybe they'll pay for more tinder is a free app but it makes money by getting you to pay for extra features like boosting your profile for 30 minutes to increase your chance of a match or allowing you to see who's liked you users who don't pay are bombarded with notifications encouraging them to become a paid subscriber it's designing to get people to subscribe and never leave making it really hard for them to opt out to cancel their subscription you can see where they're investing they're putting their money and their time to getting people to pay more they're not necessarily investing in consumer protections or safety features i think the other frustrating one is when they say that you missed someone who liked you and try to get you in that way you don't know as a user whether that's true it's an example of a feature where the site could be lying outright and manipulating their users into paying more money when they really shouldn't have had to do that tinder is owned by u.s dating conglomerate match group a dominant industry player the company has nearly 2 000 employees and owns many of the world's most popular dating platforms as well as tinder there's hinge ok cupid and plenty of fish last year the u.s federal trade commission launched legal action against match group for using fake love interest ads to trick hundreds of thousands of users into paying for subscriptions using messages the company knew were from scammers tinder acts like it's above the law and i think this this goes across its behavior whether that's about dealing with scammers using our data to set prices or dealing with people who've faced harassment or abuse this company has the resources it's offering a service it needs to just meet the bare minimum to look after people on the platform unfortunately we really don't know much about the way that tinder addresses complaints and that's because it does it makes all its decisions in a an opaque black box so that means the public really doesn't know how many reports are made what these reports are about and what the platform's actually doing to address the problem match group declined our requests for an interview but provided a statement saying we're outraged that singles anywhere may experience fear discomfort or worse when looking to meet someone special and we will always work to improve our systems to make sure everyone on our apps feels respected and safe in 2015 this woman became the target of a serial rapist who found his victims on tinder she doesn't want to be identified so we'll call her lauren initially when i saw his profile he said that he was a lawyer and a journalist and a snowboarder and and i thought oh that's interesting he started messaging me like as soon as the match happened lauren went on two tinder dates with this man who she knew as dylan on the second date they went to the pub with his friends i went to the bathroom after i'd said i'm gonna go home i'm just gonna go to the bathroom and that's when he followed me in he forced her into a toilet cubicle and tried to have sex with her but she escaped i'd left my jacket and my bag at the tables that we were sitting at and i went back to get it and um dylan had ripped my underwear off in the bathroom and he had them in his hands and he made this big gesture that you know because i was going home and he stuck my underwear under his friend's nose and i just gathered my things got in a cab and went home police contacted lauren after another victim came forward the man's real name was glenn heartland in 2017 glen hartland was charged with raping three women and indecently assaulting lauren while on bail lauren says glenn heartland continued to try to lure women on the platforms using multiple profiles under different names that was really scary it was really scary that he was a man that was violent towards all of us who he knew we were part of the case against him one of the women glenn hartland raped was paula paula met glenn hartland on tinder in 2014 and after dating him for three months she broke it off it was then that he came to her apartment and raped her she started to realise through facebook that he was interacting with other women and that's when she felt strongly then i have to come forward i have to warn these other women people can't go through what i've been through we're all proud of for doing that uh wouldn't it would've been a hard thing to do you've got to overcome the embarrassment of it and feeling that maybe you contributed to to what happened and she overcame came that and she's quite strong in her view to pursue it and and get a result and then it was just a process a long process of gathering evidence and i think i said it took a it was a four-year effort with the police doggedly following leads and that whole time was very frightening for all the girls because a lot of the time he was before they could actually charge him they were frightened and that takes a toll on them heartland's trial was meant to start next week but in a surprise move he admitted to the sexual assaults in the county court this morning finally in october 2018 glenn hartland was convicted paula was shattered by the whole ordeal [Music] we were satisfied enough he got a conviction we just wanted it behind us we don't think she was ever the same after what happened to her no there was changes you know she had mental health issues that that led from that and um we could see the changes before the sentencing paula took her own life she didn't get to see their end results um yeah so that was um that was obviously we thought she was through the worst of it yeah but um yeah i mean our life will never be the same for us it's a big part of our life is gone you know her smiley face you know my little me too she was we'd be doing something it was always me too i think one of the things she felt because she was quite an intelligent young woman she felt ashamed that she was duped and she wanted that message to get across to not feel ashamed of whatever happened to you whether it was the sexual assault or the decisions you made it's not your fault that that this happened to you glenn heartland was sentenced to 14 years and 9 months in jail the judge's remarks could have been a judgment on tinder itself you met all of your victims through dating apps where people seek partners either for transactional sexual encounters or for more meaningful relationships such an online world provides a fertile landscape in which predators can roam it's like a minefield and and sites like tinder they create these minefields and give you a few safety warnings but basically you're on your own it's the perfect platform for predators and scammers that's the way i say it [Music] match group safety policy says the company prides itself on its support to and cooperation with law enforcement and that it stands ready to assist in any active investigations but new south wales police told four corners that dating app companies frequently fail to provide information in sexual assault investigations [Music] in terms of the dating apps there's a contact email and you know they're supposed to get back to us there's always difficulties with that process some have what's called liaison officers some of the big social media operators and we work with those they tend to be offshore um or work with you know our federal counterparts having said that it's always difficult it's always difficult to get the information often tech companies particularly the big united states ones that have an international presence they throw their weight around they act like they can't be held accountable and they're not subject to local laws particularly for smaller countries like australia they're not they can be held accountable we can write great laws to force them to do better the idea that these people who are coming to tinder looking for a good experience looking for love looking for friendship can have such negative experiences when tinder is making hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars that's just unacceptable tinder has made billions of dollars off our pursuit of love and sex but the app that's redefined how we date is failing to keep us safe tinder i think has a huge responsibility to understand that their whole app is causing people to be vulnerable time and time again but i don't think they take it seriously even though it appears to happen all the time they just do not take it seriously they don't care [Applause] [Music] if the material covered in this story has raised any concerns for you you can contact these services you

Channel: ABC News In-depth

Views: 1,353,636

Keywords: tinder, dating, dating app, rape, sexual assault, tinder nightmare, tinder story, predator, triple j, four corners, propublica, unmatch, unmatching, raped on tinder, knife, threatened, threat, date, raped, love, relationship, australia, match group, bumble, hinge, online dating, online, privacy, security, sex, ABC News, what to watch, documentary, documentaries to watch, casual sex, lover, dated, protection, police, policing, filmed, graphic, NSW Police, Victoria Police, profile, danger, victim, perp, swipe, right

Id: IFFTMfp5iQo

Length: 43min 15sec (2595 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020

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[u/supremelyparanoid]

For context - Four corners is very respected tv journalism in Aus. You can even download the transcripts of the episodes on their website!

[u/staywiththecrown]

Just the fact that women DOWNLOADED the app is grounds for women to be harmed, according to LVM/NVM scroteroaches. "She KNEW what she was getting into", "Why else would she download the app??" are the things they say whenever there are reports of Tinder violence. Please stay safe, ladies!! ANYONE can download it; there are no safety nets for women.

[u/Phoenix__Rising2018]

Rapist central

[u/[deleted]]

I said this in another post about a similar topic and since OLD has become super common, this is my advice to women who use OLD: make sure to have ALL the identifying basic information of the males you’re talking to (like anything that would be included in a police report). Make sure to know their legal name, check their social media, even check the sex offender registry. Always make sure to meet in a crowded, public place in the daytime and make sure that you come and go with your own transportation. Also, make sure to take screenshots of their pictures and your conversations. It’s unfortunate women have to always be on the lookout but NEVER trust a scrote you barely know.

[u/howdoilogoutt]

Yep it is more than ever full of predators, and creeps.

[u/[deleted]]

The reason why I will never use any of these sites again is because of an article I read last week regarding women reporting rape to the police and how their cases are handled in front of the courts; in particular if you met online (tinder etc) as it states that consent is a given from both parties from the get go!!!! My blood froze on the spot! Never again!

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/society/2020/oct/19/prosecutors-england-wales-new-advice-dating-apps-nude-selfies-consent-cps