Tinder and other Apps let Sex Offenders on the Platform
What a scary world we live in!
Match Group, the company who owns most major online dating services, screens for sexual predators on Match.com, but not on Tinder, OkCupid or Plenty of Fish.
Match Group does carry out background checks for its paid services, like Match.com, but it doesn’t do so for its free apps. A Match Group representative told ProPublica that “there are definitely registered sex offenders on our free products.” Yikes!
“We do not tolerate sex offenders on our site and the implication that we know about such offenders on our site and don’t fight to keep them off is as outrageous as it is false,” the spokesperson said. “As technology evolves, we will continue to aggressively deploy new tools to eradicate bad actors, including users of our free products like Tinder, Plenty of Fish and OkCupid where we are not able to obtain sufficient and reliable information to make meaningful background checks possible.”
Here’s examples of why this is important and where it went wrong:
One Colorado man, Michael Miller, was convicted in 2015 of raping a woman he met through OkCupid. He later created a new OkCupid account and was allowed to keep using the platform for months, according to ProPublica and CJI’s investigation. A Pennsylvania man, Seth Mull, had a 17-year history of sex offenses before he started using Plenty of Fish in 2017 — that year, the dating site matched him with a woman who later accused him of rape, according to the investigation.
This makes old school dating sound a whole lot better all of a sudden.
