Tinder is the ballroom of romance of our times, with hearts made and broken with a swipe left or right. But a new hack of the popular app is tricking heterosexual men into unknowingly flirting with other men.
A hacker has set up a program using Tinder’s API that uses female dummy accounts to put heterosexual men into conversations with each other.
Each party in the conversation thinks he is talking to a woman.
According to The Verge the creator of the hack was inspired to create a Twitter bot because female friends told him about some of the aggressive messages they would receive from male Tinder users.
Using a Facebook authentication token he was able to hack Tinder’s API and create a bot that was in effect a dummy female.
However, when a real world meeting seemed imminent he put in code that would scramble phone numbers and warn the users they had been pranked.
Reaction so far from pranked users has been a mixture of anger and bemusement.
Most of the men ignored red flags that they weren’t in fact talking to a real woman.
The exploit is the latest in a series of hacks that saw techies tweak the system to mass-like every girl they came across on Tinder to a hack that revealed users’ locations to within 100 feet.
Mobile dating image via Shutterstock
