Melbourne Vigilantes Attempt to Expose Online Predators on Tinder [VIDEOS]
A Melbourne group is trying to expose online predators on the dating app Tinder by pretending to be an underage girl. The unidentified creators of The Tinder Experiment set up a fake account of a 15-year-old girl, and claims they have already caught two men who preyed on minors.
They set up a fake account for “Imogen,” who registered as an 18-year-old but cleared on her profile that she is really just 15. Despite her status as a minor, many older men on the dating app allegedly didn’t find her being too young as a deterrent.
Tinder allows underage people to join, with 13 being the minimum age requirement. However, the app only lets minors interact with other minors. It also does not prevent adults from creating a fake profile and pretend to be underage.
According to the group, they already secretly filmed two men, who are believed to be aged 31 and 43, meeting up with Imogen when she told them she was alone in the house. The creators told the Tech Geek that they started the experiment after noticing “an alarming amount of inappropriate content in the app.”
“We thought that this particular issue [older men meeting underage girls] was an important one so we tackled it first,” the creators told the site, adding that they also found prostitution and illicit drug trafficking issues on the app.
They then launched “Imogen,” who is actually a 21-year-old actress. Imogen swiped every person she came across on the app, telling everyone who swiped right back that she was underage. Although there are those who unmatched her immediately, there were also those who weren’t put off by her age.
They posted their encounters with some of the men on YouTube. The first episode sees Imogen inviting men to her house after telling them she was home alone. The group wanted to see his reaction when Imogen’s brother caught them.
The group knows what they’re doing is risky, but they said safety of everyone involved is their prioritu. “There’s always a minimum of four o us there. We always have a man close to Imogen (usually concealed within three metres) in case there’s an urgent need to diffuse a situation,” they said.
They did not identify the men in the videos, and have not reported the interaction to the police. They have consulted advice from a legal aid, who advised them not to report people as they would be the ones to get in trouble instead.
Victoria Police are investigating the content of the videos, saying they don’t condone the group’s efforts to catch so-called online predators.