Do Tinder bots dream of electric toys?

Inbar Raz
PerimeterX

Tinder. The Final Frontier. Pick gorgeous (or not so gorgeous) members of your desired sex with the tip of your finger, at the comfort of your sofa, your bed, and let’s admit it, even your toilet seat...
Research shows that there are 50 million active users on Tinder, checking their accounts 11 times per day and spend an average of 90 minutes per day on the app.
In the name of Science, I decided to sacrifice myself and delve into the world of Tinder dating. At first, I was detecting patterns in photos, in poses, in language and in attitude, all over the world. But suddenly something else showed up on my radar: Bots. And not just one – I was being surrounded. Imagine the heartbreak of matching with seven gorgeous women in a Scandinavian capital, only to discover that not only were they in reality bots, and they actually had an agenda.
In this talk I’ll describe the research, how I came to discover that bots were not an isolated case, and how I uncovered the pattern behind generating the profiles. I’ll also break down the infrastructure behind the operation, and show who’s behind a campaign that spawned over multiple countries and continents. I’ll give multiple examples, from Tinder as well as from other platforms, of how bots operate under the radar of the site owners and carry out their agenda.

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