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Dating app 'tricks users with fake profiles'

DPA/The Local
DPA/The Local - [email protected]
Dating app 'tricks users with fake profiles'
Photo: Tom Barfield

The Dresden-based online dating service Lovoo tricks users by creating fake female profiles to tempt men into giving the company more money, a technology magazine has claimed.

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The revelation come in the most recent edition of c't computer magazine, which reports that the company has been pulling the trick for at least two years.

The magazine claims to have been shown documents which prove the claim.

Although Lovoo provides a free app, users pay for bonuses such as an option called "Top Chat".

Bild reports that the fake accounts were used to try and tempt men into handing out cash for these extras.

The tabloid also reports that Lovoo made an extra million Euros per year in profit through this ploy.

Lovoo, which has 36 million users in 17 countries has rejected the accusation, claiming that the documents seen by c't are themselves the fakes.

But c't editor-in-chief Johannes Endres responded by saying in the over 50 gigabytes of screen shots, source code and emails in their possession they have found "no indication of manipulation."

This would be the second such scandal to hit an online dating portal in recent weeks, after "adult dating" website Ashley Madison - a site which facilitates adultery - was revealed to have paid for the creation of fake female profiles.

Numbers trumpeted by the company for the proportion of female to male users were proved by a hack on the company's servers to be massively distorted.

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