What happens when you pit two unwitting heterosexual males against each other, where both think the other is a for-real woman? Hilarity, that’s what.
Looking for some fun at some lovelorn straight guys’ expense, a Californian hacker developed a program that would identify two men who both swiped right on the same “bait” profile that showed pictures of attractive women on Tinder. The duo’s flirtatious messages are then bounced back and forth to each other using the fake profile as a conduit.
As you’d expect, heavy flirting was the result, until the often awkward conclusion when the penny dropped. In some of the conversations shared, conversations were surprisingly lengthy, as both parties seem to ignore the warning signs that everything wasn’t as it seemed. The code ensured any phone numbers were obfuscated, and creator apparently stepped in when both parties planned to meet in real life — which would have been very awkward.
Tinder’s API has been pretty vulnerable to abuse, hilarity and generating publicity for movies. Last year, a security flaw was reported that meant it was possible to pinpoint a user’s exact location.
As the hacker explained to The Verge, the program made matches within minutes of activation; Patrick estimates he was overseeing 40 conversations within the first 12 hours. He developed code to scramble phone numbers and stepped in when a real-world meeting was imminent, but he also feels ambiguous about the ethics of the prank: “They ignore all the signs, they ignore all the weird things,” he says of the users. “When someone is so quick to meet up without any detail or know anything about the person at all – maybe it’s deserved.”
You can see all of the screenshots of the painfully awkward conversations here.
