Hook-up dating app Down used a Russian “review farm” to write fake assessments of its product.Credit: Marija Ercegovac
A dating app touted as one of the world’s biggest used Russian “review farms” to game rating systems and employed women to have bogus conversations with unsuspecting users, according to a whistleblower.
Gabriel Machuret, former marketing manager at hook-up dating app Down, said the company, which says it has 13 million users, hired contractors to write fake positive reviews on the Apple and Google app stores.
Gabriel Machuret is the former marketing manager for dating app Down. Machuret says its practices mirror much of what happens in the dating app industry. Credit: Angi High
Machuret, who lives in Australia and worked for Down in 2022, said the Taiwan-based company’s contractors also wrote fake negative reviews to push competitor dating apps down the app store rankings. “We paid a Russian company – that was my job – to write positive reviews,” he said.
“That was part of the marketing budget per month, to pay for review farms. If you see a new app that you’re curious about and it has a review of 2.8 stars, you’re not going to download it. You’re trying to hide the bad reviews. We even paid for bad reviews for the other apps. It is that bad.”
Down is one of scores of dating apps scrutinised as part of an investigation by this masthead that found increasing concerns from consumers and experts about the industry’s conduct towards the 3 million Australians who use dating apps, including the dominant Tinder, Hinge and Bumble apps.
The investigation comes amid a backdrop of decreased users and climbing subscription costs as companies seek to maintain revenues. Match Group’s Tinder and Hinge and the many other dating apps it owns, and Bumble together generated more than $US4 billion ($6 billion) from subscriptions last year.
Machuret said Down’s tactics were not yet typical but were increasingly common across the industry because it was financially squeezed. “The dating apps are in crisis,” he said.
Wall Street-listed Bumble’s share price was $US75 three years ago but hit a low of $US10 this week; the company laid off a third of its 950-strong workforce in February.
Bumble branded itself a feminist app when it launched because women initiated conversations; it recently attracted controversy when, amid falling user numbers, it allowed men to start making the first move. Tinder and Hinge’s parent company, Match Group, has seen its share price tumble from $US169 in 2021 to $US30.
Match Group, Bumble and other smaller dating app companies this week handed the Albanese government a voluntary industry code they say will make dating safer.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland demanded the code after the Australian Institute of Criminology in 2022 found three in four people using dating apps experienced some form of sexual violence including sexual harassment, threatening language, image-based sexual abuse and stalking.
On Friday, Rowland said the federal government had worked hard to improve safety on dating apps and would have more to say after reviewing the industry’s proposed code.
A spokeswoman for Match – which along with Tinder and Hinge owns the Plenty of Fish, Match and OK Cupid apps – said the company had worked “collaboratively” with other dating apps, the government and others to create the new Australian code.
A Bumble spokeswoman said the entire industry had worked co-operatively over the past seven months to prepare its voluntary code.
“Any instance of violence, harassment or abuse is unacceptable to us, and we do not hesitate to remove perpetrators from our platform,” she said.
Machuret said Down had also used dormant female user accounts to send fake messages to men.
And while bots are a problem on many apps today, sending messages to users who think they’re interacting with a real person, Machuret said Down’s manipulation was done manually.
“We didn’t have bots. In fact, we were doing it manually. We had Filipino women messaging guys.”
A company spokesman denied manipulating reviews or using bogus conversations.
“We absolutely never employ any fake accounts ourselves. [Some] companies might play that, but we will never do that because we really feel firmly that we want our users to have a real experience.”
Asked about manipulating the app store rankings, he said: “In the app store industry, let’s say Apple and Google, we have evidence and suspicion of other negative things that maybe other players are doing. And we don’t employ that stuff currently.”
He also said Machuret was a disgruntled former employee.
Machuret also claimed that staff at the app could read all user messages.
“Everything. People think, ‘Oh, no, that’s not possible.’ But it is possible because I’ve read every single conversation of people when we have a problem, when someone gets reported,” he said.
The company spokesman said Down, like all dating apps, needed to be able to read users’ messages so it could provide a safe environment and keep “accounts authentic”.
“You would not able to in some way have that vision into what people are doing on the app,” the spokesman said.
Apple and Google declined to comment on Down’s case specifically. An Apple spokeswoman pointed out that the company removed nearly 152 million fraudulent ratings and reviews from its app store last year.
A Google spokeswoman said the company had systems to detect spam and fake reviews.
The Down spokesman would not say how many Australian users the company has, although the company’s public relations manager said Australia had an “over 200 per cent increase in downloads since the start of 2024”.
Dating app users pay subscriptions to unlock features such as unlimited “likes” and a chance to view who has swiped on their profile. But Millennials and Gen Z’s in the Western world are increasingly reluctant to pay to play.
Author Lisa Portolan, who is also an academic at University of Technology Sydney, said: “People have begun to feel very disenfranchised and disillusioned with the dating app process, and they’re very concerned these corporations are trying to squeeze them out of money by making them go onto premium packages in order to get any sort of outcome.”
In 2023, Portolan published her PhD on dating apps. She said Australia, like the US and Europe, was experiencing falling numbers on dating apps.
Neither Bumble nor Match Group answered directly on whether user numbers had fallen in Australia. Tinder’s most recent filings show a decrease in users but an increase in revenue.
“At the start, there were no premium packages,” Portolan said, “and there is a drive from the dating apps to push you towards paying for a premium package if you want your profile served to a greater group of people.”
Movember’s Zac Seidler says men’s rights activists lean into the bad experiences of young males on dating apps to turn them to misogyny.
Portolan said the dating app companies were “not very transparent” and that the Australian government should push more aggressively for clearer information on their business practices, along with greater collaboration with law enforcement, greater protection for vulnerable audiences including women, “and just greater transparency in general”.
Others studying the sector also warn the apps are playing a role in the rise of poisonous misogyny.
Zac Seidler, global director of research at men’s health charity Movember, said young men often came to dating apps with little knowledge of how to interact with women, and the effect on many men was crushing.
“Many don’t come in with a misogynist worldview, with this idea of dominance and power and toughness, but they often leave with it. It is a very slippery slope from ‘Here is how the dating world works’ to getting into pick-up artistry.”
Seidler said that men’s rights activists on social media often “weaponise these experiences that young men have on dating apps, where they start to structure the experience and say, ‘Have you realised that you’re actually not getting a lot of responses from women? Have you realised that you’ve been ghosted a lot? Have you realised that [women are] only picking the alpha males.’ It really leans into male insecurity to drive a misogynistic, sexist narrative.”
A group of US singles is suing Match, alleging in a class action that Match’s Tinder and Hinge lock users “into a perpetual pay-to-play loop” that places profit above the claim they are designed to be deleted.
“Match’s business model depends on generating returns through the monopolisation of users’ attention, and Match has guaranteed its market success by fomenting dating app addiction that drives expensive subscriptions and perpetual use,” the lawsuit says.
Users in Australia spend an average of about 90 minutes a day on dating apps.
Author Alyssa Huynh, whose new book Safe Space explores racism in Australia, said her experience of dating apps had at times been positive by connecting her with people she wouldn’t meet in her day-to-day life.
Alyssa Huynh is the author of Safe Spaces, a new book about her experience of racism in Australia. She has had mixed experiences on dating apps.Credit: Wayne Taylor
But Huynh said dating apps needed to do more to make women of colour navigating a challenging dating scene feel safe.
She fears men messaging her “because I am Asian and they have an Asian fetish or what some term ‘yellow fever’”.
“Given how mainstream dating apps now are in Australia, do they need more regulation than the current almost entirely unregulated situation?”
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