Hilarious Tinder Hack Has Heterosexual Men Flirting With Each Other

Alright, perhaps we shouldn’t be laughing at this, but boy is it funny. The Verge reported that a California-based computer engineer they dubbed ‘Patrick’ had hacked Tinder and matched heterosexual men with other heterosexual men.

From their website:

“Patrick’s program identifies two men who “like” one of his bait profiles (the first used prominent vlogger Boxxy’s image; the second used an acquaintance who had given Patrick consent) and matched them to each other. The suitors’ messages — some aggressive, others mundane, but all of them unabashedly flirtatious — are then relayed, back and forth, to one another through the dummy profile.”

I can just imagine all these guys thinking they just scored big time when the ‘girl’ they’re talking to flirts back just as hard. And then finding out that the ‘girl’ was actually just a dude. Ah, the anticlimax!

Tinder has been on the receiving end of quite a few tricks and is notoriously vulnerable to hacks. A loophole in the app allowed user locations within 100 feet to be revealed and a number of techies tweaked the system to mass-like every girl they come across.

However Patrick – who is also a Tinder user – seems to have hacked the system for a good cause, “The original idea was to throw that back into the face of the people doing it to see how they would react.” He had initially set out to build a Twitter bot but once he found out how little safeguard Tinder’s API had, he decided to tweak that instead. “Tinder makes it surprisingly easy to bot their system. As long as you have a Facebook authentication token, you can behave as a robot as if you were a person.“

Patrick’s tricks not only revealed the weakness in Tinder’s API, but also shows what happens when men find out that they’re not talking to other men. Some turn to anger, some are confused and still some find it funny. “But above all, over and over, men breeze by every red flag that indicates they’re not speaking with a woman. Evidently, the first symptom of extreme thirst is blindness.”