What is LOVOO doing?
WE ARE DECLATRING WAR ON FAKE PROFILES!
The problem with spam attacks and fake profiles has existed since LOVOO was
founded. The more people use LOVOO, the more attractive this environment gets for third
parties who want to scatter their advertising or deceitful content as much as possible
in order to earn money or hurt others. Unfortunately, we cannot identify and
disable every fake profile as such before it can do harm on our platform.
Nevertheless, we will show you how we tackle fake profiles and constantly improve in
doing so.
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Our Anti-Spam Team
In April 2015 a team was formed that exclusively deals with the development and optimization of Anti-Spam measures.
What is their mission?
Our team devises an intelligent, continuously improving Anti-Spam program. The program automatically and semi-automatically recognizes spam, scam and fake profiles and fights them. We use machine learning for this purpose.
Achievements: Aggressive spam profiles are normally identified and taken out of the picture within a few seconds.
Additional measures:
If a profile slips through the net of the automated Anti-Spam intelligence of LOVOO, our internal quality control, the Customer Care team as well as user reports will quickly step in. Spam profiles are manually blocked by the Anti-Spam team once an analysis has been completed.
We are always improving:
If a spam profile has been successfully identified, we use these findings to improve our real-time Anti-Spam algorithm. As a result, the program will be able to respond more quickly in future and ward off recurring attack patterns. Repeated waves of attack therefore have no chance of success.
Read more about Measures here
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Measures
Using a variety of measures, we aim to prevent false profiles from doing harm on LOVOO in the first place.
Prevention
Encryption of data transmission:
Encrypted and securely authenticated data transmission between the LOVOO app or website and the LOVOO system makes it more difficult for attackers to falsify or misuse data transmissions.
Invalid or duplicate email addresses, which could be used for the creation of spam profiles, are prevented.
Verification:
Users who have verified their profile are identified as such on the platform so that every user can clearly recognize whether a user is genuine or not. Profiles with limited verification (e.g. no valid email or photo verification) will have limited access to the LOVOO platform.
Continuous improvement:
The intelligent and rule-based algorithms of the Anti-Spam system are continuously improved on the basis of previously detected and repelled spam attacks.
Intelligent identification
Spam profiles are automatically identified in real time with rule-based and intelligent machine learning algorithms. Warnings from users via the LOVOO app, website or via email are evaluated manually and automatically in order to identify both individual spam attempts and bigger spam waves. New information regarding the behavior of potential spammers is used to subsequently search user profiles for spammers and identify any that may be present.
Combating
We make the lives of spammers, scammers and fakers difficult. Profiles identified as such are blocked manually or automatically. Blocked users may only communicate with others again once they have verified their profile (e.g. with photo or SMS verification). This also ensures that so-called false positives (profiles incorrectly classified as spam) may also continue to use their profile.
Read more about Spam reports here
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Up-to-date spam reports
In order to create more transparency, we publish regular reports on spam attacks on LOVOO and the tackling of these with our Anti-Spam algorithms. We analyze, learn and identify areas that we can improve in. You can find out more about our Anti-Spam measures in our up-to-date Transparency reports. We have put together some numbers for you in the following.
How many spammer profiles are automatically identified and disabled by our system?
We currently disable 87% of all profiles automatically. As a LOVOO user, you play an important role in this as the remaining 13% were reported to us manually.
How long does it take to automatically identify a spammer profile?
On average, 42 minutes pass between the initial activity, e.g. a Match vote, and disabling the profile with our Anti-Spam system.
Are spammers more active on female or male profiles?
Female profiles are predominant at 83%. The specified age is 29 years old. On the contrary, male profiles are 38 years old on average.
Read more about What can I do? here