A Tinder-like app popular with teens and young adults is alleged to have been used to extort money from users by tricking them into sending sexually explicit photos, a problem that internet safety watchdogs say is indicative of the challenges of keep young people safe on social media.
The app, Wizz, allows users to scroll through profiles that display a person’s image, name, age, status, and zodiac sign. Wizz advertises the app as a “safe space” for meeting new friends and allows users as young as 13 to join and connect with users of a similar age.
Its basic functionality resembles popular dating apps. When users open the app, they are presented with another person’s profile. They can then choose to message that person in the app’s chat feature or swipe left to see a new profile.
Child safety watchdogs have questioned whether the app’s security system is effective.
The France-based app has been downloaded more than 14 million times worldwide since its launch in 2019 and more than doubled its monthly active users in the past year, according to Sensor Tower, a company that tracks apps. It is sometimes ranked in the top 10 social networking apps on the Apple App Store.
That makes Wizz a relatively successful but still niche social network, the kind that can avoid the scrutiny heaped on larger tech platforms. And since Wizz is a French app, it doesn’t have to report child safety issues to US authorities, experts told NBC News. The app also has no parental controls, according to barka company that makes parental control products.
John Shehan, Senior Vice President, Division of Exploited Children and International Engagement at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), a nonprofit group tasked by the US government with tracking reports of abuse material online child sexual abuse, said his organization has received more than 100 reports from members of the public about minors allegedly being sextorted on Wizz this year, placing the app behind only Snapchat and Instagram for such reports.
sextortion is an increasingly common online crime in which people are lured into sending sexually explicit photos. Once the photos are sent, the recipient of the images threatens to share them online or with family or friends unless the victim sends money.
“It’s just people who know they have to report to the cyber tip line, so the incident rate could be much higher,” Shehan said.
According to the Canadian Center for Child Protection (C3P), a national charity focused on child safety, Wizz was the seventh most mentioned platform in reports of sextortion to its tip line between June 2022 and last month.
Stephen Sauer, director of C3P’s tip line, said they have received 75 reports regarding Wizz since January 1, compared with 15 reports in the previous six months. He said that he could not speak about the reasons for the rebound.
In the past six months, around 90% of C3P reports involving Wizz were related to the alleged sextortion of young people, he said. He added that some young users in these cases, ages 13 to 17, saw or talked about Wizz as a dating app.
“Often they are looking to connect with other peers of a similar age through the app and that is how they are extorted,” Sauer said.
It is not clear who was behind the sextortion or if the sextortion efforts were part of a broader pattern of online crime.
The app has become popular enough to generate its own genre of online content in which people post videos of themselves using the app and trying to woo people they find attractive. On many TikTok videosusers have shown screenshots of their chats on Wizz, where they test their “rizz,” a slang term used by young people to describe someone’s level of charisma or attractiveness. It rhymes with the name of the Wizz app, which the teens took and turned into “rizz” challenges in Wizz.
When contacted about alleged security issues in the app, Wizz provided a press release in which CEO Aymeric Roffé said: “Wizz understands parents’ concerns about their teens’ online safety. We are committed to providing a safe platform for everyone, including young adults and teens.”
The abuse of the app by predators dovetails with what authorities and experts say is a broader rise in sextortion schemes targeting minors online. Recent studies have linked harmful content and predatory activity to teen social apps.
Social apps geared towards connecting teens like Yubowizz and Wink they have been released in the last decade with varying levels of popularity. Experts say that platforms with a chat feature and a young user base carry inherent risks, including popular platforms where adults and minors can interact.
It is a problem that has been the subject of a growing body of research.
Teen dating and social apps are among the online places adults use to meet and communicate with minors, according to research. paper published last year by Brian Neil Levine, director of the Amherst Institute for Cybersecurity at the University of Massachusetts, on the effectiveness of investigations of online child exploitation material.
TO study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics last year analyzed Apple’s App Store reviews of friendship apps marketed to teens, including Wizz. His findings “point to an alarming presence of predatory and fraudulent content in apps marketed to young teens.”
In February, the fbi warned that the financial sextortion of minors online has become a global crisis, based on thousands of such reports it received in the past year.
Wizz makes some efforts to prevent adults from interacting with minors. The app uses third-party services to moderate complaints made by users through the app, according to its press release. Wizz matches users with people in their age range to ensure that the user security and estimates the age of users when they upload a selfie through an artificial intelligence tool provided by Yoti, an identity technology company. According to Wizz Privacy policyif Yoti can’t provide an accurate enough age estimate, the app uses company data AI Hive to try to manually validate a user’s age.
The use of AI to determine ages has come under scrutiny, as such systems can perpetuate and even exaggerate human prejudices.
“Because we want to make sure that our community members can only connect with people who are in the same age range, we are verifying the age of each user through our trusted partner Yoti,” says Wizz in part of his website. dedicated to security questions. He added that the company manually reviews images of people who claim the system made a mistake in identifying their age.
Wizz also says in its “acceptable use rules” that users who break its rules can get their accounts suspended and the company can report illegal activity to law enforcement.
Hive did not respond to a request for comment. A Yoti spokesperson directed NBC News at Wizz.
Some child safety experts have questioned the effectiveness of that system. Most social media apps have a form of age verification, some use AI like Wizz, and others even go so far as to require users to upload photos of their government ID. But few trust it to ensure security in relation to the main function of their application.
Detective Sgt. Katie Feehan, of the New Jersey State Police’s Internet Crimes Against Children Unit, said Wizz’s age verification process gives young users a false sense of security that they are talking to users their own age.
“Any app that has a chat feature and children are online is potentially dangerous,” he added. “And if these sextortion bad actors are on the Wizz app, that’s something parents need to know and kids need to know, you know, the dangers of using it.”
NCMEC’s Shehan said it’s common for people involved in sextortion schemes to create “fictitious accounts posing as a typically attractive young woman. And they are specifically enticing young children to produce a sexually explicit image of themselves.”
Sauer said that some of the C3P reports indicated that online predators could lie about their age on Wizz to target minors.
“The biggest concern is that there is a mix of adults and youth on the platform and that the distinction between those two groups does not seem to be constrained based on what we are seeing,” he said.
Bark, the parental control company, criticized the app’s age verification system in a review on its website, which stated that “the risk of predation is enormous on Wizz”.
Kelly Newcom, mother and founder of Brave Parenting, a Texas-based online safety education group for parents, said in an interview that she believes Wizz “has far more dangers than real benefits to making real friends.”
In lieu of parental controls, some schools have begun warning parents about the possible uses of Wizz. In the last four months, five schools in the United States and the United Kingdom shared online security infographics and guides about Wizz with parents.
