In response to this, Tantan officially responded that it has learned from the App Store that Tantan App has been removed from the App Store due to violations for rectification. "We will actively cooperate with relevant departments, conduct comprehensive self-examination and self-correction, carry out in-depth rectification, and consciously maintain health." Green Internet Ecology".
Long before Tantan was removed from the shelves, 36Kr had learned from people close to Tantan that Tantan was on the list of the special rectification of niche instant messaging tools launched by the Cyberspace Administration of China on April 16. In this rectification operation, the first batch of 9 apps that spread obscene and pornographic information were shut down, including "Lin", "Liaochiao" and "Secret Language".
html On April 19, Nanchang Evening News reported that some users used the Tantan platform to publish online prostitution information. The report cited feedback from relevant users that "pornographic users posted prostitution WeChat IDs and QQ numbers on their avatars and signatures." On April 28, Tantan ushered in the delisting crisis.According to Bida Consulting monitoring data, as of June 2018, in the ranking of monthly active users of dating and dating apps, Tantan’s MAU (monthly active users) reached 22.662 million, ranking first, far exceeding 4.094 million The second best relationship of the century. Prior to this, in November 2017, Tantan founder and CEO Wang Yu announced that Tantan had 110 million registered users at that time, 72 million users had passed the review, MAU reached 20 million, and DAU (daily active users) were 7 million. While
has achieved rapid growth in the social field of strangers, the user base attracted by Tantan Traffic seems to have deviated from its established track. The sweetness brought by the hormone economy is beginning to reveal its ugly side.
Love scam
Luming, who lives in Chengdu, owns her own cultural media company. Her busy work brings her a lot of income, but it also leaves her no time to take care of her emotional problems. Last year, Lu Ming also tried downloading Tantan after being recommended by a friend around him. When she started using
, Lu Ming also encountered some boys who directly expressed their "bad intentions" appeals. She usually ignored them or blocked them directly. Until January 2019, Lu Ming met Chen Zhibin, who was working in the financial industry on Tantan.
is different from the previous users who rushed to express their purpose. Lu Ming feels that Chen Zhibin is gentle, family-oriented, and has a successful career. In daily communication, Chen Zhibin will often send Lu Ming his location and share his daily itinerary. The location is displayed in China.
Image source: provided by the informant
One day, Chen Zhibin recommended a lottery website called Feiyue Entertainment to her. She immediately rejected it without paying much attention to it. Since then, Chen Zhibin still insists on greeting her every day. During the Spring Festival, he even told Lu Ming his previous love story: after his ex-girlfriend passed away in a car accident, he did not post on WeChat Moments for three years and was even depressed about it. Lu Ming, who had already fallen in love, even thought that Chen Zhibin was "deep in love and righteousness", and their relationship quickly heated up. Chen Zhibin also promised to come to Chengdu to accompany Lu Ming when his company was stable, and the two of them lived together.
Just when the relationship was about to be finalized, Chen Zhibin once again brought up the idea of buying lottery tickets from Feiyue Entertainment. This time Lu Ming did not refuse and started a small attempt. Every time Lu Ming invested, Chen Zhibin followed the investment with 10 times the amount, and told Lu Ming that he must follow his plan, otherwise he would be heartbroken if he lost money. Chen Zhibin even took the initiative to remind Lu Ming that the first consideration in investment should not be returns, but how to minimize risks. You should not have a "gamble" mentality, as long as you can earn 10%-15% every day.
everything sounds reasonable. While "taking" Lu Ming to invest, Chen Zhibin insisted on greeting and contacting her every day. He also recorded a special video for her on Valentine's Day and even sent her a mosaic ID card photo.
Lu Ming’s investment amount has reached more than 200,000 yuan, but Chen Zhibin still encourages her to expand the scope, suggesting that she can even borrow money to bet. By the end of February, Lu Ming made it clear that his strength was limited and his funds would not be increased.That night, the long-standing "General Victory" suffered a huge defeat - the amount in Lu Ming's account changed from hundreds of thousands to several thousand yuan.
Lu Ming, who was alerted, decided to go to Tianjin Chen Zhibin Company to find out what was going on. However, she came up empty-handed. According to the company address previously provided by Chen Zhibin, Lu Ming found that no one in the company had heard of "Chen Zhibin". After checking the industrial and commercial information, Lu Ming found that the person in charge of the company was a Fujianese in his forties, and he was not related to Chen Zhibin at all. The scam gradually unfolded. After Lu Ming raised questions and asked to meet, Chen Zhibin lost contact.
At this moment, Lu Ming found out that his best friend Zhang Yining was in love. His lover Gu Haitao was also from Tantan, but the other party's identity was a Chengdu native who was doing business in the Philippines. Coincidentally, this Gu Haitao's ex-girlfriend was also three years old. He died in a car accident before, and Gu Haitao also recommended the same gambling software to Zhang Yining.
Lu Ming then discovered that she and her best friend had encountered an organized and large-scale fraud gang. They mainly used dating and dating platforms to use relationships as a medium to gain trust and commit fraud. After some hard work, Lu Ming found seven or eight victims who had also fallen into the scam and chose to call the police. In the end, the police analyzed that they all encountered the "pig killing plate" in Southeast Asia, and the gang was most likely concentrated in the Philippines.
But why can "Chen Zhibin" be located in Beijing, Tianjin, or Shenzhen sometimes? After research, Lu Ming found that Tantan’s VIP members can modify their geographical positioning. In other words, “Chen Zhibin” can appear in any city they want to appear, and the system will also recommend the opposite sex in the same city or close to their location address. Online scams like
target not only women, but Zhang Tianzhuo, a man, is also deeply involved.
Zhang Tianzhuo downloaded Tantan a year ago and uploaded his photos truthfully, but no one took any notice. A friend reminded him that it might be because of his appearance, and suggested that he go to Taobao to buy a set of good-looking "life pictures" for boys. After he clicked on the link, his eyes were opened - thousands of good-looking life photos of young men and women were sold in sets. Containing dozens of daily photos of the same person, a set on Taobao is priced at only 4 yuan, which can be described as high quality and low price. After
changed to a new avatar, Zhang Tianzhuo was quickly marked as "liked" by dozens of women, and most of them even showed enthusiasm. This made Zhang Tianzhuo, an otaku who rarely receives attention from the opposite sex in life, very excited. But among the people who struck up a conversation with him, some of them stopped talking, and Zhang Tianzhuo attributed this to his inability to chat.
One of the girls named Shen Jing has been in contact with Zhang Tianzhuo. She also said that she would go to Hangzhou on a business trip at the end of the month and planned to come over to meet. Zhang Tianzhuo also secretly prepared a gift for the meeting. But towards the end of the month, Shen Jing said something happened at home and she needed to go back to deal with it urgently. Although Zhang Tianzhuo felt sorry, he still sent her two big "red envelopes" to express his comfort and hoped that she would deal with the family affairs as soon as possible before meeting again.
Shen Jing told Zhang Tianzhuo that something big happened at home this time. Her grandfather had been growing tea all his life in his hometown of Fujian Wuyi Mountain and loved tea as much as his life. However, he accidentally fell down while picking tea in the mountains a few days ago and was hospitalized. She could only quit her job and go back to take care of her grandfather and the tea house. In the next few days, Shen Jing posted pictures of hard work picking and frying tea on WeChat Moments, along with text such as "Be optimistic in the face of difficulties."
Although Zhang Tianzhuo doesn't like drinking tea, he still took the initiative to buy a box of tea leaves in order to help this strong girl. However, the tea leaves are expensive - 800 yuan/tael. Zhang Tianzhuo gritted his teeth and bought 3 taels, a total of 2,400 yuan.
Soon, while also on Tantan, Zhang Tianzhuo met another girl with whom he had a good chat. However, not long after the contact, Zhang Tianzhuo discovered that this girl had a very similar experience to Shen Jing, and her family also opened a tea shop. This made Zhang Tianzhuo alert. It was not until he searched online that he suddenly woke up. This type of scam had already been exposed by the media.
But that's not the end of the matter.This year, Zhang Tianzhuo discovered that the deception of the "Tea House Girl" had escalated. When the other party found that the trick of using tea could not fool Zhang Tianzhuo, he instead recommended Kweichow Moutai to him, and also provided a video of the on-site inspection, saying that he could Buy Moutai puree wine at a lower price.
In addition, Zhang Tianzhuo also met a "Cordyceps girl" from Tibet. She had Cordyceps collected from the mountains at home and said she could sell it to him at a "low price of 1,000 yuan." Feeling helpless, Zhang Tianzhuo had lost confidence in the platform and finally uninstalled Tantan App.
Zhang Tianzhuo was only defrauded of thousands of yuan to buy tea. In contrast, Nantong Luo Shunli was not so lucky.
At the end of last year, Luo Shunli met his "lover" on Tantan, an investment guru. After Luo Shunli fell in love, he led him to join a stock group. Teachers gave classes and recommended stocks in the group every day. Others in the group did seem to be making a lot of profits, and they were reaping the benefits. After observing for a period of time, Luo Shunli, who considered himself cautious, began to put down his defensive mentality and invested tens of thousands of yuan through the website recommended by the group. What really made him relax his vigilance was that all the stocks he bought maintained a good upward trend, and his profit-seeking mentality made him increase his investment to more than 500,000 yuan. But after that, the stocks he held began to hit the limit continuously, and the remaining balance could not be withdrawn.
After he questioned the teacher's level in the group, he was directly kicked out of the group. At the same time, the "lover" who introduced him also disappeared without a trace.
After consulting friends with many years of investment experience, Luo Shunli discovered that he had encountered a scam in the stock group. The general "routine" is to draw people into a special stock group through social networking sites such as Tantan, and in the group, except for one deceived person, the rest are robots or "trustees." The so-called profits are also meant to be shown to the deceived people. After successfully defrauding money, the deceived people will be kicked out of the group directly. At the same time, the website in the group that allows the defrauded people to invest has nothing to do with the securities market and is just a fund tray for internal trading.
, a self-media "full of money", once conducted research on Tantan. One day after purchasing Tantan quarterly membership, it was matched with a total of 246 people, including 30 people who added WeChat, 15 people who were "trusted" by live broadcasts, and "trusted" by games. "5 people, 2 film and television scammers, 2 gambling diversions, 1 snack "trustee"; 5 real people, only 3 people need to make friends, and 2 of them are ByteDance product managers and an overseas company of the interns are experiencing social products. "Full of Copper" said that this is equivalent to meeting 25 scammers in 24 hours, which is a very high ratio.
And among these non-real people, they may not all be people, sometimes they may just be codes.
Pencil Road disclosed that in September last year, someone used an automated program on Tantan to take advantage of men's self-esteem, vanity and lust, and used small pictures to "cheat" red envelopes in batches from friends they had not known for a long time. The illegal gains were astonishing.
Tantan’s commercial monetization struggles
Until the delisting incident, in the eyes of outsiders, Tantan’s development was smooth sailing.
In June 2014, Tantan, modeled after the foreign social networking application Tinder, was launched. This is a social App based on big data intelligent recommendation and a new interactive model. It will be based on the common interests and hobbies, common friends and past experiences between users Location and other information, filter out relatively matching people and push them. Users swipe left to feel indifferent and swipe right to like. It is simple and fast. For many otakus and people who are not good at talking, Tantan has undoubtedly hit the pain point and won the love of a large number of users.
relies on its unique positioning and rapid product iteration. Eight months after its launch, the number of Tantan users exceeded 1 million.
In the capital market, Tantan has shown strong ability to attract money. As of February last year, Tantan had experienced four rounds of financing, with a total amount of US$120 million.
Image source: Qichacha
Before Tantan, various stranger social products on the market were not friendly enough to female users. Therefore, during the development process, Tantan not only maintained extremely simple product functions and interactions, but also formulated extremely strict product mechanisms to prevent harassment for female users.In 2017, Tantan co-founder Pan Ying said in an interview with the media: “In order to prevent female users from being harassed in chats, when male users send words like ‘about’ to each other, they are reported for harassment by female users. In the end, the consequence was a permanent ban. "
As a result, "Tantan's user quality, especially the quality of female users, is high" has gradually become a common perception in the market. This is very attractive to and Momo , which are mainly male users.
In February 2018, Momo officially announced that it had spent a total of US$771 million to acquire Tantan. After the successful acquisition of Tantan, Momo’s MAU hit a record high. The financial report for the second quarter of 2018 released by Momo shows that during the reporting period, Momo’s MAU was 108 million, a year-on-year increase of 18%, and the total number of paying users was 11.6 million, a year-on-year increase of 64%, of which the newly added Tantan contributed a lot. , directly contributed 3.1 million paying users among the new users. Although
has a considerable user base, Tantan’s commercialization path is not smooth. Until
was acquired by Momo, Tantan’s commercialization method still only had paid members, and users’ payment habits had not yet been widely formed, so there was still a distance to profitability.
This may be related to the company founder’s restraint on commercialization. Wang Yu has expressed in public many times that he hopes Tantan will be thorough first and not be too broad. He believes that the stranger social market is a plate with 30 million to 50 million daily users. It is not too late to truly understand this group of people and then do more extensive commercialization.
But Momo is more active in its attempts to commercialize social interaction with strangers. A senior analyst at Jianzhi Research Institute believes that Momo has taken the path of pan-entertainment and turned into an interest platform. It has now launched product lines such as games, live broadcasts, short videos, etc. The core attention of native social networking is gradually dispersed, especially It is a live broadcast, with strong growth momentum and considerable profits.
Momo’s 2018 Q4 financial report shows that in the fourth quarter of last year, Momo’s live broadcast service revenue was US$430 million, accounting for 77%, and is its most important source of income. From this point of view, live streaming, as a model with strong cash flow, is more popular on the Momo platform where male users account for about 80%. The live streaming model cultivates users with high ARPU (average revenue per user) value. Momo, who has rarely spoken out in the mainstream in recent years, has been "making a fortune silently".
However, after Momo acquired Tantan, Tantan’s commercialization process was also put on the agenda.
In February 2018, Tang Yan, the co-founder, CEO and chairman of Momo Technology, said when acquiring Tantan, “Tantan still has huge potential to be unleashed, both in terms of user scale and revenue. The goal is to build Tantan into the company’s new growth engine in the next two to three years.”
"Tantan's road to commercialization is also faced by all other social platforms." A senior analyst at Jianzhi Research Institute believes that there is a certain demand for socializing with strangers, and an App is definitely needed to meet this demand, but the entire industry The development of all social platforms is subject to the tightening of policies. “No matter which social platform, the development of relying solely on membership payment is very limited. There is a high probability that it will be a pan-entertainment company like Momo. However, each company has different levels of development and different scales. The realization of The steps will be different. "
A senior Tantan user said on Zhihu that before being acquired by Momo, he matched 3,000+ friends without spending a penny, and two-thirds of them took the initiative to chat. After Tantan was acquired by Momo and commercialized on a large scale, he recharged three accounts. In the end, the total number of matches was less than 1,000, and less than one-twentieth took the initiative to chat.
He explained that Momo users’ “invasion” of Tantan has lowered the quality of the entire user group, and the arrival of the “diaosi army” will inevitably affect the ratio of male and female users on the Tantan platform. At the same time, with the growth of users, Tantan inevitably opened a "recharge service", further changing the overall relatively good community atmosphere of Tantan.
Why do scammers love "Tantans"
Today, the commercialization of social platforms and a good community atmosphere seem to be standing at both ends of the scale, with one ebbing and the other ebbing.
Coupled with the unique operating mechanism of this type of platform, Tantan is becoming a hotbed for online fraud.
Wang Tao is the product manager of a social software company. He has specially researched several similar products on the market such as Tantan, Momo, Jimu, and SOUL. In his opinion, Tantan and other similar products will be deeply loved by scammers and become Online scams are hotbeds for multiple reasons.
Take Tantan as an example. It focuses on socializing with strangers. When registering, you only need a mobile phone number that can receive a verification code, and no identity verification is required. In Wang Tao's view, this leaves room and convenience for identity fraud; and modern people have a need for social interaction with strangers, especially young people who have grown up in the Internet era and are more receptive to online dating. Socializing with strangers comes with attributes such as curiosity, ambiguity, and romantic encounters. Coupled with the anonymity and convenience of the Internet, it is easy to expand in scale and may lead to illegal activities.
At the same time, Tantan does not have an audit mechanism for user photos, etc., but its selection interface "swipe left to hate, swipe right to like" is mainly based on the other person's appearance. "Many people will choose to buy pictures of good-looking models or unknown actors on Taobao and other places to increase their probability of being liked. Scammers will 100% choose fake photos, which not only increases the success rate of fraud but also avoids legal liability. "Wang Tao said that since users of social networking sites such as Tantan have clear goals for making friends or going on blind dates, scammers can more accurately cater to their interests. For example, there are many older men and women, so scammers will pretend to be suitable for marriage. If you fall in love with a person who has a tall, rich, handsome or white and beautiful image, once you have feelings, your vigilance will be lowered, and you will fall into the trap.
Tantan’s user payment mechanism also gives paying members more privileges, such as being able to view more user information and modify their geographical positioning. This undoubtedly provides opportunities for scammers to see more user profiles, select suitable people to strike up a conversation with, and commit fraud. convenience.
Image source: Full of copper odor
In February last year, Tang Yan told 36Kr that Tantan’s membership fees are a very stable business. Commercialization through membership fees will actually have very low damage to the user experience, especially for a product that socializes with strangers, and it doesn’t matter if you do it sooner or later.
But in fact, according to iResearch data, less than a year after Tantan was acquired, less than 35% of Tantan’s female users, which once claimed to be half of its users, are female, and the age of mainstream users has also declined. 31 years old-35 years old.
In order to expand the number of users, Tantan even reads users' address books and bombards them with text messages. Therefore, a large number of users who have not used Tantan have received "secret love text messages": "XXX has a crush on you, come to Tantan and have a look."
Zhang Tianzhuo, an otaku, feels deeply about this. He first downloaded Tantan after receiving such text messages. Now, he can only joke to himself: "Does anyone have a crush on me when I look like this? I deserve to be deceived."
Although there are constant online scams on social platforms, But few cases have been solved. Zhou Tian, an economic detective who has handled similar cases, said that it is easy for scammers to swindle money in such cases, but the handling process is very difficult and requires a large number of police assistance. He analyzed that because scammers usually look for users on social platforms and then engage in long-term chats on WeChat or QQ, often in the name of love, most people who are deceived are not defensive. And when asking the defrauded person to invest or transfer money, they will ask the other party to enter a self-developed software or website. The receiving account is usually a personal account and is frequently changed. The process is cumbersome and evidence collection is difficult.
"Moreover, the criminals in these cases are committed by gangs, and thorough investigation is difficult. If they are hidden overseas, cross-border law enforcement will be involved." Zhou Tian said that the funds used by such gangs to commit crimes are also difficult to trace, and criminals often go through Underground banks, corporate Alipay , etc. also use "wolf pack tactics" for large funds to transfer money. They open false accounts through a large number of collected ID cards, and then remit the funds in large and small sizes, and then pool them abroad.
Now, the account that Lu Ming used to make payments has been frozen by the Guangdong police on March 20, because Guangdong is also involved in the case, and the Guangdong police have begun to investigate the case.
Whether it has become a hotbed for online fraud or is involved in spreading obscenity, Tantan seems to be getting further and further away from its original intention.As of now, there is no timetable for when Tantan will be put on the shelves again, but what is certain is that government departments will undoubtedly tighten their supervision of such apps. Time will tell how far Tantan, which has achieved 1.4 billion romantic matches between strangers, can go.
Source: All Weather Technology (ID: iawtmt)
Author: Yang Yongjie Editor: Luo Lijuan
(At the request of the interviewee, Lu Ming, Chen Zhibin, Zhang Tianzhuo, Gu Haitao, Shen Jing, Luo Shunli, Wang Tao, and Zhou Tian are all pseudonyms in the article)
