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MUD: Keeping PLANETROMEO Real

MUD: Keeping PLANETROMEO Real

MUD stands for Malicious User Detection and, in a way, it’s the PLANETROMEO digital guard dog. We’re committed to finding and removing any fake accounts from our dating platform. In fact, we’ve been doing it so well, that now we can use our experience and expertise to find and remove fakers pretty quickly.

How does MUD work?

MUD helps us to sniff out the bad guys and send them packing. Our digital guard dog is constantly running in the background, looking for patterns that indicate fake accounts. To give some idea of how it operates, let’s look at its performance over a short amount of time. MUD detected 600 fake accounts within a 24 hour period. Most of these were removed before they even went live. This means the chances of our real members meeting a chatbot is kept to an absolute minimum.

If our system detects a suspicious profile, MUD performs a variety of tests, just like the spam filter on your email account. MUD applies a scoring system to every reported profile. If the score is over a certain number, actions are taken, such as forwarding the profile to our Support Team to manually check it. For very high scores, MUD can automatically deactivate or even delete the profile.

Protecting Real Romeos

Of course, we never want MUD to delete a real profile. We need to be absolutely sure that the suspicious profiles are definitely fake before being removed. We do everything we can to avoid any ‘false positives.’ The scoring system helps us to assess who’s real and who’s fake. Sometimes the system can recognize a ‘well known’ faker, a fake profile, or pattern that has been seen many times before. We consider this kind of a threat suitable for automatic removal.
MUD has a lot of tools it uses to identify fakers, ranging from a simple search for text patterns to collecting a lot of complex statistics, which might reveal usage patterns distinct to fakers and spammers. We’re constantly developing and enhancing MUD to deal with the latest threats. We recently added protection against chatbot programs. These chatbots are designed to abuse our site by having a ‘human-like’ conversation with you, eventually prompting you to sign up to some paid site. MUD has been enhanced to find these chatbots quickly and to either delete them, or bring them to the attention of the Support Team.

‘Report User’

No matter how much experience we acquire, nor how flexible and impressive MUD becomes, the best way to find and remove fake profiles is for Romeos like you, to hit the ‘report user’ button. The human mind will always be the best tool for detecting whether content is malicious or not. Every report is totally anonymous, so the suspicious profile will never know you reported them. We investigate all reports thoroughly to ensure a profile really is fake before deleting it.