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How Coffee Meets Bagel safeguards its community for users truly looking for love

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Overview

A dating app for people looking to ditch dating games

As a leading dating application with the mission to help everyone find love, Coffee Meets Bagel unsurprisingly wants to create a safe environment where its users feel comfortable to be their authentic selves. Taking a unique approach to the classic online dating experience, Coffee Meets Bagel sends its users daily, high-quality matches curated by an ever-evolving algorithm, effectively eliminating the endless swiping that other dating apps rely on. With more than 150 million matches made to date, Coffee Meets Bagel is a place people go to ditch dating games and find real relationships.

Challenge
  • Fake profiles ruin the dating experience
  • Romance scams cause real harm
  • Fraudsters quickly adapt to rules
Solution
  • Proactively detect scammers
  • Ban fraudulent users before they compromise the community
  • Quickly adapt to new fraud tactics with ML
Results
  • Faster, more accurate review process
  • Drastic reduction in reported scammers
  • Auto-block fraudulent users and profiles
Dawoon Kang

We wanted to end the cat-and-mouse game and stop people who were on our app for the wrong reasons.

Dawoon Kang, Chief Dating Officer and co-founder

Challenge

Fake profiles and romance scams

Coffee Meets Bagel (CMB) strives to protect the integrity of its community and provide users with a safe, positive online dating experience. Unfortunately, fraudulent users can spoil the fun for the daters who are truly looking for love. According to co-founder and Chief Dating Officer, Dawoon Kang, “if our platform has members that aren’t actually looking for love, that makes it really hard for our legitimate daters to find what they’re looking for.” 

Fake profiles and users can do real damage. From a business standpoint, fraudulent profiles can impact brand integrity and the sense of trust users have in Coffee Meets Bagel. For users, fake profiles can be part of romance scams where fraudsters begin relationships with daters to solicit money or gifts.

Since its inception, Coffee Meets Bagel has had internal processes and people in place to help spot, investigate, and ban fraudulent users. But fraudsters are sophisticated, and would quickly adapt to the rules-based systems and methodologies the CMB team used to stop them. Coffee Meets Bagel’s ever-expanding user base meant that the company needed a solution that could adapt instantly, stay ahead of fraudsters, and scale as the business grew. 

“We wanted to end the cat-and-mouse game and stop people who were on our app for the wrong reasons,” Kang says. So her team contacted Sift.

Solution

Blocking fraudulent profiles before they can do damage

With Sift and its industry-leading machine learning (ML) technology, Coffee Meets Bagel is able to proactively detect scammers and fake profiles faster than with an internal system alone. By leveraging Sift’s global network and real-time risk assessments, Coffee Meets Bagel can now quickly, and in certain cases automatically, ban fraudulent users before they compromise the CMB dating community.

“The entire Sift platform, but especially the ability of Sift’s machine learning model to learn very quickly and adapt to new behaviors, has helped us make faster, more accurate bans on scammers,” says Kang.

The entire Sift platform, but especially the ability of Sift’s machine learning model to learn very quickly and adapt to new behaviors, has helped us make faster, more accurate bans on scammers.

Dawoon Kang, Chief Dating Officer and co-founder

Results

Fewer scammers, more happy daters

Since implementing Sift, Coffee Meets Bagel has seen a reduction of reported potential scammers by legitimate users, leading to an improvement in the overall user experience. Furthermore, Coffee Meets Bagel has streamlined its fraud management workflow. Sift’s real-time machine learning model enables CMB to get accurate data quickly, thus allowing their review team to make faster, more informed decisions. Leveraging the Sift Score and Sift’s easy and intuitive tools, CMB can auto-block users and investigate suspicious behavior. Layering Sift on top of their internal tools and review process, Sift helps Coffee Meets Bagel continue to focus on why the business was started in the first place—to provide a platform for its users to connect and find great dates…and eventually love.

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