Popular flirting application developer Skout is engaged in damage control after child rape charges were filed against users of its service for minors in three separate incidents.
Skout, which calls itself the “global network for meeting new people,” pulled the plug on its year-old service for teens ages 13-17 on Tuesday, a day before the New York Times ran a front-page piece about three rape cases involving adults who connected with teens as young as 12 through the app.
Lydia Chan, identified by the Times as a Skout spokeswoman, has been a staffer in Brunswick Group’s San Francisco outpost for the past few years, a possible indication the PR firm has taken on San Francisco-based Skout as a client.
Brunswick executives have not answered inquiries from this website.
Skout said earlier this month that tens of thousands of new users were signing up every day for the service, which uses geo-location technology to show the proximity of users to one another. The company started the popular teen network last year to supplement its offering for adults after realizing that underage kids were using its 18-and-over service.
Founder and CEO Christian Wiklund told the Times he is “disgusted” by the rape charges. “When you have three, it looks like a pattern. This is my worst fear,” he said.
Skout is backed by the influential venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which pumped $22M into the company in April.
“We are extremely sorry about this, but we don’t believe we have any other choice,” Wiklund said in a statement announcing the shut-down of the teen service posted to the Skout blog on Tuesday. He said the shutdown is temporary as the company plans to implement more safeguards. He called out “a few bad actors trying to take advantage of some of our younger members.”
The CEO’s blog post has drawn more than 600 comments, mostly lamenting the loss of the service and asking when it will be back.
Skout’s homepage includes safety tips for users who want to meet offline and the teen service only pinpoints users to within a half-mile of their actual location.