Immy (pseudonym) was only 15 when she met Max on Wizz. According to this Wizz profile, he was 16 years old. Who was actually behind the screen? A 21-year-old man seeking out vulnerable teens to sexually exploit. Immy was just one of his targets.
He started by gaining her trust: showering her with compliments and flattery.
“I was quite vulnerable at the time,” Immy reflects. “It is an age where you want boys to like you, you want them to show interest in you. He was and he made me feel special, he made me feel seen.”
Because of Wizz’s purported safety features, Immy though she was safe. “I thought you could only talk to people within a certain age range and you had to prove your age.”
But things quickly took a devastating turn. Once Max gained her trust, she added him on Snapchat. He began to request explicit photographs, and Immy didn’t know how to say no.
“I didn’t want him to stop talking to me and I didn’t want him to stop giving me that attention.”
That’s when the blackmail began. Max demanded she send him money or else he would release the photographs to her friends and family. In a state of panic, Immy went to her mother for help.
Max did end up sending the photos to one of Immy’s friends, but soon after he was arrested, which uncovered countless more teens he had exploited.
Despite his arrest, the damage he inflicted in Immy was lasting. “I will always be angry at him for taking away my innocence.”
Immy’s case is not a lone instance. There was a report of a 23-year-old, who purported to be 15, that was charged with raping a 12-year-old he met on Wizz. A 19-year-old Marine in Hawaii, who pretended to be a teenager, that sexually assaulted an 11-year-old he met on Wizz. A 27-year-old who sexually assaulted multiple teen girls he met on Wizz, while lying about his age.
And the list goes on.
Immy and many others were lulled into a false sense of security by Wizz claiming to have robust safety tools, such as age verification. But while age verification is a great tool, unfortunately, several sources have found that Wizz is not making effective use of it.
Wizz’s Faulty Safety Measures
Wizz is alarmingly similar to popular dating apps like Tinder or Bumble. In fact, many refer to it as “Tinder for kids.” Rated 13+ on the Apple App Store and T for Teen on the Google Play Store, users (including children) can swipe through profiles to “find new friends”—in other words, connect with strangers. Many go on to meet up in person.
While they say, “safety is our top priority,” Wizz is actually rife with child predators. The app welcomes users aged 13 to 24 and claims to organize different age groups into separate communities. However, many users found it very easy to lie about their age to group them in with minors.
The New York Post reported how Stephen Balkam, founder of the Family Online Safety Institute, took it into his own hands to test Wizz’s age verification. Wizz employs technology from Yoti (a great age verification provider) which assesses the biometrics of a user’s face in order to estimate their age. Balkam sports gray hair and a moustache, so naturally, when he attempted to create an account for a 15-year-old the Yoti technology flagged it for human review. Nonetheless, he reported that within five minutes, his account was approved anyway.
Wizz disputes Balkam’s claim that his account was approved, saying “the account was blocked before it could ever go live.” Nevertheless, whatever the truth of what happened with Balkam’s account, Wizz’s age verification protocol has failed to detect real adult predators posing as kids. As we have discussed, there have been several cases of such predators using the app to groom and abuse children.
A History of Advocacy with Wizz
Wizz has already been on the National Center on Sexual Exploitation’s radar before. In early 2024, we pushed for Apple and Google to remove Wizz from their app stores, on account of reports of rampant sextortion and unskippable pornographic ads served to children. Within 36 hours, both app stores agreed!
However, without alerting us, Apple and Google later reinstated the Wizz app. Wizz appeared to have added several new safety tools. But as we have discussed, a closer look uncovered that the company was not using these tools properly.
It is typical for tech companies to roll out safety tools to assuage public concern or skirt enforcement action, while meanwhile having little intention to ensure the efficacy or proper deployment of these tools. This will not change until tech companies can be sued for faulty and unsafe product design. And that is why we need to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
While never intended to have this effect, Section 230 has been interpreted by courts as giving tech companies near blanket immunity for harms their products cause.This means that if a survivor wishes to sue a tech company for causing or facilitating their exploitation, the lawsuit is thrown out even before it has a chance to get started.
Like almost every Big Tech company, Wizz claims that safety is their “highest priority.” They told NCOSE, “We use advanced AI moderation, trusted verification partners, and continuous human oversight to create a space where teens can make friends safely. We regularly review and update our safeguards in collaboration with online safety experts and child protection organizations.” But where are the fruits?
Until Section 230 is gone, “safety” will always be a PR stunt for tech companies, rather than a true priority.
