The Inside Story of Tea

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1:31Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are 404 Media co-founders, Sam Cole. hey emmanuel mayberg hello and jason kebler what's up all right final warning the second anniversary party for 404 media is happening this thursday well presumably if you're listening to the podcast when it comes out august 21st thursday 6 to 9 p.m uh sam are we getting close to sold out there's a few more tickets left what's the deal we're so close to selling out we're very close we're like two dozen tickets away so please get your ticket now um yeah it's gonna be fun it's at farm one in brooklyn um we're gonna have open bar really good cocktails really good local beers um we're gonna record something short and sweet for the podcast and then also take your questions um so please come with questions mail us your questions ahead of time um if you're not able to be there in person but if you're there you can bother us with your questions live and in person yeah the details are in the show notes it goes to a post on the website where you can buy the tickets again this is free for paying four or four meters subscribers there's a code in there you then enter it and you get a ticket you do have to get a ticket to be able to get in just so we can keep track of how many people are coming and going and that sort of thing.

3:28Otherwise, it's$20. Or you could subscribe for$10. And then you get access to an open bar. It seems like a very easy sell to me. I think also, I mean, this is our last podcast before our two-year anniversary. So if you're not a subscriber, we recorded a second anniversary podcast, which is... It's out now, right? It's on the feed? Yeah, it sure is. So you can get that if you subscribe. So good, good time to subscribe because we talked about how 404 Media is going and that sort of thing. I thought it was fun. Yeah, absolutely. All right. We'll leave that and we'll go to this week's stories. This first one is one written by Emmanuel, a really amazing, deep investigation here.

4:12The headline is, How T's founder convinced millions of women to spill their secrets, then expose them to the world again this is a massive investigation involves former employees people directly involved documents text messages all this other sort of stuff as well so we're not going to be able to talk about everything so i'm pulling out some important parts that i think are worth talking about on the podcast but that said emmanuel could you just remind people what tea is exactly and sort of what it promised and then we'll go from there tea is an app that went viral in late july it pitches itself as a women's dating safety app and basically the way it works is women can create an account after they verify that they are in fact women and they then share information about men that they know or have dated, thereby allowing other women to stay away from them if they're bad or have other women vouch for them if they're safe and good to date.

5:28The app was hacked in late July, just like a week after it went viral. initially we found out about it on 4chan because they gained access to the back end got all these selfies and images of IDs that women shared with the app in order to verify that they're women that was the initial hack, shortly thereafter we discovered a second hack via the independent researcher which was far worse, this one included a lot of private messages between users. Over 1.1 million, I think, is what we could verify was leaked. And these are incredibly sensitive conversation between women talking about very personal, very intimate things like abortions, cheating partners, things like that.

6:25Yeah, and the app is still popular, it seems. I was trying to load the app store. Far, far more popular than it was when these hacks happened. And I think at the time when we wrote these stories about these two hacks, they were at 1.16 million users after their viral moment in the news before the hacks. And then now they claim almost 7 million. So many times over more popular. Is weird the impact that data breaches can have, even those that put people's safety at direct risk? I mean, okay, we'll move on from that. So that's what T is. Let's step back a little bit in time. Who is Paula Sanchez and what did T want with her exactly?

7:13Yeah, so Sam, not to put you on the spot, but Paula Sanchez is the founder of this movement and community and collection of Facebook groups called Are We Dating the Same Guy? And essentially, that does basically exactly what he advertises, but it does it on Facebook and it kind of grew organically. Initially, the first group was started by Paula in New York and it became very popular and people opened other groups across the country and in Canada, dedicated to different cities. and that just exploded in popularity. Also, there's over 200 groups, 7 million members across all these groups. And Paula is still the administrator of all of it.

8:11But we first heard about... Are we dating the same guy from Sam? If you want to talk about how that came up for you and why these groups are useful and popular. Yeah. So I think we first started reporting on these, at least, when this man sued, like, 27 women and a bunch of different parts of, like, Facebook and Meta and Patreon and GoFundMe and all these other entities because he was included in an Are We Dating the Same Guy group in Chicago. So he had started this, hoping to be a class action, but started this complaint against... uh, Pella and then a bunch of other women saying that these women were in these groups defaming him.

9:05Um, his issue with these groups was that these women were calling him clingy and psycho specifically, um, accused them of being like outrageous and cruel and malicious, uh, because they were posting his picture, which was like publicly available on his Facebook, posting his picture in the groups and then asking like, what are the red flags with this guy? And those are the red flags that came up people said oh yeah i dated him and he pressured me into sex or you know like that's that's what happened in these groups is people brought up their own experiences that were like quote-unquote red flags about a guy um so yeah that was the first time we came across this and um it's it's only gotten bigger from there that was in 20 early 2024 for.

9:50Yeah, that complaint didn't go anywhere because that guy went, I think he got taken down for tax fraud or something. So yeah, it didn't go very far. Yeah. So we write these stories about the T-hacks. Sanchez reaches out to us and says, basically, I never talked to the press. I am under a lot of pressure because of lawsuits like this because of something our friends at Wired covered where there were these groups of men who again were upset about the information women were sharing about them on the Are We Didn't Know The Same Guy Facebook groups. They organized on Telegram to like dox women there.

10:34She's just been through a lot because she's behind this community. But she said, I need to I don't want to do this, but I need to tell you some stuff that I know about tea. and the gist of that is that beginning in late 2022, people from the Tee app, even before it officially launched, reached out to Sanchez and said, Hey, we're doing exactly what you're doing, but we're doing it in an app. We think we could do it better than you. We need a face and founder to go around and present this app to the world and we think you'd be perfect for this because you're behind the are we dating the same guy community.

11:22And she never responded to that, again, for the same reason that she doesn't respond to a lot of requests that she gets. And from there, things got pretty weird and I would say aggressive from T's direction. Yeah. So T is trying to create this app. Obviously, eventually, they do create the app. They ask Sanchez, who is the face of this phenomenon, basically, are we dating the same guy? Hey, we really would like you to come on board with T and be the face of our app. Obviously, there's probably some incentives there in that the CEO of T is a man. It would probably be useful to have, well, first of all, a woman.

12:03Secondly of all, a very respected woman who's already been doing all of the safety work. You can see the reasons why there. You say something changes when she doesn't reply i mean i have a short list here of things and i'll make sure we touch on all of them but what starts to happen when sanchez sort of turns down t's request the first thing they begin to notice uh not just sanchez but this community of moderators that are helping to keep the facebook groups like healthy and useful to women is that all these users are showing up and posting about T and replying. Let's say a woman comes into a group in San Diego posting about a man she's about to go on a date with.

12:54Does anybody know him? And a bunch of the replies are like, yeah, I know him and there's nothing about him in this group, but you should check out T. I think I saw something about him there. And this is happening again across like 200 groups. and the moderators are noticing that these accounts are behaving like spam and some of the women are reporting back in reviews on the T app, on the app stores, and then just talking amongst themselves, being like, I signed up because someone told me that I can find information about this man there, there's nothing there. And to be clear, I did not find any evidence that T itself was behind this, But it was very clear that these accounts were not authentic activity.

13:41These are probably accounts that were hijacked by some sort of spam operation. And this is something that is common on Facebook. There's all these accounts that are compromised. Then some sort of company, you can pay them to advertise whatever you want. and they just use compromised accounts en masse to promote a certain product or message or what have you. So again, we couldn't confirm that T was behind this, but it's clear that there was inauthentic marketing of the T app specifically targeted that are we dating the same guy groups. Yeah, that's pretty weird and pretty suspicious. Jason, maybe just briefly, because you have reported a lot on hijacked Facebook accounts.

14:26What does that look like? How can you tell an account on Facebook has been hijacked? Yeah. So again, we can't say for sure that T knew that these accounts were hijacked. I feel the most likely mechanism was probably they were paying for boosting on Facebook, which is a service that a lot of companies offer. And it's basically like promote my company across Facebook or promote my Facebook content by having a lot of likes, a lot of replies, etc, etc. And I bring this up just because this has been the case with a lot of the AI slop reporting that I've done, where a lot of the accounts that are commenting on Facebook slop are hijacked accounts.

15:12And the way that you can tell that they're hijacked accounts is, well, sometimes the name in the URL, like the name on Facebook and the URL name are totally different. And so someone has taken... I don't have the exact specifics in front of me right now, but they'll take facebook.com slash Jason Kebler. They will take that account, and then they'll change it to Diane Smith and change the Facebook profile picture. They will then change all the information on the account as well. But that URL is permanent and can't change. And so that is one way that you can tell. And in one case, Emmanuel was able to find a woman's new account where her first post was, my old account got hijacked.

16:00Oh. Yeah. And so, I mean, that was like a really good tell, you know, but basically, it's like this happens in huge, huge numbers on Facebook. And so it's a very common thing. You know, super shady and bad that this happened in this case. but there are so many services out there that sort of sell like, we'll boost your content using our army of Facebook bot accounts. And sometimes they might not even advertise them as bot accounts. They might just say, we'll boost your content on Facebook. But then the way that they're doing it is through like a botnet of zombie accounts, more or less. Yeah, that makes sense.

16:44But T did other stuff on Facebook. So again, they couldn't convince Sanchez. So then they start doing these other things like boosting the T app. It sounds like potentially misleading some people to join the app and then finding there isn't actually any information about the guy they're looking into or dating or whatever. What's with these fake Facebook groups that look a lot like are we dating the same guy, but they're not? So what's the deal there? Yeah, so one of the former employees I talked to at T, Veronica Mars, she had a lot of tasks that were related to promoting the app. But one thing she did is she was handed a number of Facebook groups that were started by the CEO of T, Sean Cook.

17:41And they were just called, Are We Dating the Same Guy? And insert name of city. And then at the very end, it said T app. So they used the branding of the original grassroots movement, appended the app name to it. So I think to be fair, they had something in there so you could tell that it was a T-app affiliated thing. But she said that many times she had to explain to people who reached out to her that these groups were not related to Paola Sanchez's thing. They just assumed that it was and people were reaching out to her looking for Sanchez and they were just confused. This is another thing that you can see in the reviews for the app is that people thought that it was an official Are We Dating the Same Guy app.

18:36And that just wasn't the case. Well, it's funny you bring that up and that confusion, especially in the reviews. Because after we posted your investigation today, and obviously I just posted it to Blue Sky and various other platforms. I think I got a reply from somebody who it seemed was confused in that respect. And like, whoa, but are we dating the same guy and Tia the same thing? It's like, first of all, please read the article. Because that's the entire point. Second of all, oh, that confusion has permeated where some people believe that. And you can't really blame them because they've been misled by these Facebook groups.

19:16Yeah. And it was very targeted. And there was a lot of effort put behind it. It was going for a long time. And then at some point, it shifts. So they definitely had some users. They had some traction. But then T's marketing changes from essentially trying to confuse people that they are part of Are We Dating the Same Guy to directly attacking Are We Dating the Same Guy. And the main way they did this is they went to this company. This is kind of like a side quest on this investigation, but I thought it was very interesting. And I knew these existed, but I've just never seen one. I've never followed the operation of one of these companies so closely.

20:04But there is this company called SG Social Branding, I believe. And they advertise themselves as having 35 Gen Z influencers. and the whole business plan is basically you come to the company, you pay them to promote your app, and then these 35 influencers spread out and start posting to social media as if they are real users of your product. And they're posting popular vertical video formats as like, Oh, I'm holding the phone and I'm talking to the camera as if I'm just a normal user talking about how much the T app rules. And it's so much better than the Facebook groups. It's so much easier to use than are we dating the same guy.

20:52Or it's like two young influencers on a podcast talking about some dating ordeal they had and how T saved them from a really bad situation. But there is no podcast. It's a fake podcast that they're pretending to be on because clips of podcasts are very popular on Reels and TikTok. Yeah. I know that while we were editing this, and I highlighted that, and it's about halfway through the story, something like that. And then you have some sort of line that says, except the podcast didn't exist. And I'm like, that's crazy. We need to stress that. And as you just rightly said, and I've seen them as well, oh, you get YouTube shorts or anything or adverts that just look like podcasts all the time.

21:39But as you say, it's different when you're investigating it in the context of a company like this trying to grow, it sounds like at all costs or whatever they're able to get away with, essentially. And it's very, very interesting to see that, oh, yes, there's a company behind it. And they were apparently hired to do that. Yeah. And I mean, two things about that is the way that I've seen these type of fake podcast clips go around, it's usually some sort of influencer or someone that's selling you a class or something like that. It's like individuals realizing that it's a popular format on social media and making one themselves.

22:20I've never seen a company turn it into a business like that. So it's like, there's that. Though there are others, right, Jason? I'm sure you've seen other companies. I've seen them. And I mean, honestly, this company, super interesting that it exists and that they do this regularly and that they brag about it on their website where they're like, case study, we did this for tea. but I guess it's honestly just how like marketing works these days but they'll do like man on the street quote-unquote man on the street interviews which is like you know a very common thing on TikTok when you're scrolling through and you have people shoving microphones in other people's faces and like spoiler alert not all of those are real or at least they're not random people many of the times.

23:12But yeah, I found that part to be really interesting. The other reason that it's different, in my opinion, is because through the investigation, we noticed very clearly that there's a pattern, right? That's why I opened with this message that Sanchez got from T about them wanting to have a face for the app. And there's even stuff that didn't make it into the story that it just like, clearly Sean Cook was going around and looking like, I need a woman. I need a young, attractive woman to sell this story in order to sell this app. And the thing that finally works, and I think the thing that actually made him viral in late July was these social videos.

23:55And it's just like the idea that there's a man paying 35 young women to pretend to authentically engage with this app and talk about how it's so helpful in online dating. and then all these women that signed up because of this, you know, whatever, all marketing is deception, but it is deception. And then like being so severely compromised, it's just like it's a really, really nasty example of this type of marketing, I think. Yeah. And I think that kind of leads into one of the couple of other things I was going to ask, which is that what did we learn about T's CEO during this? Like this article is not a profile.

24:35it's much more about the the growth of the company but of course him being the founder and the ceo he does come into that story and of course he's ultimately responsible for everything that's going on here what did we learn um about sean cook i believe uh in this piece so i would say that sean cook is like stereotypical san francisco silicon valley executive had what seems like a pretty big job at Salesforce, which is a gigantic company, a gigantic tech company, and was there for many years. And then he leaves. And then he starts this thing. And he's doing the startup hustle thing and is trying to grow it very badly and is bootstrapping it and seemingly has a lot riding on it.

25:25And just classic move fast and break things situation. And it's all extremely sloppy. He eventually... We found that on a podcast. He said he has a team of developers in Brazil and how great they are. But we looked into that. And that is just two freelancers that were hired from a software engineer freelancing program in Brazil. And I'm sure they do fine work. I'm not disparaging the platform in general. But if you're looking to define why they had these security issues, it's because he did the quickest, cheapest way that you can develop an app like this. Yeah. And just to remind people, the security issue for the driver's license won't at least the initial breach.

26:20was that it was essentially an unprotected bucket of data that anybody could log into without authentication, which is obviously Security 101. Right. And he doesn't know anything about programming. He admitted that as well in some other interview. And by talking to other people who worked at T, he doesn't know anything about how to moderate a community, which again is focused on extremely sensitive, volatile topics. He has no idea how the legal aspect of it works and what he's liable for and what the users are liable for. And I think one of the... It's not the worst thing, but I think it just indicates how desperate he was to make this happen is in interviews and on the website and on his LinkedIn, he has an origin story for the company, which is about how his mom was dating and he was trying to help his mom because she got calfished, essentially.

27:23But one of the things that the messages show, the messages that he sent Sanchez starting in late 2022, is at the time, it was his fiancee reaching out on T's behalf. And she says that they started the app together because of her bad dating experiences. And that relationship ends. his fiancee kind of leaves the company and exits the picture and then the story changes. And it's like, again, that's not the worst thing in the world. Probably the worst thing is once his fiancee leaves, he takes over this Tara persona that represented T officially on Facebook and in the app. So it's like if you needed...

28:09If you had a support issue and you talked to someone in the T app, you were talking to Tara, which presumably was once his fiancee but then was him so he's on the app pretending to be a woman talking to other women who are on the app in order to like weed out men who are being deceptive in some way and it's just like the dishonesty in that and like just like betraying people's trust and his users trust I think is pretty bad. Yeah How about to round it off, I will just read out what T's statement was. Of course, you sent a very detailed list of specific questions and specific facts that we were publishing this story.

28:58They didn't answer those, but they did say, and this is quite long, so maybe I won't read all of it, but they said, quote, building and scaling an app to meet the demand we've seen is a complex process along the way. We've collaborated with many, learned a great deal, and continue to improve tea. They then say, what we know based on the fact that over 7 million women now use tea, with over 100 ,000 new signups per day, is that a platform to help women navigate the challenges of online dating has been needed for far too long. And then it repeats, it's one of the top apps in the US. All right, should we leave that there?

29:35When we come back, we're going to be joined by our intern Rosie Thomas to talk about one of her stories about GPS trackers on TikTok. We'll be right back after this.

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