After we first became aware of it last year, we wrote a post that touched on the adult spam problem at Kik, titled, “The Kik app is definitely not for kids.” Today we’re revisiting the topic with a little help from Kik.
If you’re not familiar with Kik, it is one of many messaging apps that smartphone users, especially younger folks, tend to use instead of their phone’s SMS feature. Others include WhatsApp, Line, Viber and to a lesser extent picture messaging apps like Snapchat. At 200 million users, Kik is hardly a flash in the pan, and there are actually good reasons to use a messaging app, the principal one being that when you’re on a wifi network, your messages won’t be a tax on your phone’s data plan.
I’ve had the app on my phone for a couple of years, but mainly for the
purpose of researching it. I hadn’t used it in at least a year, and was very surprised to see the message at right last week. In case you can’t read it:
“Hello from the KIK Dating Team. We’ve noticed that you may be interested in our online dating partner www.kiktouch.com who have thousands of beautiful women all ready to chat and flirt using KIK Messenger!! We hope you enjoy our gift and enjoy our network to swap pics and flirty messages! Love KIK Team”