The app that shoots at the top of the app store this week is now at the center of a serious data violation by promising a safe place for men about “spread tea”. Tea, a buzzy social network and a new dating app for women were billed as a virtual whisper network for women, confirmed on Friday that hackers were broken into one of their old databases and thousands of photos were stolen, including government IDs and verification selfies.

According to a company spokesperson, intruders accessed around 72,000 images, which included 13,000 paintings that women presented during the sign-up process to prove their gender. “This data was originally stored in compliance with law enforcement requirements related to cyberbuling prevention,” the spokesperson reported that the stolen material dated back for more than two years.

What is really tea?

For bin calling, tea allows its female users to upload pictures of men and find them by name. Each profile can be tagged with “red flag” or “green flag”, as well as warnings about behavior, warning of background check and catfishing. The screenshots are disabled, and oblivion is a main sales point.

Tea was dreamed of by manufacturer Sean Cook, as he writes on the company’s website, seeing her mother “a terrible experience with online dating”, including dating men with catfish and even criminal records.

App tools are designed to look at women’s potential dates: reverse-image search, criminal record looks, background check and a place to share their own experiences. The format has clearly hit a raga. In the last one week, the app has experienced an extraordinary bounce, climbing the number one place in the free app chart of Apple. On Thursday, it claimed “about one million new sign-up”. By Friday morning, it was claimed that the number had passed through 2 million.

The irony is that a lot of popularity has made tea a goal.

‘Hack and leak’ campaign

Late on Thursday, the right -wing message board 4 chain began a discussion with the objective of tea “hack and leaks” with the posts urging the operation. By Friday morning, a user shared a link to a download for stolen material. According to reports, images claiming to have selfie and ID photos from tea users soon started moving on both 4chan and X (East Twitter).

After this huge leakage, the company issued a statement, “It is our top priority to protect our users’ privacy and data. Tea is taking every necessary steps to ensure safety of our platform and prevent further exposure.” It says that external cyber security experts are now on the matter. “We are working around the clock to secure our system.”