Banbury town shopping app inadvertently diverted shoppers to pornography site

A website incorporated into a promotional app designed to give publicity to Banbury shops inadvertently diverted shoppers to a pornography site.
A user of a Banbury town app found pornography on a link to a business pageA user of a Banbury town app found pornography on a link to a business page
A user of a Banbury town app found pornography on a link to a business page

The page was on a link in the LoyalFree app, adopted by Banbury BID (Banbury Investment District) to help businesses paying a town centre levy to make their websites and offers instantly available on people's phones while shopping.

However one of the entries for a town centre business took viewers to a pornography site. LoyalFree temporarily disabled that company's inclusion to prevent people unwittingly finding the porn but later found out that it was an old website whose domain had been sold on.

A Banbury Guardian reader messaged the newsdesk to say that clicking onto the link today (Monday) took the app user to the porn page which showed close-up pictures of naked women.

She said she was concerned because she had recommended the app to a number of friends with children who are scouring it for promotional competitions.

"It has probably been hacked. It's worrying because it's not an easy app to check over and kids are using it because of the competitions. They could easily click on the link," she said.

"There is no mention of age limits for its use and as it's being so openly promoted it may not occur to people that it contains potentially malicious links. If it's this easy to hack, any content could be added at anytime."

Sophie Hainsworth, CEO of LoyalFree said the company's accounts were temporarily disabled as soon as the organisation was alerted to the porn. However by this afternoon LoyalFree had ascertained that the content had been posted on an old website belonging to the company. It was assumed that domain had been re-sold and the content posted on after its sale.

"When their new website was published this was not updated on the app. Someone else now owns that domain and is clearly using it to post pornographic content. But (the Banbury business) do not own it now," she said.

The company was reconnected to the app this afternoon with links updated.

Ms Hainsworth said the link to the unsavoury content had had only seven clicks in the last two months. She said it was businesses' responsibility to keep their web information up to date on the platform. She said LoyalFree takes the content and security of its platform very seriously.

"That is why we immediately disabled the content. We intend to add in an e-alert for website changes so these can be quality checked by our team and we will conduct a full quality check on links to the app to ensure there are no other incidences."

The app is used across 28 towns and cities in the UK and over 58,000 users with no issues of this kind arising before, she said.

"Safety and quality are at the forefront of our family friendly business app, however sometimes external business websites can be compromised. We have quickly taken action on this. We are very sorry that this content has been pulled into our app and are ensuring this cannot happen again."

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