SugarDaters® official response regarding Expressen’s article

 In the last few hours there were articles in the Swedish and Danish press concerning the conversation on KIK between the Swedish journalist who was pretending to be a 14-years-old girl and the man who has been suspected to buy her virginity when she turns 15. They first initiated contact through our platform SugarDaters.se which is a dating site that promotes mutually beneficial relationships between wealthy people and people who like to get spoiled.

We take our role of the leading Sugar Dating website in Scandinavia very seriously, and do our best to ensure a safe dating community for our users.

The fact that we are open minded regarding relationships with a great age difference, doesn’t mean that we allow relationships involving underaged people. On the contrary, we mainly focus our time and resources on making sure that only people over the age of 18 can use our website. This is how we ensure it:

1. There is a manual process of handling every picture. This means that there is a person (not an automatic process) who approves or disapproves every picture before it goes live on the platform of SugarDaters®. According to our guidelines we disapprove photos which can be found online (to ensure the privacy of our users), photos with nudity and photos that looks suspicious (for instance photos where the person looks younger than 18 so we ask for a verification photo).
2. There is a manual process of handling every profile text just as in the case of pictures. Our guidelines prevent sexwork and other similar services. A profile that tries to buy or sell services like these, when reported to us, will be immediately deleted without any warning.
3. According to our terms and conditions, the user has to be at least 18-years-old in order to become a member of SugarDaters®.
4. There is the report system. Every user is encouraged to report any form of harassing, offensive or violating content which is not decent or has the intention to degrade other users or the website. Consequently, users have the ability to report any suspicious behaviour.

In our days with how technology has evolved, it is unfortunately very easy for an underaged person to go unnoticed on various platforms even though there is an age restriction. However, we at SugarDaters® strive to ensure that this doesn’t happen as often as it happens on other websites. That is why we take all these measures and procedures mentioned above.

As mentioned in the beginning, even though the contact was initiated at Sugardaters.se, the conversation that would violate our terms and conditions took place on a different communication platform, as shown in Expressen’s video. According to the same video, the journalist created a profile on our platform and pretended to be a 14-years-old girl in her conversation with another user. Unfortunately, it was beyond our abilities to detect the 14-years-old girl that in reality was an adult.

In the article it is also claimed that we refused to offer any comments regarding this issue. This is not the case. We would gladly have given a statement but we were never contacted by Expressen.se before the article was published.

In Norway and in Denmark we have a partnership with Nadheim and RedenUng. Their active role is to provide counselling and support to users of SugarDaters® who might have smaller or bigger problems (or just questions) regarding Sugar Dating. By partnering up with this type of organisations, we put an emphasis on the fact that we are transparent and open.

We would like to conclude this statement by saying that SugarDaters® is not supporting prostitution or similar services where money is traded for sex related content or activities.

The purpose of SugarDaters® is to create a dating site where adult people can voluntarily create a profile with the purpose of finding a person to date in a mutually beneficial way. Therefore, it is not a job. It is a lifestyle that a person chooses.

SugarDaters®