Phishing and offensive material

At 7am (GMT) Sunday 19th March, the Prolific team became aware of a malicious user on our platform. Posing as an institution, they set up a deeply offensive and unacceptable study which numerous participants unfortunately saw. Additionally, they sent repeated threatening, defamatory, or phishing messages to our participants. We are deeply sorry that this happened and have reported the incident to the ICO.

As soon as we realized what happened, we removed the “researcher” and deleted their study and their messages. We then temporarily suspended new researchers from being able to sign up to ensure the malicious user couldn’t set up any new accounts as we worked round the clock on further securing our systems. We will start to reallow researcher registrations gradually - this was not a technical breach but an abuse of a researcher account.

Today we will email every participant who was sent these horrendous messages with our most heartfelt apologies. We will also be speaking to the affected institution.

Additionally, our focus is on safely reopening registrations for researchers, strengthening our email verification process to stop impersonations and introducing additional researcher identification processes. We will also be adding many improvements to the reporting and monitoring of studies and messages.

We are deeply sorry to anyone that this has affected. We do not condone any type of illegal and unethical behavior. Trust on the platform is extremely important to us and we take full responsibility for ensuring this doesn’t happen again.

We would like to offer a heartfelt thank you to our amazing community of researchers and participants. Thanks to you, 99.9% of studies are having a positive impact on the world. We are committed to raising that to 100%.

The Prolific Team