A high-risk friend-making app that connects teenagers with strangers. Wizz has been repeatedly removed from app stores over child-safety and sextortion concerns. What parents need to know.
Wizz is a friend-making app that shows teenagers a stream of stranger profiles to swipe through and message, repeatedly removed from app stores over sextortion and child-safety concerns.
Official age
18+
We recommend
18+
Developer
Voodoo
Risks
4
Wizz is a friend-making app that shows users a stream of stranger profiles to swipe through and message — a format often compared to Yubo and to dating apps. It has drawn serious child-safety criticism and has been removed from the Apple and Google app stores more than once over concerns it was being used to target and financially sextort teenagers. It has been age-rated 18+ following that pressure, but the core function — connecting children with strangers they do not know — is what makes it risky.
Teenagers use Wizz to meet new people by swiping through profiles and starting chats. Because matches are with strangers rather than existing friends, and conversations can move quickly to other platforms, it creates exactly the conditions predators and sextortion scammers exploit: an unknown adult can pose as a peer, build rapid trust, and pressure a young person into sending images or money.
Who can contact you
Location: In-app profile and privacy settings
Set to: Most restrictive available — but note settings cannot remove the core stranger-contact risk
Wizz's purpose is to connect users with strangers, so privacy settings can limit but not eliminate the risk. There is no configuration that makes swiping and chatting with unknown adults safe for a child.
Report and block
Location: On any profile or chat
Set to: Use immediately for any adult contact, requests for images, or money
Blocking and reporting are the main tools available. Financial sextortion moves fast, so acting at the first sign — rather than continuing to engage — matters.
Check whether Wizz (or a similar friend-making app) is installed on your child's device
Time: 5 minutes
Have a calm conversation about sextortion: that scammers pose as attractive peers, that it is never the young person's fault, and that they can always come to you
Time: 20 minutes
Remove the app — the combination of stranger swiping and a documented sextortion problem is not something settings can mitigate for a child
Time: 5 minutes
In immediate danger: call 999. For non-emergency police matters, call 101.
Concerned about a child but it's not an emergency? NSPCC helpline 0808 800 5000. Childline for young people 0800 1111.
Myth: Wizz's 18+ store rating means my teenager can't actually get an account.
Fact: The rating limits how the app is listed and marketed, but the account creation itself still relies on the user entering their own date of birth, which a determined teenager can falsify. Treat the 18+ rating as a warning label, not a lock — the real safeguard is checking your child's device and talking with them, not trusting the store listing alone.
Myth: Wizz was removed from the App Store and Google Play and later reinstated, so its safety problems must be fixed now.
Fact: Reinstatement followed the developer adding extra verification and moderation measures, which is a genuine improvement — but it doesn't change what the app fundamentally does: put a young person in a stream of stranger profiles they can message within moments. Child-safety groups kept raising concerns about the app even after it returned to the stores, so 'back on the store' is not the same as 'safe for a child.'
Myth: Financial sextortion is a risk for girls who send explicit photos, so it isn't something I need to discuss with my son.
Fact: Reporting on Wizz and similar friend-making apps has specifically highlighted teenage boys as frequent targets of financial sextortion, where a scammer poses as an attractive young woman, quickly obtains an image, then threatens to share it unless paid. Boys can feel more ashamed to speak up about this than girls do, so it's worth raising directly and calmly regardless of your child's gender.
A child this age is unlikely to have sought Wizz out deliberately, so if you find it installed, treat it as a prompt to check who they've been talking to rather than assume it's harmless curiosity. A calm conversation and removing the app together, rather than confiscating a device in anger, keeps the door open for them to tell you if anything already happened.
This is the age band most linked to the sextortion reports around Wizz, and teenage boys in particular have been targeted. If you find the app, walk through how the scam typically works — rapid trust-building, a request for an image, then a threat — and make clear they can come to you immediately if it happens, without fear of losing their phone or being blamed.
Wizz's own age requirement still puts a 17-year-old below its stated minimum, and the sextortion pattern it has been linked to doesn't stop just short of adulthood. If they're using this or a similar stranger-swiping app, keep the conversation open about verifying who someone really is before sharing anything personal, and remind them that stopping contact and reporting costs nothing — even if a scammer has already made demands.
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