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Dear Hole19 Golfer,

Yesterday, at around 22:00 GMT, we were made aware that a series of fake accounts with indecent names had been created and these accounts started liking the posts of some of the golfers in our community that had their profile set to “public”.

We take issues like this very seriously and the trust of our community in us as a product & our company is our number one priority.

Before getting into more details, we want to apologise to you if this has put you in an uncomfortable situation.

We're sorry. 🙏

Immediately upon having learned about these fake accounts, our team was up all night working to mitigate any further escalation.

What we know at this point
- No personal data has been compromised.
- Some 200 fake accounts (with URLs in their name) were created and started automatically liking posts or rounds of golfers with public profiles, which generated notifications.

What we've done
- At around 03:30 GMT, we managed to stop the continued creation of fake accounts.
- Between 04:00 and 12:00 GMT today, we proceeded to delete all the fake accounts and with that, all the associated likes and notifications you might have received from these accounts were deleted as well.

What you can do
- Turn your profile private. Here's a Help Center article that explains how you can do that. This will mean only people you accept will be able to engage with content on your Hole19 feed.
- Be cautious of any unsolicited communications that ask for data or refer you to a web page.
- Avoid clicking on any suspicious links.

Going forward
We understand that you value your privacy and we take the protection of your information seriously. We will perform continuous internal security audits to avoid things like this from happening in the future.

Here's what we are planning to implement:

- The possibility to "block" and "report" users. We want to give you more access to remove any unwanted content appearing on your profile
- A more rigorous email verification process
- Removing the possibility of inserting URLs in names

We will continue to work hard every day to earn your trust in us, not only on the golf course, but also off it.

Thanks for your understanding and support.