What Is FetLife.com?

FetLife (fetlife.com) is a dating website for people with sexual fetishes. The adult social networking site was founded by John Kopanas (also known online as John Baku) and is owned by the parent company BitLove, Inc. You have to register before you can join the FetLife community. The website code used is Ruby on Rails. As of February 2023, the site fetlife.com gets an estimated 52.5 million monthly views. The Wayback Machine estimates fetlife.com was founded on April 21, 2001. The site fetlife.com has been saved by the Internet Archive consistently since 2008; however, between the years 2001 and 2008, it wasn’t saved at all, suggesting that the domain may have changed owners during that time. According to Wikipedia, FetLife was founded in 2008.

Links and Profiles

Website: https://fetlife.com/

Is FetLife.com Safe?

I ran malware tests to find out if fetlife.com is safe and legit. Here are the results:

I checked the site fetlife.com on the online malware scanner Sucuri and it returned with no issues. You can see the same here: Sucuri scan for the site fetlife.com.

FetLife.com Sucuri results

Sucuri says the site fetlife.com doesn’t have any malware and is a low security risk. Sucuri also says the site fetlife.com isn’t blacklisted by any of the 9 blacklists that it checked.

Some hardening improvements can be made on the site fetlife.com such as adding a website firewall and fixing the following security header:

  • Missing Content-Security-Policy directive. We recommend to add the following CSP directives (you can use default-src if all values are the same): script-src, object-src, base-uri, frame-src

However, these hardening improvements don’t impact the Sucuri grade.

To check this further I ran a parasite scan with Unmask Parasites on the site fetlife.com and it says the site is suspicious. You can see the same here: Unmask Parasites scan for the site fetlife.com.

Unmask Parasites cites 1 suspicious inline script found:

!function(){try{new Function("m","return import(m)")}catch(o){console.warn("vite: loading legacy build because dynamic im...

To confirm that the site is clean, I checked the domain fetlife.com on VirusTotal and no security vendor has flagged the domain as malicious. You can see the same here: VirusTotal scan for the site fetlife.com.

FetLife.com Sucuri results

In conclusion, the site fetlife.com doesn’t have malware and is a low security risk according to Sucuri. Sucuri also says that the site fetlife.com isn’t blacklisted. Moreover, Unmask Parasites says it found 1 suspicious inline script on the site fetlife.com. And no security vendor on VirsTotal has blacklisted the domain fetlife.com. Overall, the site fetlife.com looks safe. The 1 suspicious script is likely to be a false positive.

References

1. SimilarWeb –

2. Wayback Machine –