The popular flirting app Skout has welcomed back teens to its mobile social network, after having barred them for almost one month following three high profile rape cases in which teenage users were abused by adults they’d met through using the app.

Christian Wiklund, CEO and founder of Skout, said that the company had no choice but to lock out its teenage users, in order to fulfil its responsibility of protecting them. Even so, keeping younger users away hasn’t been easy or popular – Skout reportedly blocked more than 2,000 attempts by teenagers to sign up for the service over the last month, while the app’s reviews on Google Play and iTunes have taken a hammering from irate teens who were unable to log in.

Skout claims to be proud of the way in which it has responded to the issue involving teen users, likening the situation to crises experienced by services like Facebook, PayPal and Hotmail, which have all been abused by criminals in the past.

Although unable to go into great detail of the changes that have been made to the service, Skout insists that it has employed “groundbreaking technology” to improve the level of safety for users. The app now forces all teenagers to sign up using Facebook Connect, thereby ‘social proofing’ their identity before they can sign into Skout.

“We are well aware that there is no such thing as ‘100 percent safe’ in any aspect of life, but we believe the changes we have made to our app certainly make it safer,” said Wiklund.

The thinking behind using Facebook Connect is that those who have already gone to the trouble of building up a social presence are unlikely to want to make a new account and start building another one. Skout also claims that those who do try to sign up using a ‘fake’ account will set off alarms, causing their new Skout profile to be blocked right away. Once this happens, the mobile device used to create the profile will be permanently blocked from using Skout.

For teenage users, Skout has also removed geo-location features. Previously, users were able to discover people living close by to them (the app displays the distance between two users in miles), see who was online within half a mile, and filter lists according to location. Geo-location remains enabled for adult users, as Skout is keen to retain its reputation as the number one adult flirting app.

Wiklund added that he is planning to hire a safety officer and more community managers to help spot inappropriate content. In addition, Skout plans to develop new software to review suspicious profiles and behavior by its users.

Such technology already exists of course – just last week, Facebook helped police to arrest a 30-year old man accused of grooming a 13-year old girl he had met online. Apparently, the conversation between the two was automatically flagged by Facebook’s security software before being reviewed by staff members and reported to authorities, who quickly arrested the man.