TradeSwipes website shut down for potential policy violations

The original version of this article contained an error and has been changed. See the bottom of the article for additional information.

A website designed to help students exchange their meal plan swipes for other goods was launched and quickly shut down last week following concerns that the site violated school policies.

TradeSwipes.com is a platform where people can connect to trade meal plan swipes for notes and study guides, among other things, said Joshua La Poll, one of the creators of the website and a fourth-year history student. Students are meant to use the website to find someone they want to trade with and then meet at a dining hall to swipe for their meal.

Second-year applied mathematics studentHarsh Karthik and UCLA alumnus Zhuping Hu also helped create the website, along with Christian Blanco, a graduate student in the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

A business model based on trading swipes is against UCLA policy, university spokeswoman Alison Hewitt said in an email statement.

The site launched on Wednesday, and on Thursday, La Poll received an email from UCLA telling him that the site may be in violation of school policies. On Friday, La Poll and Blanco met with Kenn Heller, the assistant dean of students.

The newly launched website could pose a security problem, Hewitt said. UCLA Dining Services wants to prevent unaccompanied strangers from entering the dining halls, which could happen with an online swipe trade, she added.

The owner of a BruinCard is the only one who is allowed to use it to swipe for food on the Hill. Meal plan holders may not pass, loan or sell meals or their BruinCards to anyone for any reason, Hewitt said.

Blanco said that they spoke to Heller about his concerns and decided to temporarily shut down the site. The students agreed to talk further with administration to make sure all challenges have been addressed before relaunching.

La Poll said the site is only for students with a university email address. The creators of the site are already working on making the website only for students who go to UCLA, so it won’t bring in anyone who is not connected to the campus, he said.

Yoav Zimmerman, a second-year computer science student, started a similar app, Swiplur, in early December.

Zimmerman said he received an email from Heller a few days after the site was launched. He thought that the email was not important and deleted it. Within the month, his UCLA account was temporarily frozen.

Zimmerman said he has stopped
development on the site for now and is waiting for a decision from the
assistant dean of students.

A charitable program called Swipes for the Homeless had to receive prior approval before letting students donate extra swipes at the end of the quarter, Hewitt said.

“We brought up Swipes for Homeless. We said, ‘How did Swipes for Homeless get approved?’ We want to go through the appropriate channels.” Blanco said.

Karthik said he thinks the site is not a buying-and-selling market as much as it is a site to connect students.

“It’s the same thing as swiping a friend in and then them giving you their notes afterward as a ‘thank you,’” Karthik said.

Before the site launched, and now that it is down, many students hoping to trade or get swipes went through other sites such as Facebook.

Gabriella Reena, a fourth-year biology and anthropology student said that she has traded swipes in the past and is interested in a website such as TradeSwipes.

“I’ll probably use that site because I always have extra swipes, so I might as well give them away to people who are hungry,” Reena said.

Students should look into legality issues and communicate with Dining Services before making a website to make sure that they are not violating any of the school’s policies, Heller said.

La Poll said he has not had any conversations with dining staff, but researched the policies before launching the site.

Heller said there is no set punishment for violating dining policy, either by making such a site or by trading swipes, but he and Dining Services will have to evaluate the factors of each case that comes to them.

For now, the TradeSwipes website is not available for student use until there have been more talks between the founders and UCLA administration.

Correction: Zhuping Hu’s name was misspelled.