In 2021, a story made headlines in every disreputable tabloid from The Daily Mail to The Daily Star. It was a story about an unfortunate man named Sam Summers whose app-controlled cock cage had been taken over by hackers, forcing him to pay a Bitcoin ransom to get back access to his own dick.
It’s a pretty funny story. Almost too funny to be true. And there’s a reason for that: it’s not true.
Although, life being the complicated thing it is, it’s not 100% false either.
Here’s everything there is to know about the whole debacle.
Contents
Is the Cellmate Chastity Cage safe?
What is a smart cock cage?
A cock cage is a (usually metal) device that locks around a man’s genitals to stop him touching himself. It’s used for BDSM chastity play. A smart cock cage is an app-connected device that does the same thing.
Currently, there’s only one smart cock cage on the market – the Cellmate Chastity Cage by Chinese company Qiui. It looks like this:
It clamps in place on the wearer’s cock, and can be locked and unlocked via an app – meaning that access to the wearer’s genitals can be handed to someone who might be on the other side of the world.
For dominant/submissive couples who do long-distance, that’s a pleasingly spicy prospect.
What happened?
Like any smart device, the Cellmate is vulnerable to hacking. Fortunately, there are people out there who enjoy finding vulnerabilities and reporting them so that they can be fixed before hackers take advantage of them.
In April 2020, a group of these vulnerability-finding cool guys called Pen Test Partners identified a vulnerability in the Cellmate. They told Qiui… but the company really didn’t seem to care. After trying quite hard to get Qiui to listen, Pen Test Partners eventually ran out of patience and, in October 2020, published details of the vulnerability.
You can read the details published by Pen Test Partners here. And here’s a video teardown they did of the product:
Despite having been totally uninterested in fixing the issue up until this point, Qiui now rushed to put together a fix. After a brief period, the issue was patched out of existence by an app update, and the vulnerability was no more.
End of story, right?
Nope.
Just a little later on, Vice News published a story about Cellmate users who had been locked out of their cages. To be clear, the story didn’t include anyone getting the device locked onto their body by a hacker – only people whose Cellmates had been locked while they weren’t wearing them. Annoying, sure, but not hugely ransom-worthy.
In the story they included details of the messages the alleged hackers had sent to their victims, one of which included the words, “Your cock is mine.”
Then, a little later on still, comedian and YouTuber Lewis Spears pulled a prank on Vice News. He’s never said if he was inspired by the existing story… but given that he uses the phrase “Your cock is mine” when talking to a Vice reporter, it seems likely that Lewis had at least given it a cursory read.
Anywho, Lewis posed as a man named Sam Summers and told Vice News that he’d gotten locked into his Cellmate, with a ransom demanded for the safe return of his cock. Fabricating wildly, he went on to say that he’d had to use bolt cutters to remove the device, lightly slicing his dick in the process.
All totally untrue. But Vice News published the story anyway. It went viral, and from there dozens of media outlets picked it up and re-ran it, all without doing any further fact-checking.
In the furore, the original story (that there was a vulnerability that was fixed by an update, and that some users might have been briefly locked out of their devices by a general attack) was lost. The fake, much juicier story took precedence… and now that’s all anyone even remembers.
What a mess, eh?
Is the Cellmate Chastity Cage safe?
Well… no. Not 100% safe. But nothing is 100% safe – driving is deadly dangerous, as is air travel, eating food and everything else we do on a day to day basis.
But that’s not a reason not to do it. The question we should ask is: is the Cellmate Chastity Cage reasonably safe? The answer to that question depends on your personal tolerance for risk… but I present here some points to consider when making your determination:
- Qiui have demonstrated that they don’t care all that much when told about a vulnerability
- At least one hacker has attempted to hack the device and extort money from people before
- Even users who haven’t been hacked have sometimes reported technical issues with the device – including incidents where they were temporarily unable to unlock it
- The new model of the Cellmate includes the ability to deliver an electric shock to the wearer
- The viral nature of the story means that lots of people are aware that these devices exist, that they can be hacked, and that doing so might make you semi-famous
For me, personally, it’d be a no. Your mood may vary. If the Cellmate doesn’t appeal, though, you might still get some kicks out of a standard locks-with-a-physical-key cock cage. Here’s a bit more about them if you’re interested.
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