Nearly 1.5 million scammers and other bad actors on Tinder and Hinge matched with legitimate users during the first nine months of 2025, according to a year-long U.S. Joint Economic Committee investigation into Match Group’s fraud controls.
The figure, reported by The Record, applies specifically to Tinder and Hinge, although the broader investigation also examined Match, Plenty of Fish and other Match Group dating services. The available reporting does not establish whether the 1.5 million count represents accounts, profiles or match events. It therefore cannot be treated as a tally of distinct people.
Match Group rejects the investigation’s characterization of its security investment. The company points to a biometric verification system and a newer AI detection model as evidence of improvements made during the committee’s inquiry.
Tinder allegedly gave scammer profiles greater reach
The investigation examined how Tinder distributed suspected fraudulent profiles, not merely whether the platform eventually removed them.
Between May 2024 and December 2025, the number of views received by a median scammer profile increased by more than 700%, according to the report. Investigators said Match Group knew Tinder was more likely to display a profile when it belonged to “a scammer or other bad actor rather than a regular user.”
That alleged visibility matters because it can expand the pool of legitimate users exposed to a fraudulent profile. A match alone, however, does not demonstrate that a financial scam succeeded or even that a conversation followed.
The committee also objected to Match Group grouping scammers and spam together when discussing enforcement. The report includes dozens of victim accounts describing financial and emotional harm. One person told investigators that, after joining Tinder following her husband’s death, she lost thousands of dollars to someone who repeatedly invented crises requiring money.
Tinder has about 50 million monthly users.
Committee and Match Group clash over detection-model updates
Internal Match Group documents reportedly led investigators to conclude that Tinder had left some scam-detection models without updates for years. A Match Group official called that assertion “false and misleading.”
The report cited a senior researcher at an AI safety company who said Tinder would need to retrain its machine-learning models at least monthly, depending on its monitoring infrastructure and other performance measurements. In the researcher’s assessment, retraining only once or twice per year would indicate that fraud detection was not being treated seriously.
According to the committee, pressure from investigators was followed by the introduction of a newer AI model in early 2026 to inspect profiles for possible scammers. The report’s description of that deployment does not provide independent performance results for the model.
Yoel Roth, a senior Match Group official, told Recorded Future News that the report “mischaracterizes” the company’s security investment and its existing work against scams. He said Match Group made “the largest safety advancements in Match Group’s history” while engaging with the committee over the previous year.
Roth also described romance scams as a problem spanning multiple online services and said Match Group supports cross-industry efforts to combat them.
Face Check requires video selfies from new Tinder users
Match Group rolled out Face Check in October 2025. The biometric system requires every new Tinder user to complete video selfie verification. Roth said Face Check has also been deployed on Hinge, although the reporting does not describe the requirements applied there.
Match Group told investigators that U.S. pilots reduced interactions with scam accounts by 70%. The company-reported figure does not specify the pilot period or the denominator used to calculate that reduction.
Verification can form one part of a platform’s defenses, but the victim testimony illustrates the risk of treating a profile or match as proof that subsequent financial claims are genuine. Repeated requests for money tied to purported emergencies were central to the account presented to investigators.
Senate-backed proposal would require warnings to previous contacts
Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) said Match Group had made progress but argued that its response took too long. She also warned that AI can make it easier to produce fake profiles at scale.
Hassan said the Senate unanimously passed bipartisan H.R. 2481 (119th Congress) the previous month. The legislation would require dating apps to notify users who interacted with an account identified as belonging to a scammer, including when that account has already been banned.
The notification measure is a legislative proposal rather than a requirement already in force. If enacted, it would extend a platform’s response beyond removing the suspected scam account by alerting users who had already encountered it.
