Congressional probe faults Match Group for failing to rein in dating app scams

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 congressional investigation that found serious shortcomings in Match Group’s efforts to combat fraud on its dating platforms. 

The Joint Economic Committee on Tuesday released the results of a year-long investigation into Tinder, Hinge, Match, Plenty of Fish and several other dating sites owned by Match Group. 

The committee has spent years investigating digital romance scams that siphoned $1.5 billion from Americans last year, according to Federal Trade Commission data. The romance scam industry has been industrialized by Chinese criminal organizations in Southeast Asia and West Africa that use human trafficking victims to conduct a variety of schemes known as “pig butchering.” 

On Tinder, investigators found that the number of profile views that a median scammer received increased by more than 700 percent between May 2024 and December 2025. According to the report, Match Group “knew that Tinder was more likely to show a profile if it belonged to a scammer or other bad actor rather than a regular user.”

Tinder is the most popular dating app in the world, with about 50 million users each month. 

“Romance scams are devastating – both financially and emotionally – to people who are looking for connection and instead find themselves targeted and exploited by global criminal enterprises,” said U.S. Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH), ranking members of the committee.

The report released on Tuesday included dozens of testimonies from victims who spoke of the emotional and financial damage done by the scams. One victim said she joined Tinder after her husband died and met a man who allegedly lived in New Jersey. She was scammed out of thousands after the person she was speaking to kept presenting her with fabricated crises that needed financial remedy. 

“A romance scam takes more than money, there are wounds nobody sees. You question every conversation, every promise you believed,” the victim told Congressional investigators. “Some lose savings, homes, and futures. Some lose faith in love somehow. […] And that’s why I started speaking, why I couldn’t just stay still.’”

In a statement to Recorded Future News, senior Match Group official Yoel Roth claimed the report “mischaracterizes” the company’s investment into security measures and the work that has already been done to stop scams from proliferating on their dating sites. 

“Alongside our engagement with the Committee over the past year, we’ve made the largest safety advancements in Match Group’s history,” Roth said, arguing that they have launched a biometric verification tool called Face Check across Tinder and Hinge. Roth was interviewed by Congressional investigators last year. 

“Romance scams are a cross-platform, societal problem that no company can solve alone, which is why we participate in and help fund cross-industry efforts to combat online scams,” he added.

Face Check, which was rolled out in October 2025, forces all new Tinder users to go through a video selfie verification process. Match Group told Congressional investigators that pilots of the tool reduced user interactions with scam accounts by 70% in the U.S. 

Hassan said Match Group has made some progress in combating scammers but argued it should not have taken so long and that there is still significant progress to be made, particularly now that artificial intelligence has made it easier to spin up fake profiles en masse. 

She noted that last month the Senate unanimously passed bipartisan legislation that will force dating apps to notify anyone who has interacted with a scammer, even if the account has since been banned. 

A key section of the report focuses on the AI machine learning models Match Group used to detect scammers and other bad actors. Internal documents provided by Match Group showed that Tinder had not updated these models in years.

After being pressed by the committee, the company instituted a newer AI model in early 2026 that examined profiles to detect scammers. Investigators also took issue with Match Group’s combination of scammers and spam when referencing their efforts. 

The report quotes a senior researcher at an AI safety firm that said Tinder “would need to retrain its machine learning models monthly at minimum, depending on other metrics and the systems in place to monitor flagged content.” 

“[This expert] also told Committee staff that retraining models once or twice a year would mean that the company ‘did not take fraud detection seriously,’” the report said. 

A Match Group official disputed the assertion that some models had not been updated in years, calling it "false and misleading."