Roughly 1.5 million fraudulent profiles and malicious actors connected with genuine users across Tinder and Hinge during the opening nine months of 2025, according to findings released Tuesday by the Joint Economic Committee following a twelve-month probe into Match Group's dating platforms. The investigation uncovered significant gaps in the company's approach to tackling fraud across Tinder, Hinge, Match, Plenty of Fish and other services under the Match Group umbrella.

Lawmakers have focused on digital romance scams for years, tracking schemes that extracted $1.5 billion from Americans in the previous year, per Federal Trade Commission figures. Criminal syndicates based in Southeast Asia and West Africa, often employing trafficked individuals, have systematized these operations—tactics referred to as "pig butchering."

The congressional report found that scammer profiles on Tinder saw their visibility surge dramatically. Between May 2024 and December 2025, the median number of profile views received by scammers jumped more than 700 percent. Crucially, the investigation determined that "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 operates as the world's most-used dating application, drawing approximately 50 million monthly active users.

"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 member of the committee.

The committee's report presented accounts from numerous victims describing the toll of these schemes. One woman recounted joining Tinder following her husband's death, where she encountered someone claiming to be from New Jersey. The individual orchestrated a series of fabricated emergencies requiring money, ultimately defrauding her of thousands of dollars.

A romance scam takes more than money, there are wounds nobody sees. You question every conversation, every promise you believed. 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.

Victim testimony to Congressional investigators

Match Group pushed back against the findings. Yoel Roth, a senior official at the company, contended that the report "mischaracterizes" the firm's commitment to security improvements and existing anti-fraud initiatives. "Alongside our engagement with the Committee over the past year, we've made the largest safety advancements in Match Group's history," Roth stated, highlighting the rollout of a biometric verification system called Face Check on both Tinder and Hinge.

"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," Roth added.

Launched in October 2025, Face Check requires all new Tinder users to complete a video selfie verification step. According to data Match Group shared with investigators, pilot testing of the tool cut user interactions with scam accounts by 70 percent within the United States.

Hassan acknowledged that Match Group has made headway but criticized the pace of action and emphasized the need for further measures, particularly given how artificial intelligence now enables rapid creation of fraudulent profiles at scale. She noted that the Senate passed unanimous, bipartisan legislation last month mandating that dating applications alert users who have engaged with scammers, regardless of whether those accounts have since been removed.

Machine learning models left outdated

A significant portion of the report examined the artificial intelligence and machine learning systems Match Group deployed for identifying scammers and bad actors. Documents obtained from Match Group revealed that Tinder's detection models had gone without updates for extended periods.

Following pressure from the committee, Match Group implemented a newer AI model in early 2026 designed to analyze profiles and flag scammers. The investigation also criticized how Match Group conflated scammers with spam in its public statements about fraud prevention efforts.

The report cited a senior researcher from an AI safety organization who stated that 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 noted.

A Match Group representative disputed the claim that certain models remained unrefreshed for years, characterizing it as "false and misleading."