A US congressional report has detailed the scale of romance scams on dating platforms owned by Match Group, including Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish and Match. The investigation, led by Senators Maggie Hassan and Marsha Blackburn, was launched last September after romance scams were found to cost Americans at least $1.3bn annually.
One victim, Mary, met a man on Plenty of Fish in 2024 and was drawn into a romance scam that cost her almost $100,000 in cryptocurrency payments. She described the experience as being in a vortex, saying the scammer contacted her constantly, knew where she lived, and repeatedly asked for money for work-related expenses and medical emergencies. After she blocked him, he switched phone numbers and kept contacting her. She later found other profiles using the same photos and reported them to the platform.
Internal documents provided by Match Group showed that as of the second half of 2025, Tinder had not updated most of its machine learning models in years, making it less reliable at detecting scammers. Data also showed that through the third quarter of 2025 in the US, nearly 1.5m scammers or other bad actors on Tinder and Hinge had matched with at least one other user, and nearly 500,000 of those accounts exchanged contact information with someone.
Since the investigation began, Match Group has introduced measures including facial verification on Tinder across the US and a new AI model to detect scammers. The report said these changes came after a prolonged period in which scams continued to spread on Tinder.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing