A US congressional report has detailed the extent of romance scams on dating apps owned by Match Group, revealing that Tinder had not updated most of its machine learning models in years, allowing scammers to match with nearly 1.5 million users in the US.
The report, published on Tuesday, follows an investigation by Senators Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire, and Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, into romance scams on platforms such as Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish and Match. The senators noted at the investigation's launch last September that romance scams cost Americans at least $1.3bn annually.
Victim lost $100,000 to app scammer
Mary, who asked that her last name be withheld, met a man on the dating app Plenty of Fish in 2024. She told the Guardian she was looking for a connection but instead became the victim of a romance scam that cost her almost $100,000 in cryptocurrency payments.
“There was a lot of conversation, and then it started with the constant contact, pressure and repeated asks for money,” Mary said in an interview on Tuesday. “It just escalated really, really quickly.” She described the experience as “like being in a vortex”, adding: “You don’t even realise what’s happening. You’re sending money, and it’s adding up, but each one of those times that you send money, it’s, like, not connected to the other times. But finally when I realized how much money I lost, I was like: ‘Whoa.’”
Match Group's response
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” and “as a result, Tinder detected scammers and other bad actors less reliably and struggled to keep pace with emerging threats”, per the report. 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 another user”.
The report noted that since the investigation's launch, Match Group had “introduced and expanded important measures designed to combat scams”, including a facial verification feature on Tinder across the US and a new AI model to detect scammers. However, those “changes came after a prolonged period during which scams continued to proliferate on Tinder”.
In response, Yoel Roth, Match Group's senior vice-president of trust and safety, said in a statement: “We’re grateful the committee recognized our significant advancements to protect our users against romance scams.” He added: “That said, the report mischaracterizes both the historical scale of our investment and the work already complete. Alongside our engagement with the Committee over the past year, we’ve made the largest safety advancements in Match Group’s history.”
Legislation and next steps
In June, Hassan introduced legislation alongside Republican senator Rick Scott that would establish a central portal for Americans to report scams “and get the help they need from law enforcement and agencies”. Hassan described romance scams as “devastating – both financially and emotionally – to people who are looking for connection and instead find themselves targeted and exploited by global criminal enterprises”. She said: “During the course of our investigation, Match Group made progress in combating scammers – but it shouldn’t have taken so long, and there’s still more that Match needs to do.”
