U.S. Senate investigation finds Match Group apps failed to prevent romance scams

A U.S. Senate investigation, led by Senators Maggie Hassan and Marsha Blackburn, has revealed significant failures in the fraud detection systems of Match Group, the parent company of Tinder and Hinge. The report, titled ‘Outmatched: Tinder, Scammers, and Match Group’s Efforts to Catch Up’, found that Tinder had not updated most of its machine learning models used to detect scammers for several years.

Between May 2024 and December 2025, views of median scammer profiles on Tinder increased by more than 700 percent. In the first nine months of 2025 alone, approximately 1.5 million fraudulent or malicious accounts on Tinder and Hinge successfully matched with legitimate users in the United States, with nearly 500,000 of those accounts exchanging contact information.

These romance scams, where bad actors manipulate victims emotionally to steal money, have had a massive financial impact; the Federal Trade Commission reported that Americans lost nearly $1.5 billion to such scams last year. In response to the findings, Match Group has implemented new verification measures like Face Check, which reportedly reduced fraudulent interactions by 70 percent in pilot tests, and incorporated a new AI model in early 2026.