She told the Guardian she had been looking for a connection, but instead became the victim of a romance scam that cost her almost $100,000. Match Group operates apps such as Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, Match (formerly Match.com) and others. On Tuesday, a report detailing the results of that investigation was published.
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 provided by Match Group 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”. The report also showed that nearly 500,000 of those accounts “exchanged contact information with another user”.
Mary told the Guardian that she tried to establish whether the scammer she spoke with was real. He would contact her constantly, she said, and knew where she lived. She said that the man told her he needed money for work-related things and medical emergencies.
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.’” In total, Mary said she sent the man about $100,000 in cryptocurrency payments.
After realizing he was a scammer, she blocked his number. He would then switch phone numbers and contact her again. Mary has since sought to identify the people behind the fraud and discovered other Plenty of Fish profiles using the same photos as the man she had talked to.
She has reported them to the platform. Tuesday’s report noted that since the launch of the investigation last September, Match Group had “introduced and expanded important measures designed to combat scams” including a facial verification feature on the Tinder app across the US, “requiring all new Tinder users to complete a video selfie verification process”. In a news release on Tuesday, Hassan and committee Democrats added that Match Group also “instituted new efforts designed to remove harmful accounts more effectively” including in the first half of 2025, a “new AI model” that examines profiles and other information to detect scammers and other bad actors.
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