‘It’s like being in a vortex’: US report details scale of ‘devastating’ dating app scams | American politics

Mary met a man on the dating app Plenty of Fish in 2024. She told the Guardian she was looking for a connection, but instead fell victim to a romance scam that cost her nearly $100,000.

“There were a lot of conversations, and then it started with constant contact, pressure and repeated requests for money,” Mary, who asked that her last name be withheld, said in an interview Tuesday. “It escalated very, very quickly.”

Mary was one of several people who spoke to members of the U.S. Congressional Joint Economic Committee as part of an investigation by Senators Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire, and Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, into romance scams on dating platforms owned by Match Group. Match Group operates applications such as Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, Match (formerly Match.com) and others.

“Romance scams, in which fraudsters form relationships to obtain money or gifts from victims, have become a major form of financial fraud in the United States and cost Americans at least $1.3 billion annually,” the senators noted when launching the investigation last September.

On Tuesday, a report detailing the results of this investigation was released.

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 was detecting scammers and other bad actors less reliably and struggling to keep pace with emerging threats,” according to the report.

Data provided by Match Group also showed that during the third quarter of 2025 in the United States, nearly 1.5 million scammers or other bad actors on Tinder and Hinge had “matched with at least one other user.” The report also shows that nearly 500,000 of these accounts “exchanged contact information with another user.”

Mary told the Guardian she tried to determine whether the scammer she spoke with was real. He contacted her constantly, she said, and knew where she lived. She said the man told her he needed money for work-related things and for medical emergencies.

“They never leave you alone,” she said. “I call it being like being in a wormhole. You don’t even realize what’s happening. You send money, and it adds up, but each of those times you send money, it’s not related to the other times. But eventually, when I realized how much money I had lost, I was like, ‘Whoa.'”

In total, Mary said she sent the man approximately $100,000 in cryptocurrency payments. After realizing he was a scammer, she blocked his number. He would then change his phone number 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 spoke to. She reported them to the platform.

“If you knew me, you would say she would never do that,” Mary said, adding that she had a hard time understanding how it all happened, but thought it was “really about strength of control.”

Tuesday’s report notes that since launching the investigation last September, Match Group has “introduced and expanded significant measures intended to combat scams,” including a facial verification feature on the Tinder app in the United States, “requiring all new Tinder users to complete a selfie video verification process.”

In a press release issued Tuesday, Hassan and committee Democrats added that Match Group has also “implemented new efforts designed to more effectively remove harmful accounts,” including in the first half of 2025 a “new AI model” that examines profiles and other information to detect scammers and other bad actors.

“It is encouraging to see that as a result of the committee’s outreach efforts, Match Group has introduced new AI models,” the report said. However, these “changes came after a prolonged period during which scams continued to proliferate on Tinder.”

In response to Tuesday’s report, Yoel Roth, Match Group’s senior vice president of trust and safety, said in a statement: “We are grateful that the committee recognized our significant advances in protecting our users from romance scams. »

He said: “That said, the report misrepresents both the historic scale of our investment and the work already accomplished. Alongside our engagement with the Committee over the past year, we have made the greatest progress on security in Match Group’s history. Trust and security are a core priority, and we intend to continue to lead the industry in creating tools that promote authentic and safe connections.”

Much of the security work, including facial screening, was already underway before the committee’s investigation, Match Group told NBC News.

In June, Hassan introduced a bill alongside Republican Sen. 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, in a statement accompanying the report’s release Tuesday, described romance scams as “devastating – both financially and emotionally – for people who are looking for a connection and instead find themselves targeted and exploited by global criminal enterprises.”

“During our investigation, Match Group made progress in tackling fraudsters – but it should not have taken this long, and Match still needs to do more,” she said.

“As criminal networks use AI to power their scams, dating apps and all businesses must quickly and proactively keep their scam defenses up to date. Businesses must remain vigilant and prioritize comprehensive scam prevention at all levels to protect consumers and prevent fraudsters from infiltrating online platforms.”