Congress Says Match Group Failed to Stop Romance Scams on Its Dating Apps
A bipartisan investigation by the U.S. Joint Economic Committee concluded that Match Group failed to protect users of Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish and Match from large-scale romance fraud.
The findings were published by the committee on Oct. 13, 2026, in a press release titled "Hassan Investigation Reveals Deficiencies & Spurs Action from Match Group to Block Romance Scams" and reported on Oct. 14, 2026. The inquiry was led by Sen. Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire, who served as Ranking Member, and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee. The Guardian
The investigation opened with Mary, who met a man on Plenty of Fish in 2024. The relationship moved off platform. She ultimately lost almost $100,000 in cryptocurrency payments to the scammer.
That pattern is common. Romance scams involve fraudsters forming relationships to induce money or gifts from victims. Senators Hassan and Blackburn put the annual cost to Americans at at least $1.3 billion. The Federal Trade Commission reported $1.3 billion in losses in 2022.
Internal records obtained from Match Group describe the scale of exposure. Through the third quarter of 2025 in the U.S., nearly 1.5 million scammers or other bad actors on Tinder and Hinge had matched with at least one other user. Nearly 500,000 scammer or bad-actor accounts on the two apps exchanged contact information with another user.
Investigators said the company had not kept its defenses current. Internal documents showed that as of the second half of 2025, Tinder had not updated most of its machine learning models, the automated systems trained to flag suspicious behavior, in years.
The senators first pressed Match Group for answers in a letter in September 2025. They wrote that they were concerned Match, through its algorithmic design, creates trust that romance scammers can exploit. Reuters
Since the investigation launched in September 2025, Match Group has introduced new controls. Tinder now requires all new users in the U.S. to complete a video selfie verification process under a facial verification feature. The company also deployed new detection models throughout the latter half of 2025 and the first half of 2026 to better catch bad actors. NBC News
Congress has also acted legislatively. Legislation passed requires dating apps to notify users of contact with members who are engaging in fraudulent activity.
The broader context here is enforcement through product design rather than prosecution alone. Romance fraud operates across borders, uses cryptocurrency rails, and shifts quickly once accounts are removed. For policymakers, the relevant questions are retention of fraud signals, timeliness of model retraining, friction at account creation, and whether users are warned after exposure. For platforms, the trade-off is growth and user experience against verification mandates and post-match notification duties that Congress now expects.
