Match Group sat on outdated scam-detection AI for years while Tinder's bot problem exploded, a new Senate report finds.
Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan's investigation found that, as of late 2025, Tinder hadn't updated most of its scam-detection models in years, even as views on the median scammer's profile jumped more than 700 percent between May 2024 and December 2025. In the first nine months of 2025, about 1.5 million scam or bot accounts on Tinder and Hinge matched with real users, and nearly 500,000 of those accounts swapped contact information. Tinder made its Face Check identity verification mandatory for new U.S. users in December 2025, and Match says it cut scammer and spam interactions by more than 70 percent for at least seven months after launch. Separately, after sustained follow-up from Hassan's committee, Match built a new AI model this year aimed specifically at catching scammers and other bad actors.
That timeline matters: Face Check was already in the works before Congress got involved, but the report ties the newer scam-detection model directly to committee pressure, suggesting Match moved on back-end fraud tools only once lawmakers started asking pointed questions. It is a familiar split in trust and safety work: a flashy, user-facing feature like biometric verification gets resourced, while the unglamorous models doing the actual fraud-sniffing get left alone until someone outside the company forces a look.
Match's Yoel Roth pushed back on that framing, telling Mashable the report 'mischaracterizes both the historical scale of our investment and the work already completed,' and pointing to the company's role in groups like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance as evidence it wasn't starting from zero.