On Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan released the results of her investigation into romance scams on Match Group apps, including Tinder and Hinge.
Hassan, the New Hampshire Democrat who serves as ranking member of the Joint Economic Committee, began this investigation in Sept. 2025, when she and Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn sent a letter to Match and its CEO, Spencer Rascoff, requesting documents about romance scams on the company's platforms.
These scams occur when a bad actor gains someone's trust by pretending to be romantically interested in them, only to then ask for money. The Federal Trade Commission reported that Americans lost almost $1.5 billion to romance scams last year.
The investigation — called "Outmatched: Tinder, Scammers, and Match Group's Efforts to Catch Up" — focused on how the company detects and removes scam accounts. As part of it, Match Group provided the committee with two written responses and internal documents in Oct. and Nov. 2025, and additional documents throughout this year. Match Group's senior vice president of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, also sat down for an interview with committee minority staff in April 2026.
The investigation found that, as of the second half of 2025, Tinder hadn't updated most of its AI models used to detect scammers and other bad actors for years. Roth told the committee that Tinder performs ongoing maintenance on its machine learning models and that Match retrains its models every year or every couple of years.
According to data Match Group provided the committee, the number of views received by the median scammer’s profile on Tinder globally increased by more than 700 percent between May 2024 and December 2025. In the first nine months of 2025, almost 1.5 million accounts belonging to scammers or other bad actors on Tinder and Hinge in the U.S. matched with at least one user; nearly 500,000 of those accounts exchanged contact information with another user. The two apps banned tens of millions of inauthentic accounts in 2025.
In Oct. 2025, Tinder announced the U.S. rollout of its user verification process, Face Check, which became mandatory for all new U.S. users in early December. Hinge followed suit. Match Group told the committee that within a month of nationwide deployment, Face Check reduced user interactions with spam, bots, and scammers on Tinder in the U.S. by more than 70 percent. The company said that the reduction was sustained for at least the next seven months.
Face Check isn't perfect. A viral YouTube video from April demonstrated that it can be tricked, and a Tinder spokesperson acknowledged these concerns to Mashable at the time. The spokesperson added that the app is committed to continuously improving its systems.
Match also introduced a new AI model to detect scammers and other bad actors in the first half of this year after continued follow-up from the committee, according to the report.
Roth told Mashable in an emailed statement that Match welcomed recognition of its efforts to protect users, including Face Check, but disputed the report's characterization of its work: "The report mischaracterizes both the historical scale of our investment and the work already completed."
"Alongside our engagement with the Committee over the past year, we've made the largest safety advancements in Match Group's history. Trust and Safety is a foundational priority, and we intend to continue leading the industry in building tools that promote authentic, safe connections," Roth said.
Roth also said that romance scams are a cross-platform, societal problem that no company can solve alone, which is why Match participates in and helps fund cross-industry efforts to combat online scams. Those efforts include membership in the Aspen Institute's National Task Force on Fraud and Scam Prevention, co-founding the Tech Against Scams Coalition, serving on the advisory board of the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, and supporting Sen. Hassan's ReportScams.gov Act.
Hassan said in a press release shared with Mashable: "During the course of our investigation, Match Group made progress in combating scammers — but it shouldn't have taken so long, and there's still more that Match needs to do."