Mary met a man on the courtship app Plenty of Fish in 2024. She told the Guardian she had been looking for a connection, but alternatively became the casualty of a love narrative scam that disbursal her nearly $100,000.
“There was a lot of conversation, and afterward it started alongside the changeless contact, force and repeated asks for money,” Mary, who asked that her final name be withheld, stated in an discussion on Tuesday. “It fair escalated really, really quickly.”
Mary was one of multiple group who said to staffers from the US Congress’s shared financial commission as part of an inquiry by Senators Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire, and Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, into love narrative scams on courtship platforms owned by Match Group. Match Group operates apps specified as Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, Match (formerly Match.com) and others.
“Romance scams, in which fraudsters form relationships to induce prosperity or gifts from victims, have rotate into a foremost form of financial fraud in the United States and disbursal Americans at smallest $1.3bn annually,” the senators noted upon the investigation’s initiate last September.
On Tuesday, a report detailing the results of that inquiry was published.
Internal documents provided by Match Group showed that “as of the second fractional of 2025, Tinder had not updated most of its device learning models in years” and “as a result, Tinder detected scammers and another bad actors small reliably and struggled to keep gait alongside emerging threats”, per the report.
Data provided by Match Group additionally showed that through the third fourth of 2025 in the US, nearly 1.5m scammers or another bad actors on Tinder and Hinge had “matched alongside at smallest one another user”. The study additionally showed that nearly 500,000 of those accounts “exchanged communication data alongside another user”.
Mary told the Guardian that she tried to established whether the scammer she said alongside was real. He would communication her constantly, she said, and knew anywhere she lived. She stated that the man told her he needed prosperity for work-related things and medicinal emergencies.
“They never depart you alone,” she said. “I call it akin being in a vortex. You don’t equal realise what’s happening. You’re sending money, and it’s adding up, but all one of those times that you dispatch money, it’s, like, not connected to the another times. But eventually whenever I realized how much prosperity I lost, I was like: ‘Whoa.’”
In total, Mary stated she sent the man concerning $100,000 in cryptocurrency payments. After realizing he was a scammer, she blocked his number. He would afterward toggle phone numbers and communication her again.
Mary has since sought to acknowledge the group rearward the fraud and discovered another Plenty of Fish profiles using the identical photos as the man she had talked to. She has reported them to the platform.
“If you knew me, you would say she would never do that,” Mary said, adding that she struggles to comprehend how it all happened, but believes it’s “really a lot concerning power of control”.
Tuesday’s study noted that since the initiate of the inquiry final September, Match Group had “introduced and expanded crucial measures designed to combat scams” including a facial verification feature on the Tinder app throughout the US, “requiring all new Tinder users to complete a video selfie verification process”.
In a news release on Tuesday, Hassan and commission Democrats added that Match Group additionally “instituted new efforts designed to eliminate harmful accounts additional effectively” including in the archetypal fractional of 2025, a “new AI model” that examines profiles and another data to detect scammers and another bad actors.
“It is encouraging that following commission outreach, Match Group introduced new AI models,” the study states. However, those “changes came following a prolonged duration during which scams continued to proliferate on Tinder”.
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In reply to the study on Tuesday, Yoel Roth, Match Group’s elder vice-president of rely and safety stated in a statement: “We’re grateful the commission recognized our important advancements to defend our users against love narrative scams.”
He said: “That said, the study mischaracterizes the two the historic measure of our funding and the activity already complete. Alongside our involvement alongside the Committee complete the former year, we’ve made the largest safety advancements in Match Group’s history. Trust and safety is a foundational priority, and we average to continue foremost the industry in construction tools that advance authentic, harmless connections.”
Much of the safety work, including visage check, was already under way before the committee’s investigation, Match Group told NBC News.
In June, Hassan introduced legislation alongside alongside the Republican legislator Rick Scott, that would established a chief portal for Americans to study scams “and get the assistance they need from law implementation and agencies”.
Hassan, in a declaration alongside alongside the publish of the study on Tuesday, described love narrative scams as “devastating – the two financially and emotionally – to group who are looking for association and alternatively discover themselves targeted and exploited by earth offender enterprises”.
“During the way of our investigation, Match Group made advancement in combating scammers – but it shouldn’t have taken so long, and there’s motionless additional that Match needs to do,” she said.
“As offender networks use AI to supercharge their scams, courtship apps and all companies must quickly and proactively keep their scam defenses up to date. Companies must remain vigilant and prioritize thorough scam safety at all flat to defend consumers and obstacle fraudsters from infiltrating online platforms.”
