📰 newsreader

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

“There was a lot of conversation, and then it started with the constant contact, pressure and repeated asks for money,” Mary, who asked that her last name be withheld, said in an interview on Tuesday. “It just escalated really, really quickly.”

Mary was one of several people who spoke to staffers from the US Congress’s 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 apps such as Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, Match (formerly Match.com) and others.

“Romance scams, in which fraudsters form relationships to induce money or gifts from victims, have become a leading form of financial fraud in the United States and cost Americans at least $1.3bn annually,” the senators noted upon the investigation’s launch last September.

On Tuesday, a report detailing the results of that investigation was published.

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 detected scammers and other bad actors less reliably and struggled to keep pace with emerging threats”, per the report.

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

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

“They never leave you alone,” she said. “I call it like being in a vortex. You don’t even realise what’s happening. You’re sending money, and it’s adding up, but each one of those times that you send money, it’s, like, not connected to the other times. But finally when I realized how much money I lost, I was like: ‘Whoa.’”

In total, Mary said she sent the man about $100,000 in cryptocurrency payments. After realizing he was a scammer, she blocked his number. He would then switch phone numbers 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 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 understand how it all happened, but believes it’s “really a lot about force of control”.

Tuesday’s report noted that since the launch of the investigation last September, Match Group had “introduced and expanded important measures designed to combat scams” including a facial verification feature on the Tinder app across the US, “requiring all new Tinder users to complete a video selfie verification process”.

In a news release on Tuesday, Hassan and committee Democrats added that Match Group also “instituted new efforts designed to remove harmful accounts more effectively” 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 that following committee outreach, Match Group introduced new AI models,” the report states. However, those “changes came after a prolonged period during which scams continued to proliferate on Tinder”.

In response to the report on Tuesday, Yoel Roth, Match Group’s senior vice-president of trust and safety said in a statement: “We’re grateful the committee recognized our significant advancements to protect our users against romance scams.”

He said: “That said, the report mischaracterizes both the historical scale of our investment and the work already complete. 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.”

Much of the safety work, including face check, was already under way before the committee’s investigation, Match Group told NBC News.

In June, Hassan introduced legislation alongside with the Republican senator 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 along with the release of the report on Tuesday, described romance scams as “devastating – both financially and emotionally – to people who are looking for connection and instead find themselves targeted and exploited by global criminal enterprises”.

“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,” she said.

“As criminal networks use AI to supercharge their scams, dating apps and all companies must quickly and proactively keep their scam defenses up to date. Companies must stay vigilant and prioritize comprehensive scam prevention at every level to protect consumers and block fraudsters from infiltrating online platforms.”