Imagine sitting at home alone, eager to find love, yet unsure you ever will. While staring into the familiar glow of a smartphone, you download a dating app and start swiping. Left, left, left again. Then you pause.
An attractive face fills the screen, flooding your mind with a romantic montage of potential futures. You swipe right. The app congratulates you: “It’s a Match!”
The conversation flows easily and continues day after day. You feel a strong connection. They earn your trust. That montage seems closer to reality than ever before.
When the conversation shifts suddenly to an urgent crisis — they ran into legal trouble, found themselves in a financial pinch, or even suffered a heart attack — your first reaction is one of genuine concern and a desire to help.
That’s how romance scams work.
Americans lost about $1.5 billion across more than 70,000 incidents reported in 2025 to this increasingly common and lucrative form of fraud, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Some contend those running popular dating sites have been too slow to respond.
Democratic US Senator Maggie Hassan, ranking member of the Joint Economic Committee, released a report on Tuesday outlining the findings of an investigation she launched last year into Match Group, which operates the dating platforms Tinder, Hinge, Match, and Plenty of Fish.
Although the report credited Match Group for taking certain steps to improve its scam detection and mitigation features in the past year, it also faulted the company for not doing more sooner, especially considering the scale of organized crime and rapid rise in artificial intelligence.
Tinder went years without updating most of its machine learning models, which led to fraudsters and their changing tactics being detected less reliably, according to the report.
“As criminals use AI to make their scams more and more believable, dating apps and all companies that scammers exploit need to ensure that their own scam defenses quickly and proactively evolve to meet these new threats,” Hassan told reporters on Tuesday during a press conference about the report.
Mary L. Gray, an anthropologist and media scholar who researches the impacts and ethics of everyday technology, said during the press conference that a dating platform is fundamentally different from a standard online retailer, since users seeking human companionship and intimacy are far more vulnerable than those just looking to buy a pair of shoes.
“They are sharing parts of themselves and details about their lives that make them available for meaningful connection, but that also means that that makes them targets of manipulation,” Gray said. “A company that profits from creating those connections has a heightened responsibility … to protect the people making themselves vulnerable enough to use its service.”
Nearly 1.5 million bad actors matched with at least one other user on Tinder or Hinge during the first three quarters of 2025, and almost 500,000 of those accounts exchanged contact information, according to the report. In the fourth quarter, Tinder began requiring all US users to complete a video selfie identity verification process, which appears to have slashed interactions with bots and scammers by more than 70 percent.
Hassan — who worked in concert with Republican US Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, the chair of a Commerce subcommittee that handles consumer protection and data privacy — said the company still has more work to do.
Yoel Roth, senior vice president of trust and safety for Match Group, said his team is grateful that the report recognized the significant efforts undertaken to combat romance scams.
“That said, the report mischaracterizes both the historical scale of our investment and the work already completed,” Roth said in a statement, adding that the company intends to “continue leading the industry in building tools that promote authentic, safe connections.”
Roth noted that Match Group is a member of an Aspen Institute task force on scam prevention, co-founded a coalition to improve information sharing among tech companies, serves on an advisory board for the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, and supports legislation that Hassan introduced to establish a centralized website for scam prevention and reporting.
“Romance scams are a cross-platform, societal problem that no company can solve alone,” Roth said, “which is why we participate in and help fund cross-industry efforts to combat online scams.”
Steven Porter can be reached at steven.porter@globe.com. Follow him @reporterporter.