Tinder Launches Mandatory Facial Verification to Weed Out Bots and Scammers

On Wednesday, Tinder announced that it is rolling out a mandatory facial verification tool for new users in the US to help combat the spread of fake profiles and weed out “bad actors.”

Tinder claims its mandatory facial integration feature, called Face Check, is a first for a major dating app. During the sign-up process, new members complete a “liveness check” by taking a short video selfie within the app. The procedure collects and stores an encrypted map of information about the shape of the user’s face. “We don’t store a picture of your face, it’s not photo recognition, it’s data points about the shape of your face that are turned into a mathematical hash,” says Yoel Roth, head of Trust and Safety for Match Group, which owns Tinder. Tinder then uses that “hash” to check whether a new sign-up matches an account that already exists on Tinder.

Face Check is currently available to users in California, which will be followed by Texas and other states.

In a news release, Roth said the measure “sets a new benchmark for trust and safety across the dating industry” and “it helps tackle one of the hardest problems online, knowing whether someone is real … while adding meaningful obstacles that are difficult for bad actors to circumvent.”

The company defines “bad actors” as accounts that engage in deceptive behavior, including spamming, scamming, and bots. Currently 98 percent of the content moderation actions on Tinder address fake accounts, scamming, and spam. “There is a significant volume of the overall trust and safety work we do on Tinder that is focused on this challenge.”

Roth says it is a “meaningful improvement in our ability to address scaled abuse. You can get new phone numbers, new email addresses, new devices—you can't really get a new face.”

The company is aware that asking new members to scan their faces might be seen as a privacy issue, but “theoretically, if somebody were to get access to every single one of these hashes that’s been created, there isn't really anything they could do.”

The app’s previous verification methods were voluntary. Members, depending on their jurisdiction, could opt to verify their profiles through a selfie or ID process. Other dating apps like Bumble also use facial recognition software to let daters verify their authenticity, but on a voluntary basis.

When asked what the app plans to do about the fake profiles that already exist, given Face Check applies only to new users, Roth says the tech is most effective in curbing “the biggest issue that we're concerned with, which is the bulk creation of new accounts.”

As WIRED previously reported, people in the US have reported nearly $4.5 billion in romance and confidence fraud losses over the past decade, according to an analysis of the FBI’s internet crime reports. Through romance scams, fraudsters, and catfishers create fake identities to woo people and get their money; both crypto and AI can help facilitate these scams.

Tinder is undergoing an overhaul with new Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff at the helm. Rascoff, a venture capitalist who cofounded Zillow, took the reins of Match Group in February and within months laid off 13 percent of the company’s workforce. Though Rascoff oversees Match Group’s entire portfolio—which includes Hinge, OkCupid, The League, Plenty of Fish, and others—he also runs operations at Tinder.

According to the company, early results of Face Check—created in partnership with the global 3D face liveness and matching software company FaceTec—have led to considerable a decline in potential harm from romance scammers. The tech is already available in Colombia, Canada, Australia, India, and parts of Southeast Asia. Tinder claims there has been a 40 percent decrease in “bad actor reports.” The company is committed to “responsible innovation,” Rascoff said in a news release.

Tinder was the big bang of dating apps when it launched in 2012, introducing singles to an era of endless swipes and revolutionizing the dating landscape. Today, however, young people spend less time online swiping for love. In 2024, millennials spent an average of 56 minutes a day on dating apps (down from 90 minutes in 2018). According to a WIRED investigation, Tinder has taken a considerable hit when it comes to where singles spend their time. “While total dating app downloads worldwide have remained above 120 million annually since 2020, the Tinder slice of that download pie has gotten smaller,” WIRED reported this year. In 2024, the app experienced a 7 percent decline in paying users, according to Business Insider.

Starting next year, Match Group said, it plans to roll out Face Check across other apps in its portfolio.

Compared to dating apps, Roth says, “the balance of privacy is different on a platform focused on speech. In the context of apps that are built to connect people in the real world, we think that there’s not only a moral imperative but a business imperative to prioritize and build for safety.”