In 2025, AI deepfakes flooded Tinder. According to the company, 98 percent of the content-moderation actions on the app were focused on combating fake accounts, scamming, and spam, pushing the company to expand its moderation efforts for its 60 million global users.
The problem is not unique to Tinder. The spread of AI-generated fake accounts has become a rising concern for dating apps, as things like chatfishing and voice cloning have gotten more widespread across the industry.
Among current online daters in the US, nearly half have been targeted by a dating scam, with US romance scams surpassing $4 billion between 2015 and 2025, according to the FBI.
The issue has forced just about every dating platform to adopt stricter authentication tools to ward off scammers. More and more, apps are asking that you surrender your most unique attribute in order to ensure that you’re a real person: your face.
More than a dozen major dating apps and sites use face recognition to verify users, often relying on liveness checks, 3D authentication, video selfies, or biometric ID to demonstrate humanness.
To combat the issue, Tinder launched the mandatory face-screening tool Face Check for new members in October 2025. “It’s not a feature. It’s a statement about what human connection online should require,” Yoel Roth, head of trust and safety for Match Group, which owns Tinder, said to WIRED in an email. Match Group tells WIRED that it is also starting to require Face Check for existing users in several of Tinder’s core markets, including the US and UK.
As face verification slowly transforms into a prerequisite for participation across the industry, the collective drive to combat bad actors has created a necessary and equally concerning new standard where “proof of human” profiles may soon be the norm.
Underpinning the shift, however, is a grim irony: In attempting to solve the problem of knowing whether someone is real, Big Dating is potentially creating more opportunities for privacy and security risks by forcing users to give up biometric data, while also legitimizing a culture of surveillance.
One company pushing for the use of ID-verification tech in dating apps is Tools for Humanity. The AI company created World ID, an iris-scanning biometric verification system, and partnered with Tinder in April, though it’s still optional for users. The most distinct feature about World ID is that confirmed users receive a “verified human” badge on the app after undergoing the process, which requires them to scan the colored part of their eye using the company’s orb device. They are given an identification number as their official World ID.
“In the near future, any dating app, like most online platforms in general, will need some sort of proof-of-human system like this,” says Tiago Sada, chief product officer at Tools for Humanity, adding that the way the majority of dating platforms handle verification is “super creepy, because you have to give your personal data to every single app that you want to use.” As stipulated by World’s policy, the orb does not share or retain any data; it is able to verify users without ever sending their data to a server. Once your image is confirmed, the orb sends the coded image to your phone before permanently deleting it, the company claims. Likewise, Face Check collects and stores an encrypted map of information about the shape of the user’s face, not the actual picture, Match said.
But even as dating apps claim that your biometric data is safe, security continues to be a significant concern.
