Can You Run a Background Check on a Tinder Match?

Yes, if you are in the US. Tinder offers access to BrightCheck, a separate online background check platform with criminal history checks, anti-catfish checks and social media checks. Tinder users get a small number of free searches, and BrightCheck charges a fee after that. For a search to be useful, BrightCheck recommends having at least her full name, her city and state, and her year of birth.

The route is short once you know it. Tap your profile icon, then the shield icon, then the tools tab, and choose Tinder x BrightCheck.

BrightCheck is its own platform, not a feature inside your chats. Tinder points you to it, and the search itself runs on BrightCheck's side. It is also available in the US only, so if you live anywhere else the option will not help you, however hard you look for it.

The free searches are a small allowance, not a subscription. Once they are gone, every further search costs money. That is a good reason to save them for the women you are actually about to see in person.

This is the first real limit, and most men only notice it when they try. A first name and a handful of photos is not much to search on. BrightCheck recommends her full name, her city and state, and the year she was born, as a minimum.

On the apps, a woman usually gives you a first name and little else. Her surname tends to arrive later, once you have swapped numbers or she has mentioned where she works. Her birth year may never come up before a first date at all.

So in practice a background check is not something you run the moment you match. You run it once there is a real conversation, a plan, and enough detail to search on.

BrightCheck offers three kinds of check, and the names tell you what each one is for. A criminal history check looks for a record. A social media check looks at her presence online. An anti-catfish check goes after the question every man on the apps has asked at least once, which is whether this woman is really the woman in the photos.

For most men, that last question is the one that matters. The bigger risk on a dating app is rarely a dangerous woman across a table. It is an account that is not who it claims to be, run by someone who wants your money, your images or your attention for their own reasons.

Run one when something does not add up. Her story about her job shifts every time it comes up. She has a reason ready whenever you suggest a short call. She wants to move the conversation somewhere else within the first few lines. Or you are about to see a stranger late at night and you would simply feel better knowing.

Do not run one on every woman you like. You will spend the free searches on conversations that were going nowhere anyway. Worse, you will start treating dating like vetting job applicants, and that shows in how you write to her.

If a search turns up something that worries you, you owe nobody a first date. Unmatch politely and spend the evening somewhere else.

A background check is a safety tool, not a conversation topic. Even a clean result sounds strange said out loud. "I looked you up and you're fine" is not a line that helps a woman relax across the table.

Keep the search proportionate as well. You are checking that she is who she says she is and that seeing her is sensible. You are not researching her past relationships or reading her old posts for things to bring up. Men who dig for that second reason arrive at the date with a head full of assumptions, and she can feel it within minutes.

Before you spend a search, use the free checks that also happen to be good dating.

A short video call confirms her face and her voice in a couple of minutes, and a woman who is genuinely interested will usually agree to one. Keeping the conversation in the app until you have a read on her keeps everything where you can report it. A first date somewhere busy, at a normal hour, that you each travel to yourselves covers most of what a background check is trying to protect.

Any Tinder user in the US can reach the same tool, so a woman who is nervous about you can check you too. Keep that in mind for what you tell her.

a dating coach's material is blunt about this. Women on the apps are wary of fake accounts and of men who look too good to be true, and a man flaunting cash or cars can read as someone exaggerating his life. If the job, the city and the age you gave her match what she could find, a check only confirms what she already hoped. If they do not, it ends things before the first drink.

Be the man whose story checks out. Then put your effort where dates actually come from, which is a good conversation and a clear, easy plan.