Does Match.com Have Fake Profiles?

Match says it will not send you fake or misleading communications such as email notifications, messages or Likes. That is a statement about the company. It does not say that no fake profile has ever been made by an outsider, and no dating site can promise that. Fake accounts exist on every dating service, and you can check a profile yourself before you spend a Saturday on it.

The company's line is narrow. It says Match itself does not invent interest to keep you paying. A Like or a message that reaches you comes from another member's account, not from a Match employee.

That leaves two other kinds of profile. Some are real women who have since left. Others are accounts made by people who are not who they claim, which is the thing men are really asking about. Match does not publish a count of them, and nobody outside the company can produce an honest one.

If you get a Like or a message and the profile later shows Profile Unavailable, Match says the member removed her profile or Match took it down. Match adds that members are sometimes removed suddenly for security violations, and that such a member may send a few Likes or messages first.

So a profile that disappears right after contacting you can be a real woman who changed her mind, or an account Match removed. You cannot tell which from your side. What you can do is stop spending effort on someone who is gone, which is the right response either way.

You can report a profile or a message by tapping the three dots and choosing Report. Match says reports are confidential and its team reviews them. Use it whenever something is off: a profile that asks for money, a woman who pushes you to leave the site in the first few messages, or a page that does not match what she says.

Reporting costs you nothing, and it removes the account from the pool you and every other man are searching.

Match's own advice is short. Keep your chats on Match. Never send money to someone you met online. Treat urgency around money as a red flag.

Match also says it never emails asking for your username, password or financial information. If you get an email that does, you can forward it to customercare@support.match.com with the word phishing in the subject line.

A woman who wants to move you off the site quickly and then asks for money is running a script. Stop answering her and report the profile.

Match offers Photo Verification. You record a video selfie. If it passes a liveness check and a face comparison with your profile photos, you earn Photo Verified status. A verified profile has passed that test, which makes a stolen set of photos harder to get through.

Two uses for it. When you see a verified woman, you have a little more reason to believe the photos are hers. And when you set up your own page, getting verified tells her that you are who you say you are, which is the same worry she has about men.

You do not need a database. A few ordinary checks catch most trouble.

Look at whether her photos look like one person across different days and places, or like a set from a shoot. Look at whether her answers get specific when you ask about where she lives and what she did last weekend, or stay vague in a way that never changes. Ask for a short phone call or video call, and notice how she reacts. A woman who is real usually agrees to talk. One who always has a reason not to is telling you something.

Then move toward a plan. My range for a text exchange before suggesting a time and place is about four to seven messages. A real woman will agree to meet somewhere public for a short drink. A fake account cannot show up, so the plan itself is the best test.

Some men hear all this and decide every profile is fake, and then write to nobody. That costs you more than the occasional fake account does. Most women on the site are real women, and a few minutes of checking is enough. Treat the suspicion as a filter you run quickly, then spend your effort on the women who pass it and agree to meet.