How Many Tinder Profiles Are Bots?

Nobody outside Tinder can give you an honest figure, and the percentages that float around the internet are guesses. a dating coach says that in major US cities Tinder has a lot of fake profiles, and that is the most useful thing anyone has said about it. What you can do is count the fakes in your own stack for a week. That number is the only one that applies to you.

A bot count would need two things: a definition of fake and access to every account. Outsiders have neither. A fake profile can be a scripted account or a real person using stolen photos. It can be an abandoned account, or a person who is simply not looking to meet anyone. Those are different problems, and no survey separates them.

Tinder does not publish the count in anything we have read, so we will not quote one. Any article that gives a precise percentage is either repeating a rumor or making it up.

What we do have is Tinder's description of how it fights fakes. Its Safety and Policy Center says a fraud team uses technology that scans profiles for red-flag language and images. The team also reviews suspicious accounts and reports by hand, and it blocks identifiers tied to bad actors. Tinder adds that Face Check detects when the same face turns up across several accounts.

My remarks are about location and about the app's reputation. He says Tinder has a lot of fake profiles in major US cities, which is one reason he finds Hinge tends to do better there. He also says that in many places in Europe Tinder is almost the only app people use.

So the fake rate is not one number. It depends on where you live. A big city may hand you more of them, and a smaller one fewer. That is a reason to measure your own stack and not to trust a headline.

Do this for a week. Each session, tally every profile you see and mark the ones that look off. Warning signs are one or two photos that are all studio clean, nothing written, a link in the first line of text, or a face that changes between photos.

At the end, divide. If five in a hundred looked wrong, you have a rough rate for your city and your settings. It will not be exact, but it will be yours, and it will be more useful than a statistic from somewhere else.

Be fair in the tally. A woman with one photo and a blank page is more often a real woman who has not finished her page than a bot. Mark only what you would actually be unwilling to spend a message on.

We have a separate guide on spotting fakes in more detail, and the short version is that they are built at volume, so they cut the same corners.

The photos are too uniform. The page says almost nothing, or says everything too smoothly. The replies arrive fast at any hour and answer a different question from the one you asked. And within a few exchanges there is a push to move off the app to a link, a site or a number.

Any push like that in the first day or two is your answer. Do not open the link and do not send money or pictures.

Even if you could prove that one profile in ten was fake, your plan would barely change. Fakes cost you a few seconds each if you read before you like. They only cost you real time if you answer one.

What helps is to like fewer women and read for two seconds first. My advice on swiping is to like only the women you would honestly write to, and that same habit keeps most fakes out of your list. A page with four flawless photos and nothing written is not worth a like even if it is real.

The bigger risk is blaming bots for results that are really about your own page. A man who gets few likes and decides the app is full of fakes has skipped the more likely explanation, which is his lead photo.

If your tally comes back high and the real women you do see are not answering, test a second app. My advice is to run two apps with the same photos and the same written lines for two weeks, then keep the one where women reply.

If Tinder is still the one that produces conversations, keep it and stay careful. If it is not, you have your answer without needing a bot statistic.

Report any account you are fairly sure is fake. It takes a few seconds, and it is the one part of this that helps other men too.