Match Group's Dating Apps Had the Assault Reports and Left the Predators Active
What happened
An 18-month investigation by The Markup, published in February 2025, found that Match Group, the company that owns Tinder and Hinge, had maintained records of users accused of sexual assault for years and declined to act on them. Users reported for rape, drugging, and assault remained active on the platforms. Some were not flagged, not removed, and not referred to law enforcement. Match Group had been aware of accusations against specific users since at least 2016.
The most concrete case in the investigation involved a Denver cardiologist named Stephen Matthews. Matthews was reported multiple times for rape through Hinge. The platform kept his profile active. At some point during that period, the platform's systems highlighted him as a "Standout" profile, a designation meant to surface high-quality matches to other users. In October 2024, Matthews was sentenced to 158 years in prison for drugging and sexually assaulting women he had met through dating apps.
Match Group operates a safety system called Sentinel, built on machine learning and designed to detect sex offenders. The investigation found that Sentinel and the processes around it were not working as described. The company had records of assault accusations but no adequate procedures for acting on them. Employees handling reports were left to use their own judgment, without consistent standards for when a report warranted removal or escalation to police. The result was a system that logged incoming signals and then did little with them.
The accountability gap had been visible for years before the investigation ran. Match Group announced in 2020 that it would publish a Transparency Report for the United States disclosing how it handled safety issues. As of the investigation's publication, no such report had appeared. The promise existed. The documentation did not.
What the Matthews case makes legible is a failure that a basic audit trail would have made much harder to sustain. If every assault report triggered a logged decision, with a timestamp, a reviewer, and a stated outcome, the pattern of repeated reports going unactioned would have been visible inside the company and reviewable by regulators or the public. A provable record of what a system did with each incoming signal is not a technical luxury. It is the minimum condition for knowing whether the system is functioning at all. Match Group had the reports. What it lacked was any mechanism that would force it to account for what it did with them.
Reported impact
- Affected parties
- Not publicly disclosed
- Harm type
- Not publicly disclosed
- Scale
- Not publicly disclosed
- Financial impact
- Not publicly disclosed
- Regulatory action
- Not publicly disclosed
Classification
Relevant governance controls
Governance control mapping is not available for this record.
- No controls mapped
Not publicly disclosed
Control mapping is analytical. It does not state that any control would have prevented the incident.
Sources and evidence
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