Real cases where people were affected by a dating service's security, privacy or misuse by other users. Each case is our own short summary of published sources, with links to the originals. Cases never affect the scores.
The Norwegian Data Protection Authority fined the Microsoft-owned ad company Xandr NOK 92 million for passing on Grindr users' data, including data revealing sexual orientation, to potentially thousands of companies.
Grindr shared information about users' HIV status with two analytics companies. Years later it agreed to pay £26 million to settle a UK lawsuit, without admitting liability.
Australia’s Federal Court has found that eharmony misled customers about automatic renewal and pricing. Subscriptions renewed for a further 12 months, in some cases at up to five times the price. The judgment is not final. eharmony has announced that it will appeal.
US regulators accused OkCupid of sharing nearly three million user photos and associated personal information with an external technology company. The case resulted in a settlement in 2026.
A man pretended to be a woman and defrauded a man in Suffolk of more than £9,000. According to the BBC, contact began on Tinder. He received a suspended prison sentence and must pay £9,165 in compensation.
A man in England who met three men on Tinder and Bumble and took about £28,500 from them was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to fraud.
Norway's data protection authority fined Grindr NOK 65 million for sharing user data with advertising partners without valid consent. Oslo District Court and Borgarting Court of Appeal both upheld the fine.
A security firm found that flaws in Feeld could let outsiders read chats and open private photos and videos. Feeld says it fixed the issues in 2024 and saw no evidence of misuse.
Three men were lured through fake Grindr profiles, threatened with a gun and robbed in Fredrikstad and Sarpsborg. A Norwegian district court has convicted those behind it.
KU Leuven researchers found that distance filters in several dating apps could reveal a user's near-exact location. The companies say the flaws were fixed after disclosure in 2023.
A Swedish district court sentenced a man to two years and six months in prison for fraud and attempted extortion. Several of the victims were women he had met online, according to TV4 through Tinder.
A California man has been charged with using three dating apps to start relationships and persuade matches to "invest" more than $2 million with him.
In "pig butchering" scams, fraudsters build a romance on a dating app and then lure the victim into a fake crypto platform. Two victims who met their scammers on Hinge and Tinder lost their savings.
A user told The Guardian that a relationship started on Plenty of Fish cost her almost $100,000. Her account was published alongside a US congressional report on dating-app scams.
A security researcher found weaknesses in Bumble’s systems in 2020 that allowed access to users’ personal information, including political views and distance. Bumble says the flaw has been fixed and no user data was compromised.
A Parship customer withdrew from a one-year subscription after four days and was charged €392.96. The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that compensation should generally be proportionate to the time the customer actually used the service.
In 2020 a flaw in Grindr's password reset let anyone who knew a user's email address take over the account, including messages, photos and HIV status fields.
In January 2020 user data from the Spanish dating app MobiFriends was stolen and offered on a criminal forum, including email addresses, birth dates and weakly protected passwords.
Coffee Meets Bagel told users in February 2019 that an unauthorised party had obtained names and email addresses. About 6 million users were affected.
A security flaw made photos users had marked as private accessible to anyone. The company knew about the flaw but fixed it only a year later, and paid $240,000 in a settlement.
A Norwegian woman matched with a man on Tinder who posed as a billionaire's son. She took out loans in her own name to help him and was left with millions of kroner in debt.
Researchers showed in 2018 that Tinder’s mobile apps sent images without encryption. Someone on the same Wi-Fi network could see which profiles a user viewed and what they swiped on. Tinder fixed the flaw that year.
A British court jailed a man for ten years after he defrauded two women of more than £210,000. One of them had met him on Plenty of Fish.
A group used Grindr to lure men to a vacant apartment in Dallas, where they were robbed and assaulted. Federal courts handed down sentences of up to 23 years for hate crimes.
Hackers published data from about 36 million Ashley Madison accounts in 2015. Regulators in Canada and Australia found inadequate security, and the operator paid $1.6 million in a US settlement.
An attack on Friend Finder Networks in October 2016 exposed details of more than 412 million accounts, including about 339 million from AdultFriendFinder, with passwords stored in plain text or weak hashes.