It sounded at least somewhat promising when Tinder announced last year that it would start requiring photo verification for new users across the United States. Deploying a technology called "Face Check", Tinder would have every such user take a video selfie whose coordinates would be compared against pictures uploaded with the profile. While this is a partial improvement over the previous state of things where facial verification was generally optional, significant flaws are emerging.
Earlier this month, journalist Christophe Haubursin uploaded a video to YouTube that showed a strange phenomenon whereby a lot of Tinder profiles exhibited a similar pattern without obvious initial explanation. The first eight profile pictures would show one individual, but then the ninth picture would be an artistic version of a different individual (say, a face embedded in a painting or mural). A reverse image search would uncover that the first eight pictures were of a--conventionally good-looking--person with a different identity than that portrayed by the profile.
Haubursin began suspecting that Face Check was deeming "verified" profiles where as few as one of the pictures corresponded to the required video selfie. He tested this hypothesis himself and confirmed it: all a profile needed to render it verified was one (even stylized) picture that matched the video selfie, even if it was preceded by eight pictures of someone who looked completely different and who most people would assume was the actual holder of the profile. Haubursin also contacted some of the people with these types of profiles, and unsurprisingly at this point they were actually crypto scammers.
