Something very weird is happening on Tinder
Some Tinder users have started noticing a strange new kind of profile. Swipe through the photos and everything looks normal — until you hit the last one.
That's where things get weird. The final photo always shows a face that doesn't quite fit: sometimes silly, sometimes unsettling. I went down a rabbit hole of stolen identities and catfishing schemes to figure out what's really going on.
@DaleOh @stux tl;dw Tinder puts a camera-icon badge on profiles that have a "verified selfie", which is a system that asks the profile creator to perform video of their face, which is then matched to the uploaded Tinder photos. Tinder gives you the verification badge if any one photo matches. To make it less obvious that the one photo is the actual person, it's an AI-morph of something else, like a renaissance portrait.
start video at 9:00 to skip the dead-end speculations.
Any sort of verification can be used to trick people into trusting the thing too much.
In the end it's just a means to enabling scams and abuse and the platforms profit from it through micropayments and attention/time spent.
There used to be a scam on X where scammers verified accounts for well-known public figures and posted something like: "send BTC to this address and i will give back to you 2x".
stux⚡️
Phillip 
Däle, Son of Beige
felix (grayscale) 🐺
Travis Scott
propapanda 
KarakSindru (He/Him)
Kay Ohtie 🔜 FWA
小津 Ozu