[mh0pe]

Prior eng from Tinder/Match Group here. Opinions are my own, not my previous or current employers'. I haven't worked there for a few years but I can tell you with strong confidence that doing something like this would throw public metrics out of whack, and would cause massive brand damage across the Match Group family. They take security pretty seriously and this kind of initiative is very unlikely.

What's far more likely as a source of random bot traffic is that a click farm is using real devices (it can take a bit to get abuse banhammered), and I'm guessing you're in a major metro area where a few bots are more likely to sneak under the radar. Elo[1] is deprecated these days, but much of ranking leans on 2nd- and 3rd-degree evaluation of both yourself and the other person, implying those users are generally evaluated as real and not reported much. Bouncer[2] helps the engine take this kind of data into account.

All this is to say if someone seems suspicious, leverage that Safety Toolkit. But Tinder seeding in fake users themselves would be quite visible externally after a quarter, cause a big spike in reports over time, damage user retention, daily sessions, and stickiness massively, all of which negatively impact ARPPU and paid conversion rates. Throwing tons of standard KPIs isn't worth a fractional boost in sales with the kind of revenue and growth factors[3] they're driving.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/15/18267772/tinder-elo-score...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/03/tinder-tests-limited-right...

[3] https://ir.mtch.com/overview/default.aspx