Nearly three-quarters of U.S. online daters surveyed by The Harris Poll said they had suspected someone they matched with was not a real person, reflecting concern about deceptive profiles and automated accounts.
The survey was commissioned by World, a company promoting technology to verify that internet users are people, and its findings measure respondents' experiences and opinions rather than the actual share of fake dating profiles.
Singles favor confirmation that profiles belong to people
World's Nov. 2 report, highlighted in The Harris Poll's Nov. 5 newsletter, said 74% of online daters had questioned whether a match was real.
Among singles, 57% described fake or deceptive profiles as one of the biggest problems on dating apps, and 81% said they would be more likely to use an app if every profile were confirmed to belong to a person.
How the survey was conducted
Harris conducted the online U.S. survey Aug. 20-21, 2026, for World among 892 single adults age 18 and older, including 649 who had used dating apps.
The sponsor reported a Bayesian credible interval of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points at a 95% confidence level for the full sample and said uncertainty would be wider for subgroups.
No New York-specific results were provided, so the national findings cannot establish how often dating-app users in the Finger Lakes encounter deceptive profiles.
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