I found Vedang Raina's face on a grey-tick verified Bumble profile. I reported it. Nothing happened. That one moment unlocked everything wrong with how Indian women experience dating apps. Vedang Raina is the actor who broke out in Zoya Akhtar's The Archies and went on to star opposite Alia Bhatt in Jigra. He is, by any metric, extremely good-looking, which is exactly why someone lifted his photos and put them on a dating profile as their own face. The profile had a grey tick. Photo verified.

That badge is supposed to be a trust signal: the platform awards it after a user submits a pose-matching selfie, confirming a real person is behind the account. What it cannot confirm is whether the profile photos are actually of you; it verifies consistency, not identity. I reported the profile. It disappeared from my feed, which is how these apps work. Once you report and swipe away, you don't see it again, regardless of whether any action was taken. I have no way of knowing if it was removed or just removed from my view. That ambiguity is the problem.

Here's how the gap gets exploited, and it requires no technical sophistication. A catfisher verifies first, using their own real photos. Badge granted, account trusted. Then they swap the photos. The grey tick stays. This tactic has become a central driver of dating app catfishing in India, creating a trust signal cleanly separated from what it claims to signal. The badge no longer means this person is who their photos say they are. It means someone, at some point, completed a verification step. Those look identical from the outside but are not.

It's also worth being explicit about who this overwhelmingly happens to. Research on Indian women's dating apps documents a consistent directional pattern: the deception, harassment, and entitlement flows predominantly from male accounts toward female ones [2,4].

The cost to the woman looking at a verified profile is real. She knows fake profiles exist and has developed instincts for spotting them. But the grey tick is designed to short-circuit exactly those instincts. It's the platform saying ‘we checked, so you don't have to.’ A profile with no badge at least leaves her guard up. A verified profile that turns out fraudulent doesn't just deceive her: it teaches her the badge means nothing, which defeats its purpose for everyone who verified honestly.

Research on fraudulent dating profiles finds this isn't lone actors improvising. It’s infrastructure including coordinated operations running multiple fake accounts with pre-written scripts designed to maintain plausibility for days or weeks, building trust before the real objectives are pursued: financial scams, data extraction, or escalation to explicit content. These operations aren't stumbling onto weaknesses. They're built around the specific, predictable gaps in what platforms check [1].

Platform disinvestment: Who pays the price?

The verification failure is not a technical accident. Platforms built on engagement metrics, swipe velocity, daily active users and match rates have a structural disincentive to implement aggressive identity verification. Stringent multi-tiered checks would introduce friction. Friction reduces the numbers that drive corporate valuations.

The cost of this disinvestment is transferred, silently, from the platform to the female user. She is expected to do the verification work herself. She cross-checks names on LinkedIn. She reverse-image-searches profile photos. She requests video calls before agreeing to meet. Research examining Indian women dating app safety shows how users must build a self-organised infrastructure out of collective necessity because the platforms have not [2]. The informal screening toolkit shared across communities like Reddit and women-only Facebook groups represents thousands of hours of unpaid labour that exists precisely because platform accountability does not.

There is also a specific harm built into the interface design itself. When a woman is sexually harassed, manipulated, or deceived and then unmatched, the entire chat history vanishes. She has no in-app mechanism to report with receipts. Women who have received threats, unsolicited explicit images, or been manipulated into sexual encounters have no platform-supported way to preserve evidence or warn others. The man's footprint disappears. Her experience becomes unprovable. The architecture that protects user privacy also protects the person who caused harm, and these protections are not equally distributed across whom they serve [2].

When a dating app becomes a matrimony app

Log into any Indian dating app forum on Reddit, women-only Facebook groups, Quora threads, and you will find the same complaint recurring: men on Tinder and Bumble, platforms explicitly marketed as dating apps, who behave as though they are on Shaadi.com. “Bonus points if you're from X community. Same community preferred. Family will be happier if you're X caste. Serious only. Vegetarian preferred.”

These phrases appear in profiles and opening messages with such frequency that women have documented them on multiple social media apps and in personal essays for years. Academic research has formalised what women have long reported anecdotally. The arrangement is structurally convenient for a specific kind of young urban man. He uses the dating app because his parents don't know about it. He wants the experiential validation of modern, autonomous dating. He also wants to ensure that his choices will survive parental scrutiny. So he inserts caste requirements directly into his bio, pre-screening matches for family approval before the family is ever consulted. The dating app becomes a self-curated arranged marriage portal minus the elders.

The hookup divergence: When men say relationship and mean sex

Beneath the matrimonial layer lies a contradictory current and the contradiction is what makes the experience particularly disorienting. A man selects "long-term relationship" in his preferences. He writes something earnest about looking for a real connection. Within days of matching, the conversation moves toward physical availability. Research on how patriarchal norms shape behaviour in digital dating contexts identifies a dynamic where apps offer urban men a private space perceived to be exempt from the standards of social respectability that govern public behaviour; in that space, traditional entitlement finds frictionless expression [4]. Women who have placed themselves on a public dating platform are, in the logic of this entitlement, implicitly signalling openness to sexual solicitation. Women know this. They adapt accordingly with more caution, more screening and, eventually, more withdrawal.

This entitlement extends beyond the initial mismatch of intentions. Once a match exists, many women describe a specific dynamic: men treating the match as conferring ongoing access to their time, their attention and their replies. A woman who takes longer to respond, gives shorter answers, or stops initiating is not read as disinterested; she is read as a problem to be solved. The signals women use to wind down an interaction that isn't working are frequently not read as signals at all. They are met with more messages, more persistence, more demands for explanation. The burden of closing a conversation that should never have continued falls entirely on her.

This divergence between stated and actual intent isn't random dishonesty. It is, as the third piece in this series argues, a structural incentive, and the system is designed in ways that make it rational.

The vagueness trap: "Let's see where it goes"

Alongside the bait-and-switch, a subtler pattern has emerged. Many women report encountering men whose stated intentions are deliberately unclear, not flexible, but hedged. Not looking for anything specific. Open to whatever happens. Let's see where things go. The vagueness isn't communication failure. Economists studying matching markets have a framework for understanding why strategic ambiguity is rational for one party when the system doesn't penalise it.

The new female skill: Vetting

Given the verification failures, the caste interrogations, the bait-and-switch and the strategic vagueness, Indian women have developed an informal parallel safety infrastructure. It is collectively maintained, freely shared and increasingly sophisticated.

Research involving focus group discussions with young Indian women identified a typology of dangerous men that women have developed to navigate the app ecosystem with: the "Trad" man, the weirdo, the predator and the deceptive [5]. Each type has recognisable behavioural signatures. Women have learned to read them.

The predator escalates quickly. He asks for photos within the first few messages, makes sexualised comments under the guise of banter and tests boundaries persistently. Women have learned that the test itself is informative. A light deflection met with pushback tells you what you need to know long before an in-person meeting.

Women have moved away from blunt questions like What are you looking for?, instead tending towards questions that reveal more: What brought you to the app? What did your last relationship teach you? How long have you been single? What would an ideal relationship look like for you? What would make you delete this app?

The goal is not to catch someone lying. The goal is to see whether their answers demonstrate self-awareness, consistency and emotional availability. Women also report paying close attention to behaviour rather than declarations: Does he disappear for days? Does he only text late at night? Does every conversation become sexual? Does he ask questions back? Does he make concrete plans?

For identity verification, women cross-reference names, workplaces and educational histories across LinkedIn and social media before meeting in person. A man with a verifiable professional footprint has a greater stake in maintaining his reputation, which functions as a soft accountability mechanism in the absence of formal platform consequences.

Women also systematically delay migrating off the app's native chat. In India, sharing a WhatsApp number exposes your personal phone number, which links directly to UPI, the payment system most Indians use daily, meaning a phone number can connect a stranger to your payment identity and sometimes your address. Staying on the app's native messaging tests patience: men seeking quick access almost invariably disengage when denied rapid entry to a woman's personal digital presence [2].

Each of these strategies is rational. Together, they amount to a significant and invisible burden that men using the same apps do not carry.

The psychological cost: When harassment follows you home

The experience does not stay inside the app. Research documents detail how the weight of these encounters, the unsolicited explicit images, the caste interrogations, the deceptions and the entitlement produce not a series of isolated bad experiences but sustained psychological harm [6]. Women reported pervasive hypervigilance that extended beyond their phone screens, into their sense of physical safety and social trust. The harassment did not feel contained by the app's interface. It informed how they walked home. It shaped how they thought about meeting strangers. What this produces is something the next piece examines directly: a woman who is exhausted, correctly reading a system that has failed her and about to be told that her anger about it is the problem.

Platform accountability: The missing architecture

The platforms profit from this ecosystem. They have not fixed it. Bumble has introduced features like Deception Detector, which the company reports has reduced member reports of spam, scams and fake profiles by 45% [7]. The harms Indian women most consistently describe are not always fake profiles. They are everyday harassment from real, verified accounts, delivered through official channels, with no effective consequence architecture.

When a woman reports a profile for sending unsolicited sexual images, the typical response is an automated acknowledgment. She rarely learns what action, if any, was taken. There is no mechanism for women to warn each other across platforms. There is no consequence that makes harassment structurally costly for those who perpetrate it.

India's existing legal infrastructure offers limited additional remedy. The Information Technology Act is largely unequipped to handle digital catfishing, emotional fraud, or what researchers have described as algorithmic negligence by global platforms [2]. Because these companies position themselves as intermediaries rather than publishers with a duty to care, they successfully evade liability for the systemic failures of their own safety features.

India's Aadhaar identity system and DigiLocker already provide mechanisms for real-name, government-verified identity confirmation that platforms could use to offer a meaningfully higher standard of verification than the current selfie-matching system, one that confirms who someone actually is. A consequence architecture that tracks and escalates reports against individual accounts, rather than processing each in isolation, would make repeat harassment substantially harder to sustain.

Some platforms are beginning to experiment with what this could look like in practice. Vlncy, an Indian dating app, requires government ID verification from every user before they can access the platform, and asks a set of screening questions about relationship intentions up front, not as a personality quiz, but as a basic filter for whether someone is in the headspace for intentional dating at all. It is a small thing. It is also more than most apps do.

The argument is not that every platform needs to replicate one model. It is that ID verification and a minimum stated-intentions check should be the floor, not a differentiator. Right now, these are treated as features that a niche app introduces for a specific audience. Vetting should be incorporated into baseline infrastructure, the same way age verification is treated as non-negotiable in other digital contexts. A platform that allows anonymous, unverified access to women's time, attention and personal safety, and then monetises the resulting engagement, is not a neutral intermediary. It is making a choice about whose convenience it prioritises.

The interface updates. The logic remains.

Indian women have not stopped using dating apps. They have gotten more strategic, more guarded and more tired. Women have, in the absence of adequate platform protection or legal recourse, built their own safety infrastructure from scratch and continuously updated it as the methods of deception evolve.

Eva Illouz argues that contemporary dating increasingly rewards the performance of openness without the commitment of transparency [8]. In the Indian context, the ambiguity is not only a product of individualised consumer culture but also a product of men navigating between two contradictory demands: the modern aspiration for autonomous romantic choice and the family-imposed requirement of endogamous, caste-appropriate marriage. Dating apps become the space where these contradictions are managed. The cost of that management is downloaded, quietly and consistently, onto women.

Until platforms take structural responsibility not just for the romantic aspirations they monetise, but for the safety of the people who use them, Indian women will keep maintaining their folk taxonomies of dangerous men, sharing screenshots of caste-fishing messages and wondering whether the man on the other side of a verified profile is actually who the badge claims him to be: real enough to pass the algorithm, false enough to cause harm.

References:

1. Hu Y, Wang H, Zhou Y, et al. Dating with scambots: understanding the ecosystem of fraudulent dating applications. IEEE Trans Dependable Secure Comput. 2019;18(3):1033–1050.

2. Rajan B. Harassment and abuse of Indian women on dating apps: a narrative review of literature on technology-facilitated violence against women and dating app use. Humanit Soc Sci Commun. 2025;12(1):55. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-04286-6

3. Dattani K. Data-bility: endogamous social intimacies on dating apps in Mumbai. Trans Inst Br Geogr. 2024. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12687

4. Rajan B. 'Men-first': Indian women's experiences of male entitlement and intrusion on Bumble. Commun Rev. 2026. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2026.2661479

5. Rajan B. Fearing the "known unknown" men: a study on red flags and safety work on dating apps in India. Womens Stud Commun. 2025 [ahead of print]. https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2025.2489606

6. Rajan B. "It follows you home": emotional and psychological impacts of dating-app harassment on Indian women. Womens Stud Int Forum. 2025;112:103129.

7. Bumble Inc. Deception Detector feature announcement. February 6, 2024. [Company-reported figure: 45% reduction in member reports of spam/scam/fake accounts.] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240206911584/en/Bumble

8. Illouz E. Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation. Cambridge: Polity Press; 2012.