Ember

Ember / Trust and safety

Every profile is real.

Every profile you can see on Ember has passed a government-ID check with a live selfie before it could appear. Here is how that works, and what happens when someone breaks the rules.

A man laughing with friends at a pub table
A woman on a rooftop at sunset looking calmly into the camera
100%

Every profile is verified

Every profile you can see on Ember passed a government-ID check with a live selfie before it could appear. There are no unverified profiles anywhere in Ember.

2 checks

A document and a face

A passport, national ID card or driving licence, then a live selfie matched to it, checked by Didit, an independent identity service.

Private

Your ID stays yours

Your ID is never shown to other members. They only see a verified badge, your age and your nationality.

Caught

Mismatches are held

A profile whose stated gender does not match its ID document is caught at verification and held for a person to review.

A person

Every report is read

You can report or block anyone from their profile or your conversation. Every report is read by a person, not left to a filter.

Permanent

Bans do not expire

Bans are permanent. If a banned member tries to verify a new account, the same face or document is flagged.

Read the full rules in our Safety Policy and Child Safety Standards. Questions or a concern: support@emberdatingapp.org.

Why Ember requires an ID check.

Most dating apps treat verification as an optional badge. Ember treats it as the door: nobody is visible until a government ID and a live selfie have been checked. That choice was not a hunch. The public record on online dating says the biggest problem is not a shortage of people. It is not knowing whether the person on the other side is real.

$1.14B

reported lost to romance scams in the US in 2023, across 64,003 reports, with a median loss of $2,000 (FTC)

52%

of people who have used a dating site or app say they have come across someone they think was trying to scam them (Pew Research Center)

48%

of US adults think online dating is a safe way to meet people, down from 53% in 2019 (Pew Research Center)

60%

of US adults say companies should require a check before someone can create a dating profile (Pew Research Center)

The losses are not shrinking. In the first nine months of 2025 the FTC logged 55,604 romance-scam complaints, up 22% on the same period a year earlier, with more than $1.16 billion reported lost. Behind almost every one of those cases is a profile that was never a real person, or a real person using someone else's face.

What members of other apps have reported

These are not Ember's claims about competitors. They are findings from regulators and independent surveys about the industry Ember set out to change.

In 2019 the US Federal Trade Commission sued Match Group, the owner of Match.com, Tinder, OkCupid and PlentyOfFish. The FTC alleged that Match.com sent "you caught his eye" notices to non-paying members from accounts the company had already flagged as likely fraudulent, to persuade them to subscribe, and that as many as 25 to 30 percent of accounts registering on Match.com each day were attempting scams. In 2025 Match Group agreed to pay $14 million to resolve the FTC's charges. (A settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing.)

In a Pew Research Center survey of 6,034 US adults, 52% of people who have used a dating site or app said they had encountered someone they believe was trying to scam them, rising to 63% of men under 50. A majority of women under 50 who have used these apps (56%) said they had been sent a sexually explicit message or image they did not ask for.

In the UK, a survey commissioned by UK Finance found that 27% of online daters said they had been "catfished" in the previous 12 months, and 21% had been asked for money, or had given money, to someone they met online. In McAfee's 2026 Valentine's research, one in four Americans said they had encountered a fake profile or an AI-generated bot on a dating or social app, 35% had spotted AI-generated or altered photos, and 15% said they had lost money to an online dating or romance scam.

What this means for how Ember is built

Ember is built for people meeting across cities, countries and languages. Distance makes every one of the problems above worse: you cannot bump into a mutual friend, and a face on a screen is often all you have. So the check comes first. Every profile you see has passed a government-ID check with a live selfie, a document and a face that match, before it could appear. ID photos are never shown to other members. Mismatches are held for a human, and bans do not expire.

The cost is real. Requiring an ID at the door turns some people away who would have signed up anywhere else. Ember accepts that trade, because the alternative is the experience half of online daters describe above, and that is exactly what Ember was built to end.

Sources

  1. Federal Trade Commission, romance-scam data spotlights and the Match Group case: 2023 losses of $1.14 billion across 64,003 reports; the 2019 complaint and the 2025 $14 million settlement.
  2. Global Dating Insights, reporting FTC Consumer Sentinel data: 55,604 complaints and $1.16 billion in losses, January to September 2025.
  3. Pew Research Center, Key findings about online dating in the U.S. (2023): survey of 6,034 US adults, July 2022.
  4. Courthouse News, FTC v. Match Group (2019): the "you caught his eye" allegations.
  5. UK Finance online dating survey: catfishing and money requests among UK online daters.
  6. McAfee, 2026 Valentine's Day research: fake profiles, AI-generated photos and losses among US adults.