By Epiphanus Obia
Frank Odi-Njoku, a popular Nigerian baritone singer, acknowledged that he had never opened a Tinder account in his life. Yet, somehow, a profile bearing his photographs, going by the name “Ikenna” and listing an age of 31, was live on the dating app, complete with a fabricated bio about enjoying “peace, quiet, and calm conversation” and demanding honesty from prospective matches.
He found out the way most victims of this kind of impersonation do: someone sent him a screenshot. What followed was not just embarrassment, but genuine fear. In a disclaimer video he posted on July 24th alongside a “SCAM ALERTTT” message on his official Facebook page, Frank explained that he had heard enough stories about Tinder-enabled crime—men and women lured to meet a match, only to be robbed, assaulted, or worse—to worry that his stolen identity could put an unsuspecting stranger, or himself, in danger. He appealed to anyone who came across the fake profile to report or block it, said he was trying to find a way to get Tinder to take it down, and admitted, in his own words, that he was scared.
Frank is not an isolated case. A search through public complaints on X turns up at least six other Nigerian influencers and celebrities who, in the past five years, have had to publicly disown Tinder profiles built from their stolen photographs; among them, an X influencer, Lobistars, posted that a profile calling itself “Lobistars, 42” was fake; the entertainer TIFE was forced to clarify that he was “not Chris” and would not “toast” anyone claiming otherwise; Justin Ugonna discovered his pictures attached to a profile named “Brainy, 29”; chess coach and philanthropist Tunde Onakoya, whose statement that he had “never had a Tinder account” and was “definitely not 5 ft 8” drew over 162,000 views; and Akin Alabi, who has had to make the same disclaimer twice, months apart, once over a profile called “Ralph, 23” and again over one claiming to be a 35-year-old cat owner and humanitarian worker.
In each case, the pattern is identical: a stranger builds a profile around a real Nigerian’s face, invents a name, an age, and a backstory, and uses it to swipe on unsuspecting users, some of whom go on to believe they are in a genuine relationship. The victims are left to do the policing themselves, on a platform that offers them no obvious route to a swift takedown.
Testing the safety net
Tinder’s answer to this problem, at least in its public messaging, is Face Check: a verification system its parent company, Match Group, has promoted as requiring new users in the United States, Canada, Australia, India, and several other markets to complete a “liveness check” (a short video selfie) before they can finish setting up an account. Match Group has said the feature has cut the number of users exposed to “bad actors” by more than 60 percent in markets where it operates, and that it plans to extend it further across its portfolio of apps in 2026.
To see how that safety promise holds up for a Nigerian user, this reporter opened a Tinder account to test it directly. The signup process asked for nothing more than a human-verification puzzle, a phone number confirmed by a one-time password, basic profile details, and two to four photographs. No face scan or liveness check was requested at any point during setup.
Roughly 15 to 20 hours later, the account had been automatically flagged: a screen read “We need to know it’s you,” explaining that the profile had been “temporarily locked due to suspicious activity” and hidden from other users. To be reinstated, the notice said, the account would need to complete a video selfie, described as necessary to confirm a “real, live person” and, where eligible, to earn a photo verification badge.
In practice, though, clicking through to the actual verification step (conducted on Tinder’s web version rather than the app) produced something narrower: an instruction to upload a recorded video, not to record the live video selfie the company describes in its own promotional material. Whether this is a web-specific limitation, a Nigeria-specific rollout gap, or simply an inconsistency in how the feature is being deployed is unclear, but the discrepancy between the marketed safeguard and the one actually presented is difficult to ignore.
A gap with real consequences
The stakes of that gap are not abstract. In the United Kingdom earlier this year, a 19-year-old student from Aberdare in Wales, Sasha-Jay Davies, was awarded £10,000 in compensation after a four-year campaign in which a woman used Davies’ photographs, sometimes alongside AI-generated images, to run fake profiles across Tinder, Hinge, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and SoundCloud under invented names. The impersonation, which began when Davies was just 16, drew more than 100,000 followers and led to men approaching her in public believing they were in genuine relationships with her. She told the BBC she had become afraid to leave her house.
Davies had legal recourse: a High Court order, a Tomlin agreement, and a five-figure settlement. Frank and the other Nigerians named in this piece have, so far, had only their own social media accounts and the hope that enough people see their disclaimers before swapping their account rights.
For now, Tinder’s headline safety feature is live in markets across North America, Australasia, South Asia, and parts of Latin America and the Middle East. Nigeria, home to one of the platform’s larger African user bases, is not among the countries the company has named. Until that changes, or until the verification a Nigerian user actually encounters matches the one the company advertises, the burden of catching impersonation looks set to remain where it currently sits: with people like Frank, filming disclaimer videos and hoping someone believes them before it is too late.