Match Group Investor Sues Brass Over App Safety Worries (1)

A Match Group Inc. shareholder has accused current and former officers and directors of allowing predators to remain on dating platform Tinder and overstating its potential for growing usership.

Top brass hurt the dating app giant’s reputation and wallet in causing it to misrepresent its handling of safety issues and downplay challenges to gaining active users, a stockholder told the US District Court for the Central District of California. As a result, Match faces costly litigation, internal investigations, and corporate changes, according to a redacted complaint filed Monday.

These corporate caretakers “were motivated by their own self-interest in seeking stockholder approval of the Company’s 2024 Stock and Annual Incentive Plan” to boost their future compensation, the shareholder derivative action said.

The Pulitzer Center, in partnership with multiple news outlets, earlier this year published a story resulting from an 18-month investigative project looking into the Tinder and Hinge owner’s tracking of troubling users while it dithered over releasing a report on the data. People banned from Tinder, Match’s largest platform, for reports of sexual assault or other issues were able to rejoin or move to another of its apps relatively easily, the news outlets reported in February.

The shareholder’s suit shortly landed before Match released quarterly earnings results Tuesday, including a third quarter revenue forecast that topped estimates.

Shareholders have been hoping for signs of progress in Match’s multiyear turnaround plans while dating apps have struggled to gain Gen Z interest, including products enhanced by artificial intelligence and C-suite shakeups. The company announced a 13% workforce reduction in May under Match CEO Spencer Rascoff, who took over in February.

The shareholder derivative action in part echoes others focused on decreased usership filed before the 2025 investigative project came out. An proposed class action containing similar allegations about downplaying a user decline is pending in the same court against Match, former CEO Bernard Kim, and former president Gary Swidler.

User Decline

The Monday complaint alleged wrongdoing dating back to May 2, 2023, when Match highlighted Tinder’s potential to reactivate past users in a shareholder letter.

But on Nov. 6, 2024, Match disclosed a continued user downturn in the third quarter of 2024 and a dim quarterly revenue forecast. Its stock price fell almost 18% to close at $31.11 the next day—at the time its biggest single-day slide on record, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Usership “faltered because users had grown tired of meeting abusers and predators on the platform,” shareholder Ned Habedus alleged.

Levi & Korsinsky LLP represents Habedus, who seeks damages, restitution, and corporate governance reform for Match. He alleged securities law violations, breach of fiduciary duties, and unjust enrichment by current and former board members and executives including Kim and Swidler.

Neither Match nor the law firm representing it in a similar shareholder derivative action, Winston & Strawn LLP, immediately responded to emails seeking comment.

The case is Habedus v. Kim, C.D. Cal., No. 2:25-cv-07171, complaint filed 8/4/25.