Hoodfishing: The Revenue Stream Dating Apps Won't Talk About

Match Group and Bumble have spent years refining geolocation algorithms to show you singles within a five-mile radius. Turns out, a growing number of users would rather browse New York from London, or scope out Los Angeles whilst still living in Manchester. 'Hoodfishing'—misrepresenting your actual location on dating apps—has joined catfishing and kittenfishing in the lexicon of platform deception, but calling it deception might miss the point entirely.

The practice works exactly as you'd expect. Users leverage premium features like Tinder Passport or Bumble's Travel Mode to change their visible location, sometimes to cities they plan to visit, sometimes to places they're considering for relocation, and sometimes to spots they have no intention of ever reaching. The motivations range from pragmatic to optimistic to outright misleading.

The product-market fit problem platforms monetised

This isn't a trust and safety crisis. It's a product-market fit problem that platforms have quietly monetised whilst hoping no one notices the contradiction. Dating apps built their entire value proposition on proximity—the promise that your next match could be in the same coffee shop tomorrow.

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If enough users are paying to sidestep the core mechanic of your product, that mechanic might be outdated.

What makes the trend commercially interesting is that platforms are already profiting from it. Tinder's Passport feature, bundled into Tinder Plus at $4.99–$14.99 monthly depending on age and region, allows unlimited location changes. Bumble's Travel Mode sits behind Bumble Premium at similar price points.

The companies don't break out location feature adoption in earnings disclosures, which means investors lack visibility on whether this represents a meaningful driver of premium conversion or a niche use case being amplified by social media. What we do know from MTCH's Q3 2024 results is that average revenue per paying user across its portfolio reached $17.93, up 7% year-over-year, with management citing 'à la carte feature adoption' as a contributor.

The remote work overlap nobody's quantifying

Platforms won't say it publicly, but this behaviour maps directly onto post-pandemic mobility patterns. Flexjobs reported that 65% of workers wanted to work remotely full-time as of mid-2023, whilst ONS data showed UK remote work stabilising at roughly 40% of the workforce doing at least hybrid arrangements. For singles no longer tethered to a single postcode for employment, the question 'where do you live?' has become as fluid as 'what do you do?'

One TikTok user, Valia Karakyriakou, documented changing her Hinge location from Charleston to New York, matching with someone, and eventually relocating. It's a neat anecdote and platforms would love for every location-hopper to have that outcome. But the same flexibility that enables a genuine long-distance connection also enables someone in Birmingham to swipe through Barcelona for entertainment, with no accountability when matches expect follow-through.

That's where the 'hoodfishing' framing gains traction, even if the term itself is overwrought. Catfishing involves identity fabrication—fake photos, fake names, fake lives. Kittenfishing is the softer version: outdated photos, inflated job titles, creative height reporting.

Hoodfishing exploits a feature the platform explicitly offers and charges for—calling it deceptive puts the ethical burden on users rather than interrogating why platforms designed the feature this way in the first place.

What trust and safety teams are actually worried about

Compliance teams at dating operators have bigger problems than users browsing from the wrong city. The UK Online Safety Act and EU Digital Services Act impose duties around user verification, harmful content, and transparency in algorithms. Location misrepresentation doesn't trigger any of those frameworks unless it facilitates fraud or child safety risks.

Where it does create friction is in user reporting and moderation workflows. If someone reports a match for misleading behaviour, and that behaviour is 'said they were in Leeds but they're actually in Lisbon', platforms face a judgment call. The user technically violated no terms of service if they paid for the feature.

The industry's broader trust crisis—fake profiles, romance scams, verification theatre—makes every new term like 'hoodfishing' land harder than it should. According to the Federal Trade Commission, romance scams cost Americans $1.3B in 2022, up from $547M in 2021. Dating platforms have responded with photo verification, ID checks, and AI-powered fake profile detection. But none of that prevents a verified user in Manchester from telling a match in Berlin that they're just around the corner.

The strategic play platforms won't admit

If this behaviour is genuinely growing—and the absence of disclosed data means we're relying on social media signals rather than hard metrics—platforms have three options. They can restrict location features to narrow use cases, which kills a revenue stream and annoys legitimate travellers. They can require users to disclose when they've changed location, which adds friction and likely reduces feature adoption. Or they can do nothing, continue monetising geographic flexibility, and accept that 'local' no longer means what it did in 2012.

The smart money is on option three with a light communications wrapper. Expect platforms to eventually frame this as 'empowering modern relationships' whilst quietly tracking whether location-hoppers convert to paying subscribers at higher rates than average users. If they do, the feature expands. If they don't, it stays buried in premium tiers where it generates revenue without becoming a headline user behaviour.

What operators should watch is whether this shifts user expectations permanently. If enough singles assume they can date across cities and countries as a baseline behaviour, the competitive dynamic tilts towards platforms with the best long-distance matching and communication tools. That's not necessarily good news for swipe-first apps optimised for quick meetups. It's potentially very good news for slower-burn platforms like Hinge or newer entrants positioning around intentionality and flexibility rather than proximity and speed.

The question isn't whether hoodfishing is ethical. It's whether the dating industry's foundational assumption—that the best match is the nearest match—still holds for a generation that no longer plans their lives around a single postcode.

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