Realistically the party with the most straight forward financial incentive to do this should be the first we suspect, and that would certainly be the platform itself.

>Or the more realistic, less tin-foil-hat reason, sophisticated chat bots are a real problem and dating platforms aren't immune to them.

I can tell you with absolute certainty from working in the industry a decade ago that the entire business model revolves around fake female profiles and dark UX patterns (lies) to trick lonely men. I can vividly remember that it was this big open secret that we all had to dance around all the time, pretending our product was legitimate and helping people. It's literally the only viable model for dating apps and sites; anyone who is actually successful at using them stops paying. I have no doubt the big apps are using their own LLM bots at this point.

Why are you giving these companies the benefit of the doubt when they've already shown that they do this in the past?