The ultimate Tinder photo? A photo of a bank balance

A person has put his bank balance as his Tinder display picture
A person has put his bank balance as his Tinder display picture



Forget carefully posing for the ultimate selfie in order attract the opposite sex to your Tinder profile: that's so 2012. Brandon, a 29-year-old from the US - who hasn't uploaded a biog to the dating app - has decided to cut to the chase, and posted a picture of his bank balance.

Brandon has certainly worked out a way to stand out from the crowd, as he currently has $127,343.46 in his account - which should catch the eye of any woman with a passion for financial security.

However, the feedback has been pretty negative on social media. One user commented: "Man has zero shame, posts picture of his $127,000-plus bank balance as his Tinder profile picture". Another added it was "pathetic whichever way you look at it" and another commented that the user had perfected "the art of picking up easy gold diggers."

There are those who argue that it's a sign of how cynical and shallow the dating app has become, where pictures are designed to attract the most possible matches - without coming close to match the reality.

Is this clever marketing?
However, there's another side to the argument. The dating site OKCupid has published statistics about responses to people's profiles on its site, and says that women tend to be judged primarily on looks. A 'good looking' woman will receive roughly four times as many messages as an 'average' one, and around 25 times as many as an 'ugly' woman.

Men, on the other hand, are likely to be judged partly on their looks, but unlike women they are also likely to be assessed on the basis of their wealth.

Back in February, the podcast Freakonomics, explored 'What You Don't Know About Online Dating'. It spoke to Stanford University economist Paul Oyer, who has spent much of his working life studying online markets - like the jobs markets or auction sites. He found himself back on the dating scene, and decided to explore the online dating market.

He found that a man who makes $250,000 a year gets contacted two and a half times as much as a man who makes $50,000 a year - even if they look the same and everything else on their profile is the same. Women, on the other hand, do not receive more messages if they are more wealthy.

With that in mind, assuming you have little else going for you other than the fact you have a ridiculous amount of money in your current account, perhaps it's the only sensible option to use that as your profile picture.

Brandon isn't dictating what women find attractive in a man, he's just taking advantage of it.

Is this the truth?
There are those who question whether this profile is real - and whether the bank balance is. Some point out that you'd be foolish to keep this sum of cash in a current account because you're unlikely to be earning significant interest on it.

However, it's no less likely to be true than anything else you read on these profiles. Catalina L. Toma, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that about 81% of people misrepresent their height, weight or age in their profiles - so why not inflate the other statistic that other people are interested in?

But what do you think? Is this real? And if it is, can it be the right approach?

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