A verification badge is only worth what the checks behind it are. Here is what ours actually does, and where it stops.
Identity
Name matched against government-issued identification. This catches the person using a false name, which is the foundation everything else rests on: without it, no later check means anything.
Contact
A working email address and a working phone number, each confirmed. Modest on its own. Its value is friction — it makes the throwaway account that disappears after one conversation meaningfully harder to create.
Likeness
A live selfie compared against the photos on the profile. This is the check that catches the most common deception on any matching platform, which is not a false name but someone else’s face.
What none of it catches
This is the part worth reading twice. Verification confirms that someone is who they say they are. It says nothing about whether they will be a good co-parent, whether they have thought seriously about the commitment, whether they will keep to what they agreed, or whether their circumstances are what they described.
It is a check on identity, not on character. A verified profile is a starting point for your own judgement, never a substitute for it.
How to use it
Treat verification as the minimum, not the reassurance. The questions that matter — about money, contact, law, and what happens if things change — are still yours to ask, and the answers are still yours to weigh.