POF Delete Account: How to Remove Your Plenty of Fish Profile

To delete your POF account, cancel any paid upgrade first (through the App Store or Google Play if you bought it there), remove your photos and profile text, then open settings in the POF app or on the website and choose the option to delete your account. Hiding your profile is a different option that keeps everything. Uninstalling the app doesn’t delete anything.

Plenty of Fish has been around for a long time, so many people have a POF profile they set up years ago and forgot about. Old profiles are the ones most likely to have been screenshotted or copied to other sites. This guide covers how to delete POF properly and how to check for copies that outlived your account. If you only remember one thing, delete POF from the account settings, not just from your phone.

Hide, delete or uninstall?

Option	What it does	What stays
Uninstall the app	Removes POF from your phone	Your profile, messages and any subscription
Hide your profile	Stops your profile appearing to others, where POF offers it	Your account, photos and messages, ready to come back
Delete your account	Removes your profile from POF	App store billing, records POF keeps, and copies others made

If you just want a break, hiding may be enough. If you’ve met someone, are cleaning up your online presence, or never want to see the app again, delete.

Before you delete your POF account

1. Cancel paid upgrades. If you pay for a premium membership, cancel it where you bought it. For iPhone, use your Apple subscriptions settings. For Android, use the Google Play subscriptions page. If you paid POF directly, check the upgrade or billing section of your account. Deleting the account alone may not cancel a subscription.
2. Download your data if you want it. POF is part of Match Group, and its privacy policy explains how to request a copy of your information. Request it before deleting if there’s anything you’d like to keep.
3. Save evidence if you’re leaving because of someone. If a match harassed, threatened or tried to scam you, screenshot their profile and messages, and report them in the app first. Our guide on romance scams explains where else to report.
4. Remove photos and profile text. Delete each photo and clear your bio and profile answers. POF profiles often contain a lot of personal detail, such as job, height, children, religion and more, so clearing them limits what’s visible in the meantime.
5. Check your username. If your POF username is one you use elsewhere, it links your accounts. Change it there, or retire it.

How to delete your POF account

POF updates its menus from time to time, so these steps are general. Its help center has the current wording.

1. Sign in to the POF app or website.
2. Open your profile menu and go to settings.
3. Look for the account section and the option to delete your account.
4. POF may offer to hide your profile instead. If you want to leave, continue with deletion.
5. Answer any questions, confirm with your password if asked, and finish. Keep any confirmation you receive.

Afterward, avoid logging in again with the same details. On many dating apps, signing in again can restore or restart an account. If you’re locked out, use POF’s official password reset and help center. Nobody outside the company can delete your account for you, and people offering to do it for a fee are best avoided.

If you’re wondering how to delete a POF account you can no longer access at all, for example because the email address is gone, contact POF through its help center, explain the situation and be ready to prove the account is yours.

Clearing up after you delete POF

Once the account is gone, a few loose ends are worth tidying, especially if you used POF for a long time.

• Emails and notifications. Old match and promotional emails can keep arriving for a while from marketing lists. Unsubscribe using the link in the email, and delete old POF messages from your inbox if others can see it.
• Card statements. Check your next statement to make sure no renewal went through. If one did, contact the app store or POF billing support with your cancellation confirmation.
• Linked logins. If you signed up with another account, remove POF from that account’s list of connected apps.
• Photos on your phone. If you kept photos you took specifically for your profile, decide whether you still want them in your camera roll or cloud backup.
• Other old profiles. People who were on POF years ago often had profiles on other sites of the same era. Search your old usernames and email address to find any you’ve forgotten. If one of them was eHarmony, our guide to deleting an eHarmony account covers it.

Doing this once, carefully, is usually enough. After that, an occasional search of your name and photos will tell you if anything new has appeared. Our guide on how to clean up your digital footprint turns this into a simple routine.

If someone else made a POF profile with your photos

Sometimes the profile you want gone isn’t yours at all. Scammers copy real people’s photos to build fake dating profiles. If you find one using your pictures, report it to POF as a fake or impersonating profile, and keep a screenshot of the profile and its username. If you don’t have an account yourself, check POF’s help center for a way to report it. Our guide on catfishing explains why this happens and how to protect your images from being reused.

What POF may keep

Deleting removes your profile from the site and app, but POF, like other Match Group apps, typically keeps some data for a period afterward for safety, fraud prevention, legal and billing purposes. Its privacy policy describes what’s kept and why in general terms. If you also have a profile on Match itself, see how to delete a Match account.

If you’re in the EU or UK, GDPR lets you ask for a copy of your data and, in many cases, its deletion. Some US states give similar rights. See our guide on data subject access requests for how to ask.

Match Group runs several dating brands. Your POF account is separate from any account on Tinder or Hinge, so if you used those too, each one needs deleting. Our guides cover how to delete a Tinder account and delete a Hinge account.

Find copies of an old POF profile

Older dating profiles are sometimes copied by third-party sites that collect photos and profile text. Deleting your POF account doesn’t touch those.

1. Search your photos. Use a reverse image search on your main profile photos, with more than one tool.
2. Search your username. Put your old POF username in quotation marks and search it on Google and Bing.
3. Request removal. Use the copying site’s removal or contact form. If you took the photos yourself, a copyright takedown notice may help.
4. Refresh search results. If the page is gone but still showing in search, ask Google to refresh the result once the source page is removed.

If intimate images you shared with a match have been posted or passed around without your consent, see our guide on removing intimate images shared without consent and our help resources page for support. If someone is threatening to share images unless you pay, don’t pay, and read our sextortion help guide.

A worked example

This scenario is illustrative, not a real client. Marcus set up a POF profile about a decade ago, forgot about it, and recently found his old photo showing up on a profile-aggregator site when he searched his username.

1. He resets his POF password through the official route and signs in.
2. He finds no active subscription, so he goes straight to his profile and deletes the photos and bio.
3. He deletes the account from settings.
4. He contacts the aggregator site through its removal form, pointing out that the original profile no longer exists.
5. When the copy comes down, he asks Google to refresh the outdated result. He also retires the username he’d reused on a gaming forum.

Common mistakes

• Hiding and assuming it’s deleted. A hidden profile still exists and can come back.
• Canceling nothing. Deleting your account doesn’t stop an app store subscription.
• Logging in “just once”. This can restore the account.
• Ignoring copies. Old profiles are the likeliest to have been scraped. Search for them after you delete.

If old dating content keeps appearing in searches for your name, our content removal service can help with takedown requests where the rules allow, and we’ll tell you plainly when they don’t.

Frequently asked questions

How to delete POF account on the app?

Open the app, go to your profile menu and settings, and choose the option to delete your account. Cancel any subscription through the app store first.

Does uninstalling POF delete my account?

No. Uninstalling only removes the app. Your profile stays until you delete the account in settings.

Can I delete my POF account on the website?

Yes. Sign in on the POF website, open settings and use the delete account option.

Is hiding my POF profile the same as deleting it?

No. Hiding keeps your account and photos so you can come back later. Deleting removes the profile from POF.