On Wednesday, December 20, 2023, a Texas man pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement on January 6, 2021, after being reported to the FBI by a woman who matched with him on the Bumble dating app. The man, Andrew Taake, 35, was arrested on July 23, 2021. Taake used bear spray and a "whip-like weapon" to attack Metropolitan Police Department officers at the US Capitol on January 6.
He admitted that he was involved — and even bragged about it — to a woman he matched with on Bumble. The woman, referred to as Witness 1, said that Taake revealed when communicating with her on Bumble that he spent about 30 minutes inside the US Capitol.
"Yeah the whole thing was wild! Were you near all the action?" the woman said in a message to Taake on Bumble after they matched. "Yes," Taake responded to the stranger. "From the very beginning. I was pepper sprayed, tear gassed, had flash bangs thrown at me, and hit with batons for peacefully standing there."
After the January 6 attack at the Capitol in 2021, the woman figured she might be able to help the FBI identify rioters from the comfort of her own home. On Bumble, you can enter your political beliefs so they are visible on your profile, and you can also adjust your settings so that Bumble only shows you potential matches with certain political beliefs. She set her political beliefs to "conservative" on the app.
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Once she started matching with some people who identified as conservative in the area, getting these strangers to confess that they were involved in the attack wasn't even that hard, the woman told NBC.
“They just wanted to regurgitate a lot of these ideas to somebody, and it seemed like I was a willing participant. It definitely didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting to get them to start talking about it," she told NBC.
The key to getting Taake to admit to the crime? Just acting interested in what the man had to say — a bit of "comically minimal ego-stroking." "Basically me being like 'Wow, so cool — then what? What else?' was pretty much all it took," the woman told NBC.
In addition to outright admitting to being at the Capitol on January 6 when sending messages on Bumble, Taake also sent photos of himself to the woman. Bumble also shows people's location when they're using the app, so the woman took a screenshot that showed that Taake was in Alexandria, Virginia, which is close to Washington, DC, despite his profile saying that he lived in Houston, Texas. All of this information helped the FBI identify and locate Taake.
The woman decided to look for January 6 rioters on Bumble mostly because she was upset. “I felt a bit of ‘civic duty,’ I guess, but truthfully, I was mostly just mad and thinking, f— these guys,” she told NBC.
Now that Taake has pleaded guilty and his sentencing will take place on March 26, 2024, the woman who turned him in has no regrets. "I regret exactly nothing lol," she told NBC.
"FINALLY. It’s been wild to see him still defend that attack all this time and makes me even more glad he was caught for it," she said.
Though some were surprised that a man would actually admit to committing a crime when speaking to a stranger on a dating app, many praised the woman for thinking of a creative way to help identify the rioters.
"Good story about someone fighting the good fight quite creatively!" one person wrote on X.
"Not all heroines wear capes," another wrote.
"I LOVE THIS WOMAN! NICELY DONE!" one X user exclaimed.
"It's like citizen FBI or something. Really quite brilliant," another X user wrote.
