I'm amused by your use of the word "traditional" to describe online dating services. From my point of view, that's still newfangled. Get off my lawn!
My wife and I were actually one of the first online romances. Back in the days of 300bps dialup, there was a service in Houston that had a bunch of phone lines running into multiple modems on a single computer, so a smallish group (probably 16; I don't remember) of people could chat together. One of the oldies radio stations advertised it, so I plugged the phone number into my Hayes terminal program and met a few people including a lady type person (yes, a GIRL who owned a computer... even though it was just a TRS-80). Within three days of chatting we had started to discuss how many children we would like in our hypothetical family, and we had already started seriously considering marriage before we ever met in person. We married five weeks after we met online.
That's what is missing from these algorithms. What about those who are attracted by some other factor than physical appearance? What attracted me and Mrs. Esophagus was our shared values and interests. Which is good, since I was rail-thin, covered in zits, and, like any good computer geek, only heard of personal hygiene as a long-forgotten myth from distant lands.
As for "how do we even know these profiles are real?" -- limit yourself to people you can meet in person, which may mean restricting your search to people within your own city or less than {x} miles away. Don't commit time, money, or yourself until you have both had a chance to do a little snooping by way of facebook pages, google searches, whatever. Hint: If the facebook page appeared only after you make contact, you are right to be suspicious.