A LONG-lost brother and sister have been reunited after finding each other on an app.

This would be a heartwarming story if the app wasn’t Tinder and if the siblings hadn’t spent time flirting before making the realisation.

Erik de Vries and Josephine Egberts were separated after their parents split up in 1999.

Following the messy breakup, de Vries moved with his father and twin brother to Belgium, leaving his little sister and mother in the Dutch city of Breda.

As the years passed, the siblings lost touch and did not known of each other’s whereabouts.

When de Vries moved back to the Netherlands to study, the 24-year-old joined Tinder in the hope of meeting a member of the fairer sex.

While using the dating app, he unknowingly swiped right on the profile of his sister.

“The first time I swiped her profile I had absolutely no idea,” de Vries told Mic.

“To be honest, it hasn’t been on my mind in the past few years after Maarten, my brother, and I finished a failed search for Josephine.”

After receiving a match, de Vries began putting the moves on the girl.

“In our first conversation I was actually flirting with her so the conversation was very superficial,” he said.

After a few conversations, details started emerging that made de Vries suspicious of his new match.

“I began to wonder to myself: it can’t be that I just had a Tinder match with my sister?” he told NL Times.

Fearing the worst, he backed off and did not contact the girl for a few days, but then curiosity got the better of him.

In the hope of discovering the truth, he got her to divulge stories about her past.

With too many matching details, he soon came to realise he was talking to his sister.

After sharing his discovery, the two planned to meet in a cafe in Tilburg.

“When I saw him, it was suddenly very clear,” she told datingsitekiezen.nl.

“It was so special to see my own blood brother again.”

The siblings’ other brother, Maarten, was also pleased with the bizarre turn of events.

“Erik and I obviously knew for years that we had a little sister. You obviously don’t think about her every day, but a few years ago we did undertake a vain quest to find her,” he told NL Times.

“It’s too crazy for words that you come into contact with each other again like this, but that also makes it very special. I am very happy that I can now still get to know my sister.”

The siblings plan on seeing much more of each other in future, just in a more conventional sense.

CORRECTION: The original picture used in the article has been reported as fake.