News
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists finds dating apps never alert users once a fraud profile they messaged is banned and removed.
According to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, dating apps already ban fraud accounts, but the people those accounts were talking to are never told. A scammer's profile disappears from the app. The conversation does not. It simply moves to text messages or another app, and the person on the other end has no idea anything has changed.
That gap is the mechanism the scam depends on. Removing a fraudulent account stops it operating inside the platform. It does nothing about the relationship the account already built, and romance scammers spend weeks or months building exactly that before any money is asked for. By the time a dating site catches the fraud and bans the profile, the victim and the scammer are usually already messaging off-platform, where the ban has no reach and no visibility.
Romance scams cost people in the US over 70,000 reports and $1.47 billion in 2025, according to Federal Trade Commission data cited by ICIJ. Losses also rose in the UK, South Korea, Australia and across Africa. The schemes accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when more seniors turned to dating sites for companionship and scammers followed them there.
The Romance Scam Prevention Act, signed by President Trump and backed by Senator Marsha Blackburn and Senator John Hickenlooper, targets that exact gap. It requires dating platforms to notify anyone who exchanged messages with a banned fraudulent account, generally within 24 hours of the ban. The notice has to name the banned account, say when the recipient last messaged with it, warn that the person may have used a false identity or tried to defraud them, tell them not to send cash or financial information, and give fraud-prevention and customer-service contact details.
Rep. David Valadao, who introduced the bill in the House, told ICIJ he wrote it after hearing from residents in his California district who had been defrauded through online dating. The law takes effect in a year and will be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general.
The notification only fires once a platform has already identified and banned the account. It does not reach a victim who moved the conversation off-app before any ban happened, which is a common pattern in these schemes. The protection is real, but it depends entirely on the platform catching the fraud first. ICIJ's earlier reporting found women on pay-per-interaction sites including AmoLatina, Dating.com and DateMyAge, owned by the Malta-based Social Discovery Group, who said they were emotionally manipulated and drained of money by profiles that were never verified the way they appeared to be.
Anyone who has been messaging someone on a dating app who later vanishes, changes story, or asks to move the conversation to text or another app, has a reason to stop and check who they are really talking to.
