News
Why video calls no longer prove a dating match is real
Online Dating and Discovery Association's Simon Newman told a podcast that scam compounds run manufactured romances against many victims at once.
Key facts
UK romance fraud costs victims more than £106 million a year Average loss per UK victim is £11,000 Many romance fraud cases go unreported Deepfakes and face-swapping now defeat video-call verification
Reported by
Online Dating and Discovery AssociationRomance fraud works by building a relationship that feels real to the person inside it, even though every part of it was manufactured for profit. The online dating industry discussed the mechanics of this on Sumsub's What the Fraud? podcast, with ODDA chief executive Simon Newman and Anna Rowe of Catch The Catfish and LoveSaid. If a new online match asks to move off the dating platform quickly, treat that as a reason to slow down, not speed up.
A video call used to be the test people relied on to check someone was who they claimed. That test no longer holds. Deepfakes and face-swapping technology let a scammer put a convincing, moving face on the call, which means the old advice to "ask for a video call" no longer settles the question of identity.
How the manufactured relationship gets built
The podcast episode, hosted by investigative journalist Vicky Baker, features ODDA chief executive Simon Newman alongside Anna Rowe, founder of Catch The Catfish and co-founder of LoveSaid. Both describe romance fraud as a relationship that is manufactured on the scammer's side but experienced as real by the victim. That gap is the mechanism. The scammer uses love bombing to create intensity early, then trauma bonding to keep the victim attached even once suspicion creeps in. These are psychological tactics, not persuasion in the ordinary sense; they work on cognitive biases the victim is not aware are being used against them.
Romance fraud now operates at scale through organised criminal groups, including through what the episode calls vast scam compounds. That detail matters because it reframes the scam. It is not one person spinning a story to one victim. It is an operation running the same manufactured relationship against many people at once, with the emotional manipulation refined and repeated rather than improvised.
The financial cost in the UK is put at more than one hundred and six million pounds a year, with victims losing an average of eleven thousand pounds each. Many cases go unreported, which means the real total is higher than the figure captured. The sequence shows where detection should sit: not at the point of payment, when money has already moved, but earlier, at the point where the relationship is being built and the victim has not yet been asked for anything.
What the episode leaves for others to act on
Newman and Rowe both call for a joined-up, government-led response, bringing dating platforms, regulators and other organisations together rather than leaving each to act alone. They also raise whether the UK's Online Safety Act goes far enough to address fraud tactics that keep evolving. The episode sets out the problem and the gap in current protection; it does not set out what the government-led response would contain.
Check a message
Received something like this? Paste it into the Flggd message checker before you reply, click or pay.
Related stories
What to do
- Stop and slow down if a match pushes to leave the dating platform or avoid verification.
- Check a person's identity independently rather than relying on a single video call.
- Report suspected romance fraud rather than staying silent about it.
