The 2023 Norton Cyber Safety Insights Report, found that more than one in every four adults has fallen victim to an online dating or romance scam globally. As we see a significant rise in romance and investment scams around the world, we are also seeing a rise in people suffering significant financial losses, heart break, and in some devastating cases, loss of life.

Having never used dating apps, I wanted to try my own investigation and understand how the scams are taking place on dating apps, versus, the scams that take place on platforms such as Facebook or Instagram.

According to TSB, over 80% of scams originate from Facebook, therefore Meta is both a transient communication channel and an originating channel for the scammers. However, with this in mind, I wanted to delve deeper into the world of dating…and find out how romance scams can start on dating apps.

Looking for verified love

The first thing I did in my quest to find the scammers was to create a profile in a dating app. Like many looking for love, I entered my likes, some simple information about me such as my age, location, country of birth and what I am looking for. As someone new to dating apps, I was unaware of the significant difference between verified accounts and unverified accounts.

A verified account is one where identification of that person has been confirmed through a specific process. They would have provided a photograph of their face within specific boundaries, taken through liveness detection (such as say a specific sentence, turn your head a particular way, blink, make a specific pose) and so forth, which would have then been verified by facial recognition.

The accounts that are verified are signalled by a blue shield. An unverified account simply needs an email address, or phone number to validate the device is receiving access to the account created. This therefore means anyone with contact details can impersonate someone on the app, scraping photos from an influencer and putting down their hobbies as an example.

I, as I imagine many are, was unaware of this fatal flaw. It must be said that verification is important as it shows that someone is who they say they are.

How swiping almost got me scammed

After being encouraged to “swipe left” and “swipe right” to determine people that I liked on the dating app, I started to get matches from people that apparently liked me back.
As someone completely new to using dating apps, it became apparent to me that all of those likes and all the people talking to me were criminals impersonating someone else. Maybe this is because I work in fraud and I speak on romance scams every day, but what also struck me were the commonalities between the profiles were as follows:

• An attractive person
• Typically an influencer, which when I verified by a reverse image search, found to be true
• Typically 35 years old
• Typically called Olivia or Julia
• Quite new to the app

In addition, every conversation started with them being new to the city or living in another city and wanting to meet someone to have fun and explore. And very, very quickly one of the conversations turned to an investment opportunity.

As I understand it, one Olivia who I was talking to, was buying a house. And she wanted investment. I quickly asked more questions, which led her to leaving the conversation and blocking me.

Scammed by multiple Olivia’s

Over the coming hours a few more Olivia’s connected to me, all of them with similar photographs, age and profile data. To which I replied to them – when they asked what I did for a living – that I am an expert in financial crime prevention. Now, either this job is an incredible turn off when dating, or I had met many criminals and their fake identities.

So having subscribed to a dating app, where I had spent hours completing a profile, swiping left and right, I was gifted with a conversation with five criminals and no genuine people. Really disheartening and potentially life shattering for innocent people searching for love.

It dawned on my why, one of the key features of dating sites is to match new people. The algorithms are rewarded for driving up views and amplifying new customers of the dating app. This is deliberate to secure a longer-term customer and potentially a subscription.

Unfortunately, this has the unintended outcome of amplifying the new customer to the dating site and the experienced social engineer’s new profile. Also, the new customer is given a status symbol “new to site”. This means that when you’re most vulnerable and learning about dating apps / online dating you’re more likely to match with a criminal who knows you are new to the site.

Given this outcome, it got me wondering why more is not done by dating apps to stop fraudsters using their platforms to scam those just looking for love.

So, what have I learnt?

If you or anyone you know is using a dating app, be incredibly cautious. If you connect with someone who is unverified, consider that they could be anyone on the other side of a computer. And finally, sometimes when looking for love, it may be too good to be true, if an attractive ‘Olivia’ likes you and starts telling you about her plans to move, then think twice. It might not be love.

Most dating apps do not apply your filters verbatim; they use poetic license to find people close to what you want. That may mean that you think you are filtering out certain people, however you are matched with them. So even if not a scam, it might not be an appropriate match or your life long partner to be.

Good luck to all and I wish you success and love!