This Valentine’s Day, fight romance scams with ID verification

Romance scams, or scams where bad actors leverage online dating to extract money from its victims, can happen year round but are especially notable on Valentine’s Day. Online daters express concern and would like to see more identity verification take place.

Cases of romance scams have grown exponentially in recent years. In 2022, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission received almost 70,000 cases totalling $1.3 billion in losses, while it saw less than 53,000 cases in 2020 and just over 11,000 in 2016. This may represent just a fraction of all cases, as only 59 percent of romance scam victims in 2023 reported the scams to law enforcement, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance.

Cryptocurrency was used in 34 percent of total losses from 2022.

According to the crypto exchange platform Binance, two percent of all reported scam cases were romance scams, with average reported losses reaching almost $14,000. A common scenario for romance scams is “pig butchering,” where a bad actor builds trust with its victim and lures them into a false sense of security by facilitating modest investments with small returns that victims can actually withdraw from.

Eventually, the victim will make a larger investment. When they try to recover the funds, they may be prompted to pay a fee or tax before they can receive it in a final attempt to extract more funds from the victim.

These scams prey on individuals letting their guard down in the hopes of finding companionship. Over half of online daters believe in love at first sight and hope to get married, according to findings from a TransUnion consumer survey.

As many as 68 percent of millennials are concerned about dating scams, and even higher rates of baby boomers (74 percent) and gen X’ers (77 percent) worry about scams. Interestingly, only 19 percent of gen Z is concerned about dating scams.

Most dating app users – 87 percent – believe dating platforms should verify information about users, while 71 percent want to see background checks. A majority of users, 60 percent, would be willing to pay for a background check for themselves or a prospective love interest.

Overall, 62 percent of users would be more willing to reach out to someone with a verified profile, while 77 percent of high-income earners would be more willing.

Leading dating apps have taken steps to verify users and prevent catfishes and those who are underaged. FaceTec‘s liveness detection is being used in Tinder’s photo verification as well as MeetMe’s face verification badge feature. Yoti‘s age estimation is keeping underaged users off of the Facebook Dating platform, while its identity verification is security the Muzz matchmaking app.

Article Topics

biometric liveness detection  |  biometrics  |  fraud prevention  |  identity verification  |  TransUnion