Romance scams where scammers convince people that they are in love with them and once they have gained their trust and an emotional connection ask under a variety of pretenses for money has only gotten worse with AI being able to be used for scammers to appear as anyone they wish in videos or change their voice through AI voice cloning to appear legitimate.  I have written many times about scammers posing as celebrities to scam people out of their money and this type of scam too has gotten worse with AI.

Senators Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee have sent a letter to Match Group which owns the dating apps Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid a letter requesting its records related to how scammers are using their platforms and what the company is doing to prevent romance scams.  In particular the senators expressed concerns about how the algorithms used by Tinder, Hinge and OKCupid contribute to romance scams. The senators requested the documentation be provided to them by October 15th.

TIPS

I will follow up on this story when the Match Group provides the requested information to senators Hassan and Blackburn, but meanwhile there are various red flags to help you identify romance scams.  I describe many of them in detail in my book “The Truth About Avoiding Scams.” The most important thing to remember is to always be skeptical of anyone who falls in love with you quickly online without ever meeting you and early into the relationship who then asks you to send money to assist them with a wide range of phony emergencies.

Here are a few other things to look for to help identify an online romance scam.  Often their profile picture is stolen from a modeling website on the Internet.  If the picture looks too professional and the person looks too much like a model, you should be wary. You also can check on the legitimacy of photographs or video images by seeing if they have been used elsewhere by doing a reverse image search using google.images.com or websites such as tineye.com.

Scammers often will ask to move your conversation to WhatsApp, email or text quickly, but you are better off maintaining your communication on the dating app.  You can also suggest a video call early in the relationship.  Last year a scam group called the “Yahoo Boys” based in Nigeria began using artificial intelligence to change their facial features in Zoom videos to appear to be the person they are posing as in the romance scam. They also can use AI to change their voice and accent to sound legitimate and while doing a video conference with a romance scammer in the past was a good way to see if the person was actually who they claimed to be, now scammers using this technology will be very difficult to recognize as scammers, however, not all romance scammers are using this sophisticated technology so it is still helpful to request a video call.

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