5 Ways Dating Platforms Can Mitigate GenAI Romance Scams
AI is rewriting the playbook for online fraud, and dating platforms aren’t immune. Romance scams have always relied on misrepresentation and emotional manipulation. Generative AI (GenAI) supercharges the speed, scale, and believability of those tactics.
● A single fraudster can create dozens of fake accounts in minutes
● AI-generated photos and documents are more realistic than ever
● Tailored messages can mimic a real conversation
For online dating services, this creates a growing challenge: How do you preserve trust and safety on your platform without adding so much friction that it turns real people away? One effective strategy: taking an identity-first approach to detecting fraudsters and scammers.
Flag Suspicious Behavior
Even with AI, bots still behave like bots. Look for signals like:
● Dozens of accounts created from the same device
● Messaging patterns that repeat across profiles
● Conversations that move unusually fast, especially toward emotional or financial topics
● Attempts to move communications to a different platform
● A person’s estimated age based on their selfie differs significantly from the age indicated
by their provided date of birth
These signs can help you flag potential scammers before they reach legitimate users.
Spot Connections Between Suspicious Accounts
If you’ve spotted one fake profile, chances are there are dozens (or even hundreds) more hiding in plain sight.
To better detect, deter, and deny them, use link analysis tools to see how accounts are connected via shared devices and personal details. This network-level view makes it easier to uncover fraud rings and block them before they spread. You can also use link analysis to learn your users’ standard patterns and better highlight abnormal behavior.
Adjust Your Onboarding Based on Risk
Platforms across industries are increasingly using a risk-based approach to onboarding. With this approach, you ask for minimal information from low-risk users and require higher-risk ones (like a new user with a link to a fraudulent account) to further authenticate themselves, such as by verifying their identity with a government ID and selfie. This lets you keep fraudsters out without slowing down everyone else.
Check Who Someone Is… Not Just What They Upload
Fraudsters often use GenAI to create headshots and identification documents that look real enough to fool humans and computer systems alike.
To catch GenAI selfies and injection attacks, it can help to collect a breadth of active signals (information collected during a verification process) and passive signals (information collected in the background during a verification process). For instance, you can ask users to take a selfie in real time and check for signs that it’s a
real person, not a deepfake or recording. Often called liveness detection, this process helps ensure that a real person is using their actual ID.
You can also passively check whether the selfie was previously uploaded, which is a strong indication that the person is injecting a recording rather than taking a selfie in real time.
Give Users the Tools to Protect Themselves
Trust and safety doesn’t stop at onboarding. In-app prompts, scam education, and easy ways to report suspicious behavior can help your community stay alert and responsive even as threats evolve.
A Smarter Approach to Identity Can Be Your Competitive Edge
GenAI may be changing how fraudsters operate, but it hasn’t changed what dating platforms need to succeed: genuine connections built on trust. Fighting back doesn’t require a heavy-handed or high-friction experience. With the right mix of identity tools, behavior tracking, and risk-based decisioning, platforms can stay one step ahead and create spaces where real people feel safe, seen, and ready to connect.
Kerwell Liao is a seasoned product marketing and user experience leader with over a decade of experience shaping identity, security, and user-centric solutions at some of the world’s most influential tech companies. Currently serving as a Product Marketing Manager at Persona, Kerwell drives go-to-market strategy for Persona’s highly configurable identity verification and fraud prevention products.
