Data & Analytics

Romance Fraud and Dating Apps: UK Losses, Scam Tactics and the Rules in 2026

UK banks recorded £39.2m of romance scam losses in 2025, up 23%. What the data, Ofcom's rules and new US evidence mean for dating apps.

31 March 2026· / 13 min read·DII Editorial Team

Updated 17 October 2026. UK banks recorded £39.2 million of romance scam losses across 6,335 cases in 2025, up 23% and 22% respectively on 2024, according to UK Finance. Ofcom's research suggests far more people are targeted than ever report a loss, and new US congressional evidence shows how slowly the largest dating group updated its scam defences until late 2025.

First published 31 March 2026. This edition replaces several figures in the original that DII could not verify, and adds what has happened since; the changes are listed below.

What has changed since publication

Headline figure replaced. The original edition led on "£106 million lost across 9,449 cases in 2024/25", attributed to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, and an estimate that true losses exceed £170 million based on an FCA reporting rate. DII could not trace either figure to a published source and has removed them, along with the report's former title. The lead figure is now UK Finance's 2025 data, published in June 2026.
Other figures removed. We could not verify, and have withdrawn: average losses of £7,000 (£19,000 for over-61s); a 20% rise in Barclays cases and a claim that 67% of romance scams start on dating and social media; TSB's "11 payments over 95 days"; McAfee research on operators running 40 to 50 identities; RedCompass Labs findings on scam compounds; Norton's 34% and 64% survey results; GBG's 61% bot-match figure; a Brigham Young University study of 2,000 assaults; a 175% rise in dating-app-linked offences; and a 2023 UK Finance satisfaction survey. Some may exist in a form we could not locate; none should be cited from this report.
Corrected. The Sentinel database was described by journalists, not in Match Group's "disclosures to investors" as the original said. Match Group's 2024 revenue was $3.48 billion, not $3.19 billion, and its market value was never close to $50 billion. The Childlight study was a self-report survey, not a study of investigated offenders.
New since March. Ofcom published guidance for dating services in May 2026. A US Senate Joint Economic Committee minority report on Tinder and scams appeared on 13 October 2026. Action Fraud is being replaced by a new national service, Report Fraud.

Executive summary

Romance fraud is a small share of UK fraud losses but one of the most damaging per victim, and dating apps are one of the places it starts. The data has improved since March: UK Finance has published full-year 2025 figures, Ofcom has set out what it expects of dating services, and a US congressional investigation has put numbers on how far scammers reached on Tinder.

Key findings

Bank-recorded losses rose by almost a quarter. UK Finance members recorded £39.2 million of romance scam losses in 2025, up 23%, across 6,335 confirmed cases, up 22% (UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2026). That works out at roughly £6,200 per case on DII's calculation.
Most of the money went back. £26.2 million, or 67% of romance losses, was returned to victims in 2025, up 32% (UK Finance).
Exposure is far wider than losses. Ofcom research finds that 29% of adult internet users have experienced romance or dating scams and 6% have encountered fraud on a dating site or app (Ofcom, May 2026).
Fraud overall is rising. The Crime Survey for England and Wales estimates 3.8 million fraud victims in the year to March 2026, up 10% (ONS, July 2026).
Tinder's scam defences lagged. The median scammer on Tinder received more than 500 impressions before being banned in December 2025, up from fewer than 70 in May 2024, according to a US Joint Economic Committee minority report citing Match Group documents (JEC, 13 October 2026).
Verification appears to help. Match Group says Face Check facial verification cut interactions with bad actors on Tinder by more than 70% in the US within a month of its December 2025 rollout; the committee notes those figures combine scammers with spam and bots.
The UK duty is general, not fraud-specific. Fraud is a priority illegal harm under the Online Safety Act, and Ofcom names romance fraud as a key risk for dating services, but there is no dedicated dating-fraud code (Ofcom).

The scale of financial fraud

The most reliable UK measure of romance fraud losses is the data banks report to UK Finance. It counts authorised push payment (APP) fraud, where victims are persuaded to send money themselves, and it includes only cases reported to member banks. UK Finance describes romance scams as persuading a victim to pay "often online through social media or dating websites".

Measure (UK Finance members)	2025	Change on 2024
Romance scam losses	£39.2m	+23%
Romance scam confirmed cases	6,335	+22%
Romance losses returned to victims	£26.2m (67%)	+32%
All APP fraud losses	£576.4m	+19%
All payment fraud losses (authorised and unauthorised)	£1.28bn	+4%

Source: UK Finance, Annual Fraud Report 2026 (June 2026).

Three points follow. First, romance scams are about 7% of APP losses by value on these figures, but they are concentrated: each case involves one victim, often making repeated payments to someone they believe they know. Second, both losses and cases grew faster than APP fraud overall. Third, the share returned is high, which reflects banks' reimbursement of APP fraud victims; the losses still represent real money taken from the financial system and, in many cases, from people who did not get it all back.

UK Finance also reports that 66% of APP fraud cases are enabled by online sources, though it cautions that this is based on a subset of data and "cannot be considered definitive". It does not publish a separate figure for romance scams or for dating apps specifically.

Bank data understates the problem because many victims never report. The Crime Survey for England and Wales, which asks people directly, estimated 3.8 million fraud victims and 4.5 million fraud incidents in the year to March 2026 (ONS, 23 July 2026). The survey does not publish a romance-fraud breakdown in that bulletin. Police-recorded fraud, historically collected through Action Fraud, is being moved to a new service, Report Fraud, and was not included in the July bulletin.

How many people are exposed

Ofcom's guidance for dating services cites its own research: 29% of adult internet users have experienced romance or dating scams, and 6% have encountered fraud on a dating website or app (Ofcom, 18 May 2026). "Experienced" here means encountered, not necessarily lost money. The gap between those figures and the 6,335 cases banks confirmed in 2025 shows how much fraud is attempted for each loss that is reported.

The US evidence on platform exposure is more granular. According to the Joint Economic Committee minority report, roughly 1.5 million spam and inauthentic accounts in the US, about one-third of those detected, matched with at least one user on Tinder or Hinge in 2025 through the third quarter, and nearly 500,000 exchanged contact information with another user (JEC). Those figures include spam and bots as well as scammers, and they are not UK figures, but the contact-exchange number matters: moving a conversation off the app is the point at which a dating platform loses sight of a scam.

How romance scams use dating platforms

The pattern in the sources is consistent. A fraudster creates a false identity, builds an emotional relationship, moves the conversation to another channel, and then asks for money, usually more than once. The platform's role is at the start: it is where the scammer finds and first contacts the victim.

That makes three platform controls important: stopping fake accounts at sign-up, removing them quickly once they are active, and spotting attempts to move victims elsewhere. The congressional report gives an unusual view of all three at Tinder:

Speed of removal. The median scammer received fewer than 70 impressions before being banned in May 2024 and more than 500 by December 2025, a rise of more than 700%. The 90th percentile rose from 2,447 to 4,039 impressions. Match Group told the committee it uses impressions as a measure of "operational efficiency, not as a measure of user risk" and that it "does not optimize for impressions".
Model maintenance. Internal documents said that "most of [Tinder's machine learning models] have not been updated for years" as of 2025. Match Group told the committee that daily retraining is "technically infeasible".
Contact detection. Match Group deployed a new model to detect the sharing of private contact information in the second half of 2025.

On AI, the original edition said deepfakes and language models were "industrialising" fraud, citing research DII could not verify. The documented position is narrower: regulators and platforms describe AI-generated images and scripted messaging as growing risks, and Match Group is using AI on the defensive side, including a profile-analysis model introduced in the first half of 2026 and AI moderation with the vendor Musubi, according to the JEC report. DII has covered industry research on AI romance fraud separately.

Platform response

Match Group

Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Match.com and Plenty of Fish, reported revenue of $3,487.2 million in 2025 and $3,479.4 million in 2024 (Q4 2025 results). Its main visible response to fraud has been verification. In its February 2026 results it said Face Check, Tinder's facial verification feature, had led to a more than 50% reduction in interactions with bad actors in the markets where it had been rolled out, measured on a random weighted sample of profile views, "with minimal impact to revenue".

The congressional report gives more detail: a summer 2025 pilot produced a more than 60% reduction in interactions with bad actors; within a month of the US rollout in December 2025, interactions fell by more than 70%; and Hinge saw a 20% to 30% decrease in key markets. The committee cautioned that these figures combine scammers with spam, so the effect on scams alone is unclear. In the first half of 2026, Tinder added 169 automated rules and improved 108 others. The report's only UK reference is Match Group's work with Stop Scams UK.

On disclosure, the picture is unchanged. In February 2025 The Markup and the Pulitzer Center reported that Match Group's internal Sentinel database had recorded users reported for rape and assault since 2019, that the company had promised a public transparency report in 2020 and not released it, and that the remaining central trust and safety staff were let go in 2024 and their work outsourced, according to former employees (The Markup). Sentinel concerns sexual violence rather than fraud. DII has found no Match Group transparency report covering either as of October 2026.

Bumble and others

Bumble reported revenue of $965.7 million in 2025, down from $1,071.6 million in 2024 (Q4 2025 results). Its results release refers to "raising the bar on trust and authenticity" but gives no fraud data. DII did not find published UK fraud figures from Bumble, Grindr or other operators in the sources reviewed for this update.

Industry bodies are also moving. DII has reported on the Online Dating and Discovery Association's consumer safety panel and on Veriff joining the association.

Sexual violence and child safety

The original edition merged romance fraud with sexual violence and child exploitation. They share a cause, weak checks on who is on a platform, but they are different harms with different evidence, and DII covers child safety in detail in its CSEA report.

Two verified data points are relevant here. The National Crime Agency reported in 2016 that rapes following a first meeting arranged online rose from 33 in 2009 to 184 in 2014, a six-fold increase (Get Safe Online, reporting NCA figures). And in Childlight's 2025 self-report survey of about 5,000 men in the UK, US and Australia, 66% of men who said they had sexually offended against children used dating platforms, and they were nearly four times more likely to use dating sites than other men (University of Edinburgh). Ofcom's dating guidance also cites a Thorn survey in which 11% of young people threatened with the exposure of sexual images had first met the perpetrator through an online dating service.

The regulatory framework

United Kingdom

The Online Safety Act 2023 applies to dating apps because they let users interact. Its illegal content duties have been in force since 17 March 2025 (Ofcom timetable). Under them, every in-scope service must assess the risk of 17 kinds of illegal content, fraud among them, and apply baseline measures: clear terms, an accessible reporting and complaints tool, and processes to remove illegal content quickly. Ofcom's May 2026 guidance for dating and social discovery services names romance fraud, intimate image abuse, sextortion, harassment, stalking and grooming as the key risks and points to research on games that help people resist romance scams (Ofcom).

What the regime does not yet contain is a fraud measure written for dating. Ofcom consulted from July to 2 October 2026 on codes for fraudulent advertising, which will apply to categorised services, and its statement on additional safety measures is due in the autumn, subject to Parliament (Ofcom timetable).

Penalties can reach £18 million or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater (Schedule 13). Qualifying worldwide revenue is revenue referable to the regulated service, not automatically a group's total revenue (CMS). In practice, Ofcom's fines so far have been far smaller: by September 2026 it had fined 11 providers a total of more than £7 million, none of them dating services, and its enforcement director said most had not been paid (The Register).

European Union and United States

In the EU, the Digital Services Act sets platform duties with fines of up to 6% of global annual turnover. In the US there is no equivalent federal duty of care, but congressional scrutiny is rising: the JEC investigation was opened in September 2025 by Senators Maggie Hassan and Marsha Blackburn (JEC). DII has covered proposed US legislation on dating app scam alerts.

What it means for operators

Measure exposure, not just removals. The congressional report shows how a removal count can look healthy while the reach of each scammer grows. Track how many users a fraudulent account reaches before it is banned, and report it internally.
Retrain detection models on a schedule. Stale models were the committee's central criticism. Write down how often each model is retrained and who signs it off.
Keep scam data separate from spam data. Combined "bad actor" figures make it impossible to show regulators or investors what a measure does to fraud.
Watch for off-platform moves. Detecting contact-detail sharing and warning users at that moment addresses the point where platforms lose sight of a scam.
Put fraud in the illegal content risk assessment in plain terms. Ofcom names romance fraud as a key risk for dating services. An assessment that does not deal with it in detail will be hard to defend.
Weigh verification against friction with evidence. Match Group reports large reductions from facial verification "with minimal impact to revenue". Operators considering similar steps should test on their own user base and record the results.

What to watch next

22 October 2026: next ONS crime statistics release for England and Wales.
Autumn 2026: Ofcom's statement on additional safety measures, and its decisions following the fraudulent advertising codes consultation that closed on 2 October.
Late 2026 onwards: the bedding-in of Report Fraud as the replacement for Action Fraud, which will change how police-recorded fraud data is published.
US: Match Group's response to the JEC report, and any follow-up from the senators.
Mid-2027: UK Finance's next annual fraud report, the first full test of whether 2025's rise in romance losses continued.

Methodology

This report was first published on 31 March 2026 and revised in October 2026. For the revision, DII checked each figure in the original against its stated source. Where we could not find the figure in a published source, we removed it rather than replace it with an estimate. The revised report relies on UK Finance's Annual Fraud Report 2026, the ONS crime survey bulletin for the year to March 2026, Ofcom's guidance and timetable, Match Group and Bumble results filed with the US SEC, the US Joint Economic Committee minority report of 13 October 2026, and The Markup's February 2025 investigation.

Limitations. No UK source publishes romance fraud losses by platform, so the share of losses that begins on dating apps, as opposed to social media or messaging, is not known. UK Finance data covers only cases reported to member banks. The most detailed platform data is American and combines scammers with spam and bots. Per-case averages are DII's calculations from UK Finance totals.

First published 31 March 2026. Updated 17 October 2026. This analysis was not commissioned, funded or reviewed by any dating platform, bank or regulator.

Sources

Questions readers ask

How much do UK victims lose to romance scams each year?+

UK Finance members recorded £39.2 million of romance scam losses across 6,335 confirmed cases in 2025, up 23% and 22% on 2024, according to its Annual Fraud Report 2026. That is roughly £6,200 per case. Banks returned £26.2 million, or 67% of losses, to victims. The figures cover only cases reported to banks.

How many people encounter romance scams?+

Ofcom research cited in its May 2026 guidance for dating services found that 29% of adult internet users have experienced romance or dating scams and 6% have encountered fraud on a dating website or app. Experiencing a scam means encountering one, not necessarily losing money, so these figures are far higher than the number of reported losses.

What did the US congressional report find about scammers on Tinder?+

A Joint Economic Committee minority report published on 13 October 2026 found that the median Tinder scammer received more than 500 impressions before being banned in December 2025, up from fewer than 70 in May 2024. Internal documents said most of Tinder's detection models had not been updated for years. Match Group says impressions do not measure user risk.

What are dating apps doing about romance fraud?+

Match Group's main step is Face Check facial verification on Tinder. It says Face Check cut interactions with bad actors by more than 50% in markets where it launched, and by more than 70% in the US within a month of the December 2025 rollout, though those figures include spam and bots. Few operators publish UK fraud data.

Does the Online Safety Act cover romance fraud on dating apps?+

Yes. Fraud is among the illegal harms every in-scope service must assess under the illegal content duties in force since March 2025, and Ofcom's May 2026 dating guidance names romance fraud as a key risk. There is no fraud code written specifically for dating apps. Penalties can reach £18 million or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue.

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DII Editorial Team

Published 31 March 2026 · Updated 2026-10-17

DatingIndustryInsights.com is an independent B2B intelligence platform covering the global online dating industry. It publishes original research, financial analysis, regulatory tracking, and investigative reporting. It operates with no advertising from the companies it covers.