The Scoop: On dating apps, safety is a priority. We talked to Incognia’s co-founder and VP of marketing about how their solutions and technology use device fingerprinting to identify users with up to 99.9% accuracy– and why such verification is more important now than ever.
Online scams have been around for just as long as the internet, but it used to be way easier to tell when something was fraudulent. A decent level of media literacy plus a knowledge of what to look out for used to be more than adequate protection against online scams.
Today, avoiding a scam isn’t always so simple. Artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency have changed the game.
Online scams are intensifying, and victims are losing more. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission received fraud reports from 2.6 million consumers, with total reported losses topping $10 billion.
Imposter scams raked in the most money, followed by online shopping scams, sweepstake scams, investment scams, and business scams, respectively.
One type of scam has not only garnered national media attention but is critically pertinent to online daters seeking to protect themselves online: romance scams. Romance scams, often fueled by AI tech and cryptocurrency transfers, are on the rise.
Romance scammers create profiles on dating sites and apps and then connect with people who they identify as targets. They try to get as close as possible, as quickly as possible, with their targets so they can exploit their trust and take their money.
Consumers reported $1.14 billion in losses to romance scams last year. As romance scams become increasingly common, dating apps and sites need solutions that protect their users. The issue is that scammers have access to a lot of the same tech that the people trying to stop them keep you safe have.
Verification systems are one of the most effective bulwarks against romance scams. A great verification system keeps scammers off apps, so you don’t have to worry about encountering them in the first place.
But not all verification systems are created equal, and platforms need to choose solutions that are leading the front for individual user security. Incognia is a verification and fraud prevention service that uses device fingerprinting to identify users with up to 99.9% accuracy.
Incognia works with food delivery and ride-sharing services to help them prevent driver ban evasion and GPS spoofing. Dating apps and sites share many of the same security concerns, and Incognia’s technology can be used on these apps in the same way it is for food delivery.
André Ferraz, CEO and co-founder, and Morgan Grandi, the Vice President of Marketing, talked to us about Incognia’s solutions and how they can protect online daters. They detailed how their user verification works and how it can prevent bad actors and scams on dating apps.
Incognia’s Unique Approach to Keeping You Safe
Morgan Grandi gave us the low-down on who Incognia is and what they’re accomplishing.
“We are creating next-generation identity solutions. Essentially, our goal is to enable secure, but also seamless, digital experiences. We do this by adding two additional layers to a technique called device fingerprinting,” Grandi said.
Device fingerprinting helps Incognia’s clients recognize individuals’ devices, rather than relying on a user’s personal information, like emails, phone numbers, or other forms of identification. But what sets Incognia apart is its three layer approach, which includes tamper detection and location analysis, offering a next-generation version of device fingerprinting.
“Tamper detection means we’re making sure that the data the device is sharing with our SDK (software development kit) is accurate,” Grandi explained.
“There are a lot of tools out there to manipulate data – like GPS spoofing apps – which allow people to control the perceived location of their device.”
This kind of tech comes in handy for preventing users who are trying to circumvent being banned. On dating apps, when someone has been banned, it’s important they stay off the platform. Hinge bans users for violating terms of service, which stipulates you won’t lie about your personal information, harass, bully, intimidate other users, and solicit, among other unwelcome behavior.
“It’s critical that we can trust the signals that are coming from the device so that the fingerprint or device profile that we generate is accurate and can reidentify the device,” Grandi said.
The second layer of the tech, location analysis, is what makes Incognia’s technology unique.
“It’s our secret sauce,” Grandi told us. “It’s about actually profiling the location behavior of a device in order to confirm that the user is who they say they are. We are working mainly with companies in the food delivery, ride-hailing, and marketplace spaces.”
The Verification Challenges Facing Dating Apps
Dating apps need tech that will keep bad actors off the platform for good. Ferraz gave us a little more insight into the security challenges facing the dating industry, and how it’s changing many aspects of verification.
“I’d say the key challenge that we’ve been hearing about from platforms is detecting ban evasion,” Ferraz said. “Let’s say there was a scammer on one of these dating platforms. A user reports them, an investigation is done, and the app bans them. But what is stopping them from using a fake name to create another account?”
As Ferraz pointed out, without the right protection, there could be nothing stopping that person from rejoining the app and continuing to scam legitimate users. They may gain access to someone else’s information, use deepfakes, and clear their device to try to remove associations, enabling them to generate a new profile on the app.
“This is a big issue. Most of these platforms have sophisticated verification processes which identify scammers that are trying to make a fake account, but if they slip through, they don’t have a reliable way to associate banned accounts to the same device in order to recognize recurring scams.” Ferraz explained.
When romance scams occur, catfishing is involved nearly every time. Catfishing, or pretending to be someone you’re not online and then interacting with others under that false identity, is a key tactic scammers use. Grandi pointed us to another big scam in the dating industry: pig butchering.
The FBI estimates that pig butchering scams increased 53% compared to last year, totaling nearly $4 billion stolen from tens of thousands of American victims.
These scams are mostly run by organized criminal enterprises, frequently based out of Southeast Asia, who recruit people for fake IT jobs and then force them, often against their will, to execute the pig butchering scam.
Housed in large apartment complexes these trafficking victims are forced to participate in the scam.
Once the victim’s trust is gained, or they are “fattened up”, they’ll begin offering too-good-to-be-true investment opportunities, which are almost always done through cryptocurrency.
Once the victim makes the final transaction, the perpetrator disappears without a trace leaving them with no recourse.
Grandi and Ferraz agreed the challenges that face the dating industry– and the fact that romance scams themselves have become a billion-dollar industry– have made foolproof user verification more difficult to achieve.
But they also see it as an opportunity to leverage new technology to help platforms stop these scams from scaling. For example, the location intelligence provided by Incognia may be able to help data apps identify associations between these fake accounts by tracking them all to the same location.
The Horizons of Safe Online Dating
While there are things you can do to protect yourself online, the impetus falls on platforms to do everything they can to protect users from scams, especially when it comes to scammers who are regaining entry to platforms through ban evasion.
Romance scams have been getting more media attention lately, and it’s because the reverberations of these scams go much farther than people’s hearts or pocketbooks. Romance scams have led to victims pleading guilty to federal crimes, and some even losing their lives.
While platforms are taking the necessary steps to ensure they protect users, you still have to be an active participant in your own safety. You should never send money to anyone you don’t know online– not via money transfer and not through cryptocurrency.
When you’re online dating, don’t spend too much time chatting virtually if you’re looking for an in-person relationship. If you’re interested in someone you’ve matched with, ask them out on a date in a public place.
If they’re not willing, this could be seen as a potential red flag that they aren’t who they say they are.
While romance scams are getting smarter, you can avoid them, and platforms can do their part to curb them with solutions like Incognia.
“Like all fraud, detecting romance scams comes down to a cat and mouse game,” Ferraz said. “The bad actors are always innovating, so we need to make sure that we’re moving even more quickly.”
