Match Group at SXSW: To Combat Scams, Companies Must Have “A Unified Front”

Online dating companies put a lot of effort into distinguishing themselves from their competitors. They carve out specific niches, develop their own communication styles and technology, and build their brands around a theme that connects with users.

But one topic that places dating companies on equal footing is the issue of scams by dishonest players out to harm dating app users or take their money. Earlier this week, representatives from Coinbase, Match Group, and the FBI gathered at SXSW to discuss solutions. 

Match Group is a dominant presence in the dating world with Match, Tinder, and Hinge in its portfolio. That also makes it a hub for some of the most pervasive and damaging romance scams in the industry. 

For years, Match Group has been criticized for its inability to keep users safe from scammers and even dangerous predators. The company recently faced mounting pressure to improve its safety protocols, especially when it comes to keeping banned users off its apps. 

Match Group used its recent presence at SXSW to explain how its battle against romance scams has evolved. 

The company has pinned its hopes on its Trust and Safety team, specifically the team’s leader, Yoel Roth. His background in Trust and Safety at Twitter, as well as his research on dating app safety, makes him uniquely suited for the task.

On a panel at the event, Roth, alongside Coinbase leader Philip Martin and former FBI agent Roger Campbell, explained how romance scams have become an industry-wide problem — and must have an industry-wide solution. 

The Group Tech Against Scams is an Opportunity For Collaboration 

The industry’s most recent move in the fight against romance scams came in the form of Tech Against Scams, a coalition of industry leaders who hope to pool their resources to better combat romance scams. “We were all dealing with the same threats and challenges in the scam space but were not doing a great job at comparing notes or working together on those issues,” Roth said. “We started to think through what the opportunities for collaboration could look like.” 

Specifically, the coalition hopes to establish industry-wide standards when it comes to supporting victims, sharing important anti-scam data, and tracking down bad actors. Roth explained how the most deep-seated change will be in the way these companies interact with each other. Instead of treating each other as competitors, each company will ideally “create a united front to address some of these challenges,” Roth said. 

Pesky catfish are far from the only challenge. The culprits behind extortion scams, pig butchering scams, and overseas romance scams are all waiting to find victims, usually in the form of someone vulnerable and seeking emotional connection — someone you might find on a dating app, perhaps. 

Tech Against Scams operates on the belief that companies have a duty to act quickly and efficiently when scams occur. As Martin explained, there’s strength in numbers when it comes to reporting romance scams to law enforcement. A case involving one victim is one thing, but a case involving hundreds of victims across multiple platforms is another. The latter is more likely to be taken seriously by law enforcement, as it has the resources and credibility of multiple companies to support the allegations. 

As scammers get more powerful and more sophisticated, so, too, do the industries they target. “Platforms have to work together if we’re going to try to stay ahead of some of this,” Roth said. 

If tech companies inside and outside of the dating industry want to take a firm stance against romance scams, then they have to pay attention to what Roth calls the “scam kill chain” — a scammer’s movement between services to keep the victim engaged while alerting as few people to their con as possible. 

Dating App Companies Will Never “Out-Technology” Scammers

As scammers invent more sophisticated ways to con people out of money, industry leaders have had to revisit how they address common scams. Not every big swing has been successful — Roth mentioned how Match Group’s efforts to uncover AI-generated images had underwhelming results — and the attempt to “out-technology” scammers was ultimately a waste of time and resources. Martin agreed that AI technology and machine learning are not the anti-scam saviors that some people hoped they’d be. They may be necessary for companies to have from a competitive standpoint, but they’re “not completely sufficient, because the bad guys will adapt and adjust very, very rapidly,” Martin said. 

Match Group decided that the most effective way to address scams is to educate dating app users about the scams they may encounter. The hope is they’ll be able to cut scams off at the pass. 

Roth explained how “behavioral nudges” have been an effective way to encourage dating app users to think more critically about who they’re interacting with — and trusting, and giving money to — online. Match Group’s “Are You Sure?” prompt pops up when the app notices unusual user behavior. “One in 5 people who get that prompt choose to change their behavior,” Roth said. “We’re seeing it as a powerful intervention against abuse. It also works against scams.” 

The key is to remember that there’s no fail-safe against scammers, not even in the ever-evolving world of AI technology. Roth warned against complacency from a leadership standpoint and from a consumer standpoint. 

“We’re going to see adversaries be adaptive to changing market conditions, [and] to which apps are hot with which groups,” Roth said. “One of the tools we have is that a lot of the discussions about what works and what doesn’t work happens in public.”

It’s essential for the consumer to maintain vigilance. It’s just as important for companies to have their own Trust and Safety teams to remain vigilant, too. “This stuff is going to constantly evolve, and companies shouldn’t get complacent with what they’re detecting right now. They should recognize that there’s always going to be a next thing, and the thing before it didn’t go away, it’s still there in the background.” 

Trust and Safety Are Up to the Dating Apps 

Not every company is as powerful as Match Group, which makes dispensing the necessary resources to fight scammers a much more difficult task. But Roth urged executives to remember that scams aren’t an “if” — they’re a “when,” especially in the dating industry. 

Dating industry pros aren’t the only people to recognize this looming threat. The Online Dating Safety Act of 2023 aimed to require fraud ban notifications on a federal level, but it died in the Senate before it could make any real change. Only New York and a handful of other states enacted similar safety policies. There’s still reason for hope; Senators Marsha Blackburn (Republican, Tennessee) and John Hickenlooper (Democrat, Colorado) have recently introduced the Romance Scam Prevention Act, which has virtually the same goals as the Online Dating Safety Act. In addition to requiring apps to inform users when/if they’re interacting with a previously banned account, the Romance Scam Prevention Act would also require apps to educate users about the characteristics of common romance scams.

DatingNews reached out to Senators Blackburn and Hickenlooper for comment, but haven’t received a response. 

The proposed bipartisan bill has not yet been passed, so it’s up to dating apps to live up to the implied promise made with their Trust and Safety teams. After all, trust and safety are paramount to consumers, especially when they’re putting their money and their hearts on the line. “Of the trust and safety complaints, scams and fraud are at the very top of the list,” Roth said.

Neither Roth nor Match Group went into specifics about future plans to keep users safe. He did, however, advise companies to reach out to people who stop using their product. Scam victims rarely report their experiences, which means a scamming epidemic could be happening at your platform without you even knowing it. “Report, report, report,” Roth urged consumers and executives.

The only way companies can address romance scams is if they admit they’re happening. “We are dealing with a crisis of under-reporting. We’ve seen estimates of between 5-7% of scams get reported, and even then, we’re talking about losses that tally in the billions of dollars,” Roth explained. “Encourage people to report. Don’t just block and delete. Report. That’s the most critical signal we can get.”