Last week, President Trump signed into law the Romance Scam Prevention Act that Congressman David Valadao (CA-22) introduced and that received bipartisan sponsorship. In short, this new federal law requires dating apps and services to notify users who have interacted with someone who was removed for fraudulent activity.
The scale of romance scams is enormous, with Americans losing $1.5 billion in 2025 as per the FTC and global losses coming in yearly at over $1 trillion. Dating apps play a significant role in the phenomenon because they present predators with the perfect pool in which to fish for victims. According to a year-long investigation whose results were released in recent weeks, U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan concluded that Match Group has greatly lagged behind in its efforts to implement the best technological safeguards available. This is especially relevant because Match Group (which controls most of the best-known dating apps such as Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupid) continues to dominate the dating app market and hence its failures put many users at risk.
The new legislation may help users who are still in touch off-app with fraudsters who have been removed. That is a very narrow slice of users, however, and the system largely depends on whether dating apps effectively remove said fraudsters in the first place. The Romance Scam Prevention Act, however, places no obligations on apps to remove fraudsters or to prevent their joining apps in the first place. It is theoretically possible that the passage of even this fairly weak dating-app-related legislation, in conjunction with the issuance of Sen. Hassan's report, will put some pressure on apps and signal that stricter laws could follow if they don't improve their safety measures. As of now, however, the new law itself is unlikely to stop more than a minimal percentage of romance scams.
Last, it is worth mentioning that financial harm to dating app users, while very important, is far from the only damage resulting from dating apps' continued lackluster use of safeguards. For a crucial example, according to a Columbia Journalism Investigations survey, one third of women who use dating apps report having been sexually assaulted or raped by someone they met on an app. Neither the Romance Scam Prevention Act nor other congressional action so far addresses these many acts of violence or other related harms.
The post Romance Scam Prevention Act Signed into Law appeared first on Reason Magazine.