Scams & Safety

What this section covers

Four things, in the order they tend to matter. How to spot a profile that is not a person. How the common money scams are structured, so the shape is recognisable before the request arrives. How to keep an account and a device from leaking more than you intended. And which platforms share an operator, because that changes who actually holds your data.

The single most useful habit

Stay on the platform until you have met. Every stage of a romance fraud approach depends on moving the conversation to a private messaging app, where there is no report history, no account to ban, and no record that the person existed.

That one habit defeats more of the sequence than any feature a platform can offer you.

What platforms actually verify

Less than most people assume. Age is normally a self-declared date of birth with nothing behind it. A verified badge usually means a live selfie matched the profile photos, which rules out stolen images and nothing else: not the name, not the age, not whether the person is single.

Photo verification is still the most useful single signal available, because impersonation using someone else's pictures is the most common form of misrepresentation. Just do not read more into the badge than it claims.

Reporting

Report to the platform, and where a crime has occurred, to the police. Screenshot before reporting rather than after: platforms remove accounts on report and rarely preserve the evidence for you.

In the United States the FTC takes fraud reports at reportfraud.ftc.gov, and the FBI's IC3 takes internet crime reports. In the United Kingdom, Action Fraud. Where a minor is involved, NCMEC's CyberTipline or CEOP, both of which accept reports directly from young people.