Ask most dating apps what they’re doing about romance scams, and you’ll get a statement about “ongoing investments in trust and safety.” A “CYA” footnote… like that’s supposed to mean anything.

Ask them what happens to the money after someone’s been conned out of their savings by a fake oil-rig engineer or a too-good-to-be-true crypto tip, and the answers get vaguer fast. One dating-app CEO, pressed on the subject in a 2024 interview, landed on something close to a shrug, with sympathy for the victims, but ultimately paired with the sense that this is just an unfortunate cost of putting people online to meet strangers. Very much a “well, you knew the risks when you signed up” kind of sentiment.

Seeking.com is making the case that it doesn’t have to be that way.

The Industry’s Shrug Problem

Romance scams aren’t a fringe issue anymore. They’re a documented, tracked epidemic. The FTC put reported losses at $1.14 billion in 2023, with a median loss of $2,000 per victim. That’s the highest of any imposter-scam category the agency tracks.

Congress has taken notice, too, with senators pushing major dating conglomerates for details on how their fraud-detection systems actually work, citing past FTC findings that a major share of new accounts on some platforms were scammers before better filtering caught up. The pattern across the industry has mostly been reactive. Pull down fake accounts only AFTER users report them, issue a statement, move on.

Seeking.com is pitching something structurally different by getting ahead of it (with all of the receipts). Proactivity… imagine that.

What “Exposing the Faces of Fraud” Actually Means

Every new Seeking member has to clear an AI-assisted selfie verification step before they can join. The system checks that a real, live person is behind the account instead of stolen photos or an AI-generated face, and layers in behavioral signals associated with fraud patterns. Seeking says more than 90 percent of attempted scammers get filtered out before they can message a single real user.

What’s new is that Seeking is publishing images of scammers caught in the verification process, essentially putting receipts behind a problem the rest of the industry mostly glosses over. It’s a dare, in effect, aimed at every other platform that’s treated fraud prevention as a “nice to have” instead of an actual design requirement.

Built by People Who Got Burned by the Old Model

Co-CEOs Brandon Wade and Dana Rosewall (who met on the platform) have spent the past couple of years rebuilding Seeking around the problems that make most dating apps forgettable at best, and dangerous at worst, such as junk accounts, low-effort matching, and safety features that show up only after something’s gone wrong.

“With the help of AI, we’re ending this,” Wade says. “We talk about romance scams as statistics, but those statistics hide real victims, real pain, and real money lost. Our message to the industry is simple: let’s see them. Expose the faces, eliminate the fraud, and stop pretending safety is a side project.”

It’s a bet that verification doesn’t have to be the thing users tolerate to get to the good part of an app. It can be the product itself.

The Bigger Ask

Seeking isn’t just marketing a feature here . They’re sliding a number across the table and daring the rest of the industry to match it. Will that pressure actually move other dating apps like Tinder, Hinge, or Match.com to change how they screen accounts? Maybe? Hopefully?

But for anyone currently swiping through the ordinary uncertainty of online dating, Seeking.com’s approach is at least an answer to a question of what would it actually look like to treat fraud prevention like it matters as much as growth… if not more.