Somewhere in Seeking.com’s rejection pile is a running gallery of catfish—fake oil-rig engineers, trust fund daddies, too-good-to-be-true crypto bros… basically, whoever’s tried logging in with a stolen photo set or an AI-generated face.

None of them got far. Seeking’s AI caught them before they could send a single message, then did something almost no other dating app bothers to do. It put their faces on the record.

Most dating apps handle scam questions the same way. Vague language about “ongoing investments in trust and safety” in a statement that reads like it was written by legal. Then? Radio silence. Forgive and forget, right?

There’s not much sympathy for someone who gets conned by a fake oil-rig engineer or an insider crypto tip. They knew the risks… that’s not the platform’s fault.

Seeking’s approach is the opposite, and puts its scammers on blast in an attempt to actually protect the rest of its user base.

The Receipts, Explained

Co-CEO Brandon Wade puts it bluntly. The industry treats romance scams like statistics instead of “real victims, real pain, real money lost.” Seeking’s bet is that verification doesn’t have to be the annoying gate before the fun part of an app. It can literally just be the product. Everyone talks about guardrails being built into AI workflows from the start to prevent messiness later. Same idea applies here.

No System’s Perfect, But At Least This One’s Trying

If you’ve ever unmatched someone mid-conversation because their timeline stopped adding up, or their photos looked a little too professionally lit, your instincts were probably correct. You just usually don’t get to see the receipts afterward. Those get filed away in some “trust-and-safety inbox” nobody outside the company ever sees. Seeking is making that part public instead. Will it fully deter scammers from trying to get through? Of course not. Some people are bold. And dumb. But with a 90% success rate, an anti-fraud system should be able to give you at least a little peace of mind that there’s an attempt to keep you safer on the dating platform.

None of this guarantees every match is a good one, either. Bad dates are still bad dates, and that’s not an AI problem. (I’m sure we’ll cross that bridge eventually. Have you seen these humanoid robots??)

But knowing a dating site is actually filtering out the people who were never real in the first place is a pretty reasonable ask, and a lower bar than most apps clear. Other than Seeking, it’s still a bar most of them aren’t clearing at all.