- Key insight: The new law mostly codifies existing practice. Most dating services already send fraud-ban notices to all users because at least four states require them, and the federal law overrides those state rules.
- Supporting data: Among victims who told the FTC how they paid, bank transfers carried the most romance-scam losses in 2025, at $195 million, ahead of cryptocurrency at $159 million.
Overview bullets generated by AI with editorial review.
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A newly signed law saddles dating apps with a federal duty to help stop romance scams: They must warn users when someone who messaged them gets banned for fraud. Most dating apps already issue such warnings.
President Trump on Tuesday signed the Romance Scam Prevention Act, which requires online dating services to notify any user who received a message from an account the service later banned for fraud. The law takes effect October 2027.
The warning is designed to help users who have moved their conversation with the scammer off the dating app, onto another messaging platform. The notice must tell users not to send money or financial information to anyone else on the app.
For banks, the law starts to shift some accountability for romance scams to dating apps, something banking trade groups have been asking for. It's is also a small first answer to a question consumer advocates have been pressing in Washington: Who should bear responsibility when a scam starts on a tech platform?
There is "no clear or consistent duty of care to suppress scam activity" across telecom companies, digital platforms and financial services, according to a national strategy an Aspen Institute task force released last year.
The task force's members included banks, the American Bankers Association and the Bank Policy Institute.
The new law creates one such duty, for one kind of platform. That duty is a notice, not reimbursement.
What the dating-app notice says, and who already sends it
The notice must identify the banned profile and say that the person "may have been using a false identity or attempting to defraud members," according to the text of the law. It must also include advice on avoiding fraud.
The law puts no limit on how long ago the message arrived. The notice generally must go out within 24 hours of the ban and must say when the user last traded messages with the banned account.
The only people whose privacy the law affects are those banned for fraud, according to the Senate Commerce Committee's report on the bill.
The Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, and state attorneys general enforce the law. Services that comply get a safe harbor, meaning no user, including the banned one, can sue the service over sending a required notice.
The law also sets "one national standard," according to its text, overriding state laws on the same subject.
At least four states require dating apps to provide notification of sketchy users: Vermont since 2017, Arizona since 2021, Utah since 2024 and New York since 2025.
The pre-existence of the state laws means the federal mandate changes little in practice. Most dating services already send the notices to users nationwide "because some states already require those fraud notifications," according to the Congressional Budget Office's cost estimate for the Senate version of the bill.
The federal notice closely tracks those state rules but reaches more people. The state laws require notices only for users who replied to the banned account; the federal law covers anyone who received a message from a banned account.
Where romance scams start, and where the law stops
Consumers reported losing $1.48 billion to romance scams in 2025, up 22% from the year before, according to the FTC.
Victims who told the FTC how they paid lost more through bank transfers ($195 million) than through any other method, ahead of cryptocurrency ($159 million), according to the agency's public fraud-data dashboard. (Most reports did not name a payment method.)
Many of those scams never touch a dating app. Nearly 60% of people who reported losing money to a romance scam in 2025 said the deception started on social media, according to an April FTC data analysis.
The law signed Tuesday covers dating services specifically, not social media in general.
On dating apps, the notice goes out only after the app decides to ban an account, but these apps do not always catch scammers quickly.
As of the second half of 2025, Tinder had gone years without updating most of the machine-learning models it uses to catch scammers, according to an Oct. 13 report from Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., the top Democrat on the Joint Economic Committee.
In the first nine months of 2025, nearly 500,000 scammers or other bad actors on Tinder and Hinge in the U.S. swapped contact information with another user, the report found.
The newly required notices target the transition off the dating app, onto a messaging platform.
The app doesn't need to know whether that transition actually happened; the notice goes out by email or text message, so it reaches a user who took the conversation elsewhere and would not otherwise learn the dating app banned the account.
Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge, rolled out new detection models and a video-selfie check for new Tinder users after the investigation began, according to the report.
Match Group supports the law and welcomes "a national standard that builds on the protections our apps already provide," a company spokesperson told American Banker in a statement.
"Romance scams are a societal problem that spans every online platform, and no company can solve alone," the spokesperson said.
Why a dating-app rule matters to banks
Romance-scam victims usually don't recover their losses. When a scammer tricks a customer into authorizing a payment, the bank generally does not have to refund it under Regulation E, the federal rule on disputed electronic transfers.
That line is under pressure. The United Kingdom began requiring sending and receiving banks to split the cost of reimbursing scam victims in October 2024, under rules from its Payment Systems Regulator.
House Democrats have proposed a similar split in the U.S. in the Protecting Consumers from Payment Scams Act. House Financial Services Committee Republicans rejected that approach in a July report on fraud policy.
The dating-app law takes another route by putting a duty on a platform rather than on the bank, although that duty does not require any kind of reimbursement for losses.
The Independent Community Bankers of America called the law "an ICBA-supported bill" in a Sept. 29 post after the Senate passed it.
The new law cuts both ways for banks. On one hand, it gives dating apps cover: An app that sends notices as the law requires has done what Congress asked of it, leaving banks that move the money looking more responsible when a scam succeeds anyway.
But if the notices prevent potential victims from sending money, there are fewer losses for anyone to fight over.
Technology Reporter
Carter Pape has covered cybersecurity, financial crime and emerging technology for American Banker since January 2022.Pape, reporting from... Read full bio