Fighting dating fraud with AI

According to BBC, a neural network has analysed real dating data such as age, gender and ethnicity as well as the language people use to describe themselves, and the system built managed to accurately spot scammers and fakes in 93% of cases, the researchers said.

Statistics gathered by the UKs police reporting centre Action Fraud suggest British people lost GBP 50 million to romance scams in 2018. About 63% of the victims were women. Moreover, computer scientists in the UK, US and Australia collaborated on the AI-based system and found that those making fake profiles were more likely to be men (60%) and had an average age of 50.

Nevertheless, the researchers said scams on dating sites and apps were hard to tackle because they were usually not large campaigns and were not generated automatically. The researchers suggested their method could be harder to get around than some current approaches, which rely on blacklists and other basic technical tricks to thwart repeat offenders, the online publication ads.