Open a dating app and it begins with age, city and perhaps whether you smoke. Then it gets personal. Do you want children? What are you looking for? Add a credit card, and the company knows more about your private life than most businesses ever will.
People accept that bargain because online dating is useful. A recently divorced parent can browse after the children are asleep. Someone in a rural county gets more choices than the same 12 faces at the local bar. For many gay and lesbian users, the local pool may barely exist.
This is a real service, not a social failure. Dating.com shows why the category has grown: members can explore profiles from more than 150 countries and move from messages to voice notes or video without immediately handing a stranger their private number. Translation tools give an international conversation a chance to get past “hello.” Those are practical, positive uses of technology.
Dating remains a strange corner of the economy, though. Intimate information, payments and conversations between strangers share one screen. Washington does not need to write rules for courtship. It does need to decide what a company owes people when it sells access to a high-trust environment.
The easy part is meeting. The hard part is trust.
Dating platforms ask users to perform a difficult trick. Be open, but not gullible. Give a match a chance, while remembering that the handsome engineer in the photographs may be neither handsome nor an engineer.
Romance scammers seldom lead with cash. They begin with attention and an excuse for why meeting must wait. The job is overseas. The camera is broken. Later comes an emergency and instructions for a wire transfer, gift card or cryptocurrency purchase.
Federal Trade Commission data cited by lawmakers put reported romance-scam losses at roughly $1.14 billion in 2023. Some schemes start on dating services; others begin on social media or gaming platforms. Blaming dating companies for every romance scam would be unfair.
Some companies already go further than a warning page. Dating.com’s published safety policy advises members to use video chats, keep identity documents private and never send money. It also says that when a verified member asks for money or seriously misrepresents basic profile details, the account can be banned and the credits spent on that conversation reimbursed. That is a concrete example of a platform giving its safety promise some financial weight.
Platforms also see patterns hidden from members: reused photographs, mass-produced messages and complaints following one profile. The person chatting with that account may know none of this, particularly after the conversation moves to WhatsApp or text messages.
A small bill with a useful idea
The Romance Scam Prevention Act targets this problem. The House passed it in June 2025; a year later, it reached the Senate calendar. Its central requirement is almost comically reasonable. If a service bans an account for a significant fraud risk, it must alert members who exchanged messages with it.
The warning would identify the profile and advise against sending money. Normally it would arrive within 24 hours. Three weeks after a ban, an alert may only explain how somebody lost their savings.
The bill’s narrowness is refreshing. It does not guarantee that every profile is truthful or ask an agency whether a relationship is sincere. It says that once a company identifies a serious fraud risk, customers still exposed to it should know.
This ought to be the floor, not the ceiling.
Then there is the money
Fraud makes headlines. Subscription trouble produces an irritated email and a bank call. Less dramatic. Also more common.
Dating services sell monthly access, premium placement, special messages or credits. Nothing is inherently wrong with charging for a product. Trouble begins when a user cannot tell what a payment buys, whether it repeats or how to stop it.
People should check before paying, but reviews are useful for more than spotting problems. Recent public feedback about Dating.com included users describing the setup as “fast and easy,” praising the international selection and saying they had found genuine people to talk with. One retired reviewer wrote about wanting somebody with whom to share dinners and travel—not a fairy-tale claim, just a recognizable reason to try online dating. Platform-specific pages containing dating.com reviews help prospective members understand which features people enjoy and which questions to ask before opening a wallet.
The FTC’s 2024 “click-to-cancel” rule was vacated by a federal appeals court. In March 2026, the agency sought new input on negative-option marketing—arrangements where doing nothing means paying again. It had received more than 100,000 related complaints in five years.
Here is a rule that does not require a task force: if joining takes two minutes on a phone, leaving should not require a laptop, three menus and a negotiation with a retention agent.
The same goes for prices. Put the amount beside the button. Say whether it renews. Explain what a “credit” buys in ordinary dollars. Do not hide one plain sentence inside legal terms.
Dating data is not ordinary data
A shoe store knows a customer’s size and address. A dating platform may know their religion, sexual orientation, location and private hopes. That sensitivity is also why in-platform video, voice messages and translation can be valuable: two people can get acquainted without immediately exchanging personal contact details.
That information can cause real damage. Yet the United States has no comprehensive federal privacy law for this marketplace. Companies face a patchwork of state requirements; users get different rights based largely on ZIP code.
Congress should begin with restraint. Platforms should collect sensitive information because a feature needs it, not because it may become useful later. Members should be able to see, correct and delete what is stored.
Location deserves special care. “Lives within five miles” is helpful. A pattern revealing where somebody sleeps, works or goes every Tuesday is not. Defaults should protect newcomers who are thinking about a first message, not studying a privacy dashboard.
Platforms could publish basic figures. How many accounts were removed for suspected fraud? How quickly were reports reviewed? Dating.com, for example, maintains a transparency center as well as public safety and refund policies. That kind of disclosure gives users something concrete to evaluate and gives regulators a better place to start than promises made in an advertisement.
Keep Washington’s job narrow
Congress cannot guarantee a pleasant date. It cannot outlaw ghosting, old profile pictures or the man who spends dinner discussing his former wife. Those are hazards of meeting human beings.
The policy line is not difficult to see. Romantic disappointment belongs to life. Hidden renewal terms, ignored fraud evidence and careless handling of intimate data belong to the marketplace. Good federal rules would not punish companies for offering international chat, video calls or credit-based features. They would reward platforms that explain those features clearly and support customers when something goes wrong.
Online dating works because users agree to take a chance on another person. When the service is easy to understand and gives members useful ways to communicate safely, that chance can lead to friendship, companionship or a lasting relationship. Washington’s job is simply to make trustworthy behavior the standard rather than the selling point of a few better-run platforms.
Photo: Vitaly Gariev via Pexels
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