Why banks should care about the new romance scam law
- 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
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 also a small first answer to a question consumer advocates have been
There is “no clear or consistent duty of care to suppress scam activity” across telecom companies, digital platforms and financial services, according to
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.
Why a dating-app rule matters to banks
Romance-scam victims
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
House Democrats have proposed a similar split in the U.S. in the
The dating-app law takes another route by putting a duty on a platform rather than on the bank.
The Independent Community Bankers of America called the law “an ICBA-supported bill” in a
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.
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 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
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:
The preexistence 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
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,
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
Many of those scams
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
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.
