The stats are in…..

• Ofcom (2024): 10% of online UK adults visited an online dating site or app. 

• Statista (2023/2024): 11.1 million online dating users in the UK in 2023, which was over 16% of the total population. 

• YouGov (2025): Around 10% of Brits have met their partner on an app. 

• The Guardian (2024): Just under 5 million adults visited a dating service in May 2024

• Dating sites are big business. However, reports show user numbers on dating sites in decline. Statista calculates that the average dating site user still spends £247.

• Statista (2023) 61 percent of online dating service users in the United Kingdom were men, 39 percent were women.

What sites are people using?

Dating Site Usage, Ofcom (extract)….

Groomed for Money

“In a romance scam, the victim is persuaded to make a payment to a person they have met, often online through social media or dating websites and with whom they believe they are in a relationship. Fraudsters will use fake profiles to target their victims to start a relationship, which they will try to develop over a longer period. Once they have established their victim’s trust, the criminal will then claim to be experiencing a problem, such as an issue with a visa, health issues or flight tickets and ask for money to help.” (UK Finance)

TSB’s research (2021) suggested that a 35% of frauds began on Facebook, including Facebook Dating, 24% on Tinder, 21% on Plenty of Fish and 9% on Match.com. This data shows which sites people were scammed on (but doesn’t reveal to us what percentage of frauds in total actually begin on dating sites or how those fraud numbers compare to actual site usage.)

So we looked for something a little more recent, and Action Fraud has just released it’s fraud statistics (Sept 2025). At least £106 million was lost to romance fraud last year, about 9% of total UKFraud - so a significant amount. UK Finance tracked £35 millon, and reported falling numbers of ‘romance scams’ - 17% less thanks to wider awareness:

• Romance scams have an average of nearly 11 scam payments per case - the target is often convinced to make multiple, generally smaller, payments to the scammer

• Reimbursement rate in 2024 was 64 per cent (up from 37 per cent in 2020)

• 75 per cent of all romance scams originated online in 2024 - at odds with our own reserach data which showed a trend offline. We feel we should defer to these stats, as they have a greater insight into actual losses, and our data relates to people who KNOW they’ve been groomed.

Advanced fee scams are on the rise: the criminal persuades their target to pay a fee in order to the release a much larger payment, or as a deposit for high-value goods or holidays. Typical scams might include winning an overseas lottery, gold or jewellery being held at customs, or an inheritance imminent. The fee must, allegedly, be paid to release the funds/goods, which will never materialise.

Romance fraud is on the increase!

When Good Dates Go Bad

In 2022, a team of researchers at Brigham Young University found that attacks on people who had met through dating apps happened faster and were more violent than when the perpetrator met the victim other ways. And perpetrators who use dating apps select vulnerable people as their targets.

So whilst our data hasn’t shown grooming via data sites to be vastly different to the outside World, grooming is just one part of the picture and it’s important to stay safe.

Reporting issues

Internet users have had mixed outcomes from their reporting, according to Ofcom. Our experience has been that dating sites aren’t great at policing their environment, although this has had to improve. The ODDA has clear guidelines on lots of things, including:

• Services should define acceptable behaviour guidelines for users through Terms and Conditions and/or Community Guidelines.

• Encourage users to report abuse and provide easily accessible tools to block unwanted interactions.

• Filter tools for contact control and responsive handling of reports.

These are great in as far as they go, but there are no clear actions to be taken if abuse is found - it is left to the user to report, when the site will have far more data on an individual’s interactions. There are no required actions if a member is abusive - even local pubs have ‘banned from one, banned from all’ policies for bad behaviour.

According to Ofcom stats on the Internet in general:

• over half of those who reported or complained about potentially harmful content or behaviour online said that nothing had yet happened as a result of taking action (53%). Our experience talking to victims is that this trend applies to online dating sites.

• Almost a fifth said that the content had been removed (18%). We - backed by research - don’t believe that users are generally removed from dating sites following complaints, and have seen nothing to suggest anything like a ‘three strikes’ rule. (False reporters, by contrast, will find themselves prosecuted.)

• Satisfaction levels with the reporting or complaints process varied for UK internet users, with 32% feeling satisfied with their experience and 36% feeling dissatisfied. We are instinctively certain that the disasfaction levels would be higher than this for dating apps.

In a 2020 survey of 4,860 dating app users in the US, over half of the women reported unwanted sexually explicit messages or images from another user, and 19% of female users (aged 18–34) stated they were threatened with physical harm through a dating app.

With declining numbers of people using dating platforms and apps, surely they should be upping their game:

• insisting that user identities (name and age) are verified;

• screening users for sexual offenders;

• making sure that all users have clear reminders of basic behaviour requirements each time they log in (language, respect, safety)

• reports acted on quickly and efficiently, and affected users advised;

• stronger controls over data sharing of profiles between sites with explicit permission required; and easier sharing of abuse reports between sites;

• barred from one, barred from all,

• computer monitoring of conversations on the app, with investigations handled where flagged;

• a complete ban on AI profiles.

And if they can’t, it would be fair to ask for a regulator to be created - one empowered to keep people safe.