UK Action Fraud Partners with Scamalytics to Offer Data to Dating Services
Action Fraud, the UK’s national reporting centre for fraud and cyber crime, has partnered with anti-scam service Scamalytics to provide the online dating industry with data on scam accounts and profiles.
The partnership sees Action Fraud pass reports and intelligence to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, who then transfer it to Scamalytics for inclusion into their database.
Dating services are able to check their user profiles against the Scamalytics database and see whether singles are matching with scammers on their platform.
Scamalytics’ CTO Dan Winchester commented: “There has long been an appetite from both law enforcement and the dating industry to cooperate more closely on the prevention of fraud, so it is fantastic to finally have this service up and running – and already preventing known scammers from targeting new victims.”
“Lots of hard work has been taking place behind the scenes by agencies including Action Fraud and the NFIB, the Metropolitan Police, as well as the Online Dating Association and DateSafe, in order to make this data-sharing platform come into being.”
Director of Action Fraud, Pauline Smith, said: “We see many cases of romance fraud each year, the cost of which is high, both emotionally and financially. Heartless fraudsters cruelly use dating websites, social media and direct emails to exploit those looking for love.”
“This is why Action Fraud and the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau are working collaboratively with Scamalytics – to seek out false suspect information and to prevent further victims of romance frauds.”
Ross Williams, Founder of Venntro Media Group and a Scamalytics client, added: “As one of the earliest adopters of Scamalytics technology, Venntro Media Group has been at the forefront of fighting scammers and working closely with the police to protect our users for many years.”
“All sites powered by our White Label Dating platform automatically benefit from the protection Scamalytics offers, and the collaboration between Action Fraud and Scamalytics now enables us to automatically check all registrations against Police data sources on top of our existing anti-scammer measures.”
Scamalytics reports that the Action Fraud data has already helped them to identify hundreds of new scam accounts, and that both parties are looking to increase their data sharing in the future.
Visit the Scamalytics website here.
