President Donald Trump signed the Romance Scam Prevention Act on Tuesday, October 20, 2026. The law, H.R. 2481, will require online dating services to warn members who were messaged by someone the service later banned for fraud. The default deadline for that warning is 24 hours after the ban, but the rule does not start for a full year.
What does the Romance Scam Prevention Act require?
The White House listed H.R. 2481 among ten bills signed into law on October 20. The enrolled bill covers any website or mobile app that offers dating or romantic relationships by arranging or facilitating social introductions.
The trigger is what the bill calls a fraud ban. That is the termination or suspension of a member’s account because the provider judges there is a significant risk the member will try to get cash or other currency from another member through fraud. A ban for rude behavior or spam does not set off the notice.
Once a fraud ban begins, the provider must notify any member who received a message through the service from the banned account. The notice must be clear and conspicuous, and it must go by email, text message or another method the member has agreed to receive. The deadline is not later than 24 hours after the ban is initiated.
So will a dating app actually tell a person that the match they were chatting with was a scammer? Once the rule is in force, yes, for members who received a message from an account the service banned for fraud, and only by a contact method they already agreed to. Until then, no federal law requires any app to send that warning, so members talking to new matches today are relying on each service’s own policies.
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When can the warning take three days instead of one?
The bill allows two exceptions to the 24-hour clock. If the provider judges that the circumstances require a delay, the notice may go out within 3 days after the fraud ban is initiated. That is a call the provider makes, and the text does not list what circumstances qualify.
The second exception belongs to police. If a law enforcement official asks for a delay because of an ongoing investigation, the provider may not notify the member until that delay ends. The provider then has 3 days after the delay ends to send the warning.
The clock also runs from the ban, not from the first message. A scammer can chat with a member for weeks before an account is suspended, and the notice follows only if the service bans the account for fraud. An account that is never banned triggers nothing, and neither does a conversation with someone the service never flags.
Who enforces the rule, and when does it start?
The section takes effect one year after enactment, which puts the start in October 2027. The Federal Trade Commission enforces it, and a violation is treated as a violation of an FTC rule on unfair or deceptive practices.
State attorneys general, and other state consumer protection officers their states authorize, may also bring civil actions in federal district court on behalf of their residents. They must notify the FTC first, or immediately after filing if advance notice is not feasible. The FTC may step into those cases, and a state cannot sue over violations that are already the subject of an FTC lawsuit.
What can members do during the year before the notices start?
The law changes nothing for a member today. Anyone who has sent money, gift cards or account details to a person met on a dating app can report it to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, the agency’s reporting site. Those reports are what the FTC uses to see which scams are spreading.
The enrolled bill sets the 24-hour rule, the 3-day extension and the October 2027 start. What it does not set is a warning for the year in between, or for conversations with accounts a service never bans. For the member whose match just asked for money, that gap is the open question.
Is a dating match asking for money before the notices begin?
The new notice arrives only after a service bans an account for fraud, and not until about October 2027. A member who has already sent money to a match, or who has been asked to, gets no warning from this law in the hours that matter most.
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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
