Australian Competition and Consumer Commission deputy chairwoman Delia Rickard said the highest losses were on online dating platforms and apps such as Tinder and Match.com and social media platforms,especially Facebook and Instagram.
But Ms Rickard said the big trend of 2019 was the scammers'increased use of other platforms. For example,whilefraudsters have targetedplayers ofWords with Friendsfor several years,by last year scams perpetrated through the game accounted for nearly $600,000 in losses in Australia alone.
"They're places where you're not going there looking for love and you're certainly not expecting to have a romance start up,so your guard's not up,"she said.
Ms Rickard said the number of victims and the size of the financial losses had been increasing over the years,possibly because there were a lot more scammers seeing the opportunity and getting in the game. In 2018,there were 3981 reports of romance scams,with losses of $24.6 million,in Australia.
In the past,the scams typically involved the victims transferring money through online banking or wire transfers. This still accounted for about a third of the losses but it was closely followed by other payment methods such as iTunes,Steam and Google Play gift cards and even cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin.
Romance scams accounted for a fifth of all scams reported to the ACCC's Scamwatch,while Ms Rickard said another growth area was fake business invoices.