To the leadership of every dating and social platform operating today — to your Trust & Safety teams, your product teams, your legal and compliance teams, and to the executives who sign off on your safety posture:
Romance fraud is not a fringe problem. It is not an edge case. It is not an acceptable operational tolerance. It is a structured, systematic criminal enterprise operating on your platform, using your infrastructure, and targeting your users — every single day.
$42 billion. That is the estimated annual global cost of romance fraud. Behind that number are individuals who were targeted through platforms like yours — manipulated through four repeatable, documented behavioural patterns that have now been formally named, scored and published.
OSB developed the RSEI Model™ — the world's first and only structured behavioural scoring framework for romance fraud. It identifies four pillars through which every romance scammer operates: Relationship Acceleration. Script Consistency. Emotional Manipulation. Incremental Extraction. Every documented case traces to one or more of these pillars.
We are not here to raise awareness. Awareness campaigns do not stop scammers. We built a framework. We built a scoring system. We built a certification standard. And we are asking — publicly, on the record — whether your platform is prepared to meet it.
The RSEI Certified™ Platform Certification Programme is the first and only framework-backed safety standard for dating and social platforms specifically addressing romance fraud. There is a public registry. Right now, it is empty. No platform has yet achieved certification. That emptiness is a record of where the industry currently stands on the safety of its own users.
Every platform operating today is either on the RSEI Certified™ Registry or it is not. There is no middle ground. Your users are beginning to ask: is this platform RSEI Certified? If it is not, they will draw their own conclusions. And they will be right to do so.
I want to tell you about one case. We call it IFN-002. A person was targeted on a social platform. No money was ever exchanged — not a single payment. And yet the victim reached a point of suicidal ideation. No financial loss. Maximum psychological harm. This is the case that established the E Pillar Independent Trigger — mandatory victim support referral at E ≥ 4, regardless of financial loss.
This happened on a platform. It could have happened on yours. The question is not whether you can prevent every scammer from signing up. The question is whether you have a real framework — not a set of community guidelines — that accounts for the behavioural reality of how romance fraud operates.
Apply for RSEI Certification. Be assessed against a real framework by the organisation that built it. Put your platform on record as one that takes this seriously. The goal of OSB is to make the RSEI Standard™ the industry-recommended baseline for dating and social platform safety. We will get there.
The registry is open. The standard is published. The assessment process is live. The question is which platforms will be first on the right side of it.