Currently submitted to: JMIR Serious Games
Date Submitted: Apr 10, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Apr 20, 2026 - Jun 15, 2026
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Love, Lies and Learning in Online Dating: An Online Randomized Controlled Trial of a Serious Game to Combat Romance Scams
ABSTRACT
Background:
Romance scams impose substantial financial and emotional burdens, yet scalable interventions to improve responses to such scams are limited.
Objective:
This study evaluated whether a serious game improves behavioural responses to romance scam attempts.
Methods:
We conducted a three-arm online randomised controlled trial with 4,201 UK adults assigned (1:1:1) to a serious game, a text-based scam-prevention intervention, or a control condition. The serious game used simulated dating interactions with feedback to teach key scam warning signs. Participants responded to scam and legitimate messages in a simulated dating-app environment immediately post-intervention and at four-week follow-up; the primary outcome was the proportion of scam messages responded to correctly and the secondary outcome was the proportion of encouraging responses to legitimate messages. Group differences were analysed using ordinal logistic regression, with results reported as odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs).
Results:
Immediately post-intervention, 85% of scam messages were correctly responded to in the serious game group, compared with 76% in the text-based intervention (OR 2.08, 95% CI 1.81–2.39) and 60% in the control group (OR 6.33, 95% CI 5.48–7.31). At four weeks, correct responding remained higher in the serious game group (75%) than in the text-based intervention (71%; OR 1.38, 95% CI 1.15–1.66) and control groups (70%; OR 1.42, 95% CI 1.19–1.72). The serious game also increased encouraging responses to legitimate messages (51%) compared with the text-based intervention (46%; OR 1.37, 95% CI 1.20–1.57) and control groups (37%; OR 2.81, 95% CI 2.45–3.22), indicating that the serious game did not lead people to be overly cautious when responding to legitimate messages.
Conclusions:
A serious game improved behavioural responses to romance scams, with effects persisting at four weeks, suggesting that serious games may be a promising online safety intervention for combating romance scams.
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