In today’s day in age, the internet has found itself to be the main medium for virtually everything, including the search for a romantic partner.  Millions of people use dating apps daily with the hopes of finding love.

While people share their hearts with the internet, some also share a little too much, included their hard earned money as they fall for a seriously unfortunate scammer.  A team of researchers in Great Britain have decided however, to put an end to this once and for all.

They’ve come up with a algorithm that is capable of detecting scams, and this could be the solution to preventing hopeless romantics from not only heartbreak, but also some real unfortunate financial troubles.

In general, many dating scams follow a certain pattern that can be predicted. Scammers will put on an act by creating a fake profile in order to lure in their next victim, and have them convinced that they have met the love of their life. Once they’ve got their victim head over heels, that’s when they start to ask for money as either a gift or to borrow as favor.

The new protective algorithm has been trained specially to be able to recognize these fake profiles by finding common patterns between them. It then performs a scan on dating sites and searches for specific information, or photos that might reveal that the profile is in fact false.

In the United Kingdom, over 3,000 people lose nearly $15,000 annually due to these online dating scams. We can only imagine the numbers in the rest of the world. What’s even more upsetting is that often people are so ashamed that they fell for the scam that they don’t report it, which in turn, allows the criminal to continue his criminal acts.

Artificial Intelligence will hopefully be the answer to prevent such cases from happening.