A Game-Theoretic Approach to Detecting Romance Scams

This conceptual chapter explains how game theory could model strategic interaction between romance scammers, targets, and detection systems. It argues that an automated detector informed by game-theoretic incentives and likely responses could help identify deception, reduce financial and personal-information theft, and improve trust in online dating services. The accessible abstract presents a modeling approach and anticipated benefits, not a completed deployment. It does not describe a dataset, implementation, comparison baseline, or measured detection performance. The chapter should therefore be treated as a proposed analytical direction for romance-scam detection rather than evidence that a particular automated system is effective.