The person in the photos is the person you’re talking to.

Romance scams have become one of the most costly categories of consumer fraud in the United States, running into the billions annually by the FTC’s own reporting. The mechanics are always roughly the same: stolen photographs, a fabricated identity, a large number of conversations run in parallel, and an account that’s disposable the moment it gets reported.

Every part of that depends on being able to create accounts freely and anonymously. Optional verification does nothing about it, because the accounts running the scam are precisely the ones that decline to verify. Making it mandatory is the whole intervention.

• A live photo check matched against your profile photos — this is what defeats the use of someone else's pictures.
• An identity check, so a removed account can't immediately be recreated.
• Unverified profiles are never shown to anyone. There is no unverified tier of the app.
• Your verification data stays with Ember. Other users see a badge, not documents.
• Reporting and blocking are immediate, and verification makes ban evasion genuinely hard.

Verification confirms that the person in the photos is the person holding the account. It doesn’t confirm that they’re honest about their job, their relationship status, or their intentions. No system does that, and any app implying otherwise is selling reassurance rather than protection.

The ordinary advice still stands, and it’s worth repeating because scams exploit exactly these gaps: never send money to someone you haven’t met, be wary of anyone who avoids video calls or meeting in person, and treat urgency about money as the warning sign it almost always is.