A Throat Theory Data Report
Romance scams, sextortion, and an unprecedented flood of fake profiles are eroding trust in online dating — and gay & bi men are squarely in the crosshairs. Here's what the public data shows.
In 2024, Americans reported losing $823 million to romance scams, across roughly 58,734 victims.[1] That follows a record $1.14 billion reported in 2023, when the median victim lost about $2,000 — the highest of any imposter-scam category that year.[2]
Why does this matter more for gay and bi men? Because they're far more likely to be on the apps in the first place. Pew Research finds 51% of LGB adults have used a dating site or app, compared with 28% of straight adults — and roughly a third of LGB men have used Grindr.[5] A larger share on the apps means a larger share exposed to whatever is hunting on them.
Extortion was one of the three most-reported cybercrimes of 2024, with 54,936 complaints to the FBI's IC3 and a 59% jump in complaints year over year.[3] The crisis is sharpest among the young and male: NCMEC went from roughly 100 financial-sextortion reports a day in 2024 to 137 a day in 2025, and in the cases studied, 90% of victims were boys aged 14–17.[4] At least 36 boys are known to have died by suicide after being targeted since 2021.[4]
The pattern doesn't stop at 18. Adult men are frequent targets of the same financial-sextortion playbook — a fake connection, a coerced intimate image, then a demand for payment. It thrives wherever identity is unverified.
The single most alarming number in this report isn't a dollar figure — it's a 2,087% increase in bot attacks on dating apps between January 2023 and January 2024.[6] AI has industrialized the fake profile. Today, 26% of people say they (or someone they know) have been approached by an AI chatbot posing as a real person,[7] 32% of online daters report being catfished, and 55% encounter suspicious profiles at least weekly.[8] Three in five even believe they've held a conversation written by AI.[8]
Most platforms moderate reactively — they wait for a report, then remove a fake. By then the scam is done. The structural fix is to stop the fake from existing in the first place: confirm a real, age-verified human before an account can message anyone. Verification is the one intervention that simultaneously starves romance scams of fake identities, denies sextortion its anonymity, and makes the bot flood pointless.
That's the bet behind Throat Theory: an 18+ social app for gay & bi men where every profile is a verified real person, with anti-scam and anti-sextortion protection built in from day one — not bolted on after the damage.
Join the waitlist — be a verified Founding Member →This report aggregates the most recent publicly available figures from government agencies, child-safety organizations, academic survey research, and cybersecurity firms, as of June 2026. Throat Theory is a pre-launch platform and these figures are not first-party data; they are cited from the sources below. Statistics describe the U.S. and global online-dating landscape broadly and are not specific to any single platform. Figures are reported as published; definitions and methodologies vary by source.
For press & researchers: you're welcome to cite this report with a link to this page. For comment or the data summary, contact hello@throattheory.com.