Romance fraud is more than just heartbreak – it's a serious crime that can leave victims emotionally devastated and financially exploited. But what if we could play our way to protecting ourselves online?
This research explores how serious games can empower people to recognise and resist romance scam attempts. Serious games are games whose primary purpose is learning and behaviour change, and they do this by leveraging two powerful mechanisms: repeated feedback and experiential learning.
In this innovative study, we conducted a large-scale online randomised controlled trial (‘RCT’) with 4,201 UK adults to test the effectiveness of the serious game approach against text-based guidance and a control (in which participants received information about an unrelated topic).
The results provide strong evidence that the serious game was a highly effective educational tool and a promising online safety intervention. The serious game improved people’s skills at detecting romance scams, more than both the text-based intervention and the control, and this effect of the serious game was still significant after four weeks. The serious game did not result in any backfire effects – playing the game did not make people more suspicious of legitimate messages. In fact, it made them more engaged with non-scam messages.
So, what does this tell us? How we present online safety information matters. And when it comes to fighting romance scams, a little play could go a long way.
Think you can spot a scam? Game on! Click here to play our game.
For more details about the key findings, see our Insights Paper
For more technical details about the trial design and data analysis, see Technical Report
For qualitative insights into participants experiences and perception of the game, see Annex – Qualitative Insights Deck