A number of women who play Scrabble online on Scopely's Scrabble Go app claim to receive messages from "creepy men" within the game's chat feature.
They start a game and then start asking where the women live and if they are married and want to keep chatting via other messaging apps like WhatsApp.
Many of them are likely to be romantic scammers.
Scopely said the chat feature might be limited to friends only.
One woman, 60 years old and living in London, told BBC News that she was contacted by private message by two or three people a week, all claiming to be American men.
She didn't want to be named.
"It's almost like a script," he said.
"They start with 'How are you?' They match you to start a match, then start messaging.
"They play very badly, so you win the game. And then they exalt you.
"Regularly, they say, 'I just want to check, can't we be friends?'
"When you say 'No', some of them disappear, they quit the game.
"If you don't answer at all, most of them quit the game."
The photograph of the son
He believes many of them are scammers.
English didn't seem to be their first language, he said.
One man confessed that he used his son's photograph as a profile picture because he thought his son was "more attractive".
"This is not a dating site," he said.
Block functions
Scopely said it "does not tolerate any harassment or misconduct" on its gaming platforms and players should report incidents to it.
"In Scrabble Go, players are able to access the mute and block functions within the chat functionality, as well as the privacy setting for disabling public chat," a spokesperson said.
"When enabled, players will only receive notifications and chat messages from players they already know and are connected with as Facebook friends, favorites or via their synced contacts."
Scrabble Go was launched in March 2020.
And it became the official Scrabble app in June, when Mattel's franchise ended with gaming giant EA.
He says he has 2.5 million daily players.
But a petition calling for the return of the EA app has now received nearly 8,500 signatures.
And Scopely introduced a stripped-down "classic" version of the game after complaints about additional features such as treasure-style rewards and bright colors.
'Fasten'
A woman who signed the petition three days ago wrote: "I don't like being targeted by creepy men who want to chat and not play Scrabble."
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) told Gizmodo that it received two reports of romantic scams on Scrabble Go in its first three months, but it also received two on the previous EA app during the first half of 2020.
On the sixtyandme site, Pat Skene described similar experiences on the unofficial Words With Friends app, similar to Scrabble.
"Suddenly, I'm inundated with guys who want to hook up because they fell madly in love with me at first sight," she blogged last year.
It is a problem common to many social media platforms.
And it's difficult to monitor, especially as it happens in the form of private messages.
Lisa Forte, of Red Goat Cyber-security, said, "As individuals, we really need to start dealing with unsolicited online contacts with people we don't know are suspicious until proven otherwise."
