Romance scams: how to spot one, and what to do

If you take one thing from this page, take this: being targeted is not a verdict on your intelligence.

A 2025 research brief from the FINRA Investor Education Foundation tested that directly. It found no statistically significant relationship between how intelligent people believed themselves to be and whether they lost money to a scam. An earlier study from the same foundation with the BBB Institute and Stanford's Center on Longevity found a sample that was 73 percent college-educated, with education making little to no difference, and victims who were on average two to three years younger than non-victims.

What did predict it, in both studies, was exposure and isolation. Having nobody to talk an offer over with. Being contacted in the first place.

And one thing protected people more than anything else: already knowing how the scam works. In the Stanford study, 9 percent of people who recognised the scam type lost money, against 34 percent of those who did not.

That is the entire reason this page exists.

The scale, honestly stated

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded 23,159 confidence and romance fraud complaints in 2025, with reported losses of about $929 million. People over 60 accounted for roughly $584 million of that.

Those numbers are much too low, for two separate reasons.

The first is under-reporting. A national AARP survey published in February 2026 found that 55 percent of adults over 50 who lost money to a romance scam never reported it to anyone. The FTC has said plainly that reported losses are "just a fraction" of real losses.

The second is a quirk of how the figures are kept. Both the FBI and the FTC classify by where the money went, not by how the contact started. Someone who spends four months talking to a person on a dating app and is then walked onto a fake investment platform gets counted under cryptocurrency investment fraud, not romance fraud. That separate category came to $7.2 billion in 2025.

So the real figure for relationship-initiated loss sits somewhere well above the romance line item. Nobody knows exactly where.

Where it starts now

Dating apps are not the main entry point any more, and if you only guard the obvious door you will be surprised by the others.

The FTC reported in April 2026 that nearly 60 percent of people who lost money to a romance scam said it started on a social media platform — Facebook producing the highest reported losses, then WhatsApp, then Instagram. Dating apps come next. Then there is the wrong-number text: a message that looks misdirected, an apology, a friendly exchange, and a few weeks later an introduction to a way of making money. FinCEN now documents that opener as standard practice rather than an oddity.

Australia's national anti-scam body logged reports originating on more than 70 different platforms, including online games and fitness apps. "I don't use dating apps" is not protection.

The shape of it

These follow a script, and the script is remarkably consistent. Australia's National Anti-Scam Centre mapped it in nine stages in March 2026. Compressed:

The approach. A profile that reads as unusually well matched to you. The photographs are stolen, or generated.

Moving you off the platform, early. This is the single most consistent step, and it usually happens within the first few exchanges. WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal. It serves two purposes: it escapes the platform's moderation, and it destroys the evidence trail. Investigators repeatedly find that people deleted the original app long before they realised anything was wrong.

Intensity that outpaces the relationship. Constant contact. Declarations that arrive far earlier than they should. Plans for a future with someone you have not met.

Separation from everyone else. Your doubts get reframed as other people's jealousy. Your friends do not understand. This is not incidental — it is the mechanism.

A reason they can never be in the room. Working overseas. An oil rig. Deployed. An offshore contract. The cover story is built so that absence is permanent and cannot be checked. Meetings get arranged and then collapse at the last step: detained at customs, a visa problem, a medical emergency, and often a cost attached to the collapse.

The average scam in the Australian data ran 171 days — three and a half times longer than other scam types. This is not a quick confidence trick. It is built to take months, because months is what it takes.

The first ask, which is usually modest and framed as you helping rather than giving. Medical costs. A plane ticket to finally come and see you. A customs fee.

Escalation, with each new crisis explaining why the last one did not resolve, and the payment methods shifting steadily towards the ones that cannot be reversed.

Coercion, if you try to stop and they have intimate photographs.

Disappearance, when they judge there is nothing left.

And then a second approach, from someone offering to recover your money. More on that below, because it catches a lot of people twice.

The version that takes everything

The classic scam asks you to give money, so it is capped by what you are willing to donate out of sympathy. The newer one asks you to invest your own money for your own benefit, and the ceiling becomes everything you have: savings, retirement accounts, home equity, borrowed money.

That is why the average loss is so much larger — roughly $40,000 per romance complaint to the FBI in 2025, against roughly $117,000 per cryptocurrency investment fraud complaint.

It works like this. The relationship comes first, over weeks or months. Then wealth gets mentioned casually, attributed to trading. Then an offer to show you, on a platform they recommend. The platform looks real — often it is a genuinely polished app, sometimes from a real app store. Your balance goes up. You are encouraged to withdraw some, and the withdrawal works, which is the step that converts a careful person into one who wires their retirement account. Then the larger balance will not come out until you pay a tax, or a fee, or a compliance charge.

That last demand is close to decisive on its own. No real platform requires you to deposit money in order to withdraw money. It is the harvest, and it is the point at which people borrow, because the balance feels like it is already theirs.

You may have heard this called "pig butchering." Authorities including INTERPOL are deliberately retiring that phrase, on the grounds that it dehumanises the people it happens to and discourages them from coming forward. US agencies now mostly say relationship investment scam or romance baiting.

Signs worth watching for

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission publishes six, and they are specific enough to be useful:

• They want to move the conversation to a private messaging app.
• They message constantly but can never meet.
• They say they are wealthy from crypto or foreign currency trading.
• They encourage you to open an account on a trading site they recommend, which only takes cryptocurrency.
• They tell you to send funds to their wallet or to a particular platform.
• You follow their directions and make money quickly and easily.

To which it is worth adding:

• Photographs that reverse-image-search to a different name or a different life.
• A situation that structurally prevents meeting, rather than one that merely delays it.
• Being steered away from the people who know you.
• A crisis arriving on a schedule.
• Any request involving gift card numbers and PINs, a wire to a person, or cryptocurrency.
• Being coached on what to tell your bank. This one is worth stopping on. If someone is telling you what to say to your bank, or that your bank will not understand, they already know the bank will recognise it.
• A request for intimate photographs.

The test that used to work, and does not any more

The standard advice has always been: insist on a video call. That advice is weaker than it was, and you deserve to know why.

In December 2024 the FBI published a notice on criminal use of generative AI. It documents, specifically, criminals generating realistic photographs for fictitious profiles, running real-time video chats, and creating videos "to 'prove' the online contact is a 'real person'." The proof-of-life video is itself a product.

The FBI's 2025 annual report logged 22,364 complaints involving AI, with $893 million in losses, including voice cloning. FinCEN has separately warned that deepfakes are being used to defeat live identity checks.

So: asking for a video call is still worth doing, because a refusal tells you something, and most operations will not bother running a convincing live fake on a low-value target. But a video call that happens is no longer proof. Do not let it settle the question on its own.

If you want to make it harder, ask for something unrehearsed and physical during the call: turn fully side-on, pass a hand slowly across your face, pick up a specific object nearby and read something written on it. The FBI's own notice points at distorted hands, unnatural features and lag as the things to watch. None of this is conclusive. It raises the cost.

How to actually check

Reverse image search every photograph, not just the profile picture. Crop to the face first. Google Lens has the broadest coverage, and TinEye is best at finding the oldest copy of an image, which is what exposes a stolen one. The FTC also suggests searching the job they claim to have plus the word "scammer," and it is worth searching distinctive phrases from their messages — the scripts get reused, and people post them.

Know the limit of that check. A face generated by AI returns no matches at all. A clean result is not a clean bill of health.

Then lean on the things that do not scale:

• Who is the account actually in the name of? Money in these schemes goes to intermediaries and exchanges, never to the person you think you are talking to. Ask whose name is on the destination. There is no good scripted answer.
• Would the opportunity survive you buying it yourself? Through your own broker, at a firm you chose, that they have never touched. If not, it is not an opportunity.
• Check the firm. FINRA BrokerCheck for registration. California's DFPI Crypto Scam Tracker lists reported fake platforms by name, and is useful wherever you live.
• Tell one person. A real relationship survives you mentioning it to a friend. Insisting on secrecy is the single behaviour the business model cannot do without.

If this is happening to you right now

In this order.

1. Stop sending money. Including the fee that would release the balance. Especially that one.

2. Do not delete anything. Not the profile, the messages, the usernames, the phone numbers, the wallet addresses, the transaction IDs, the receipts, or the app. Screenshot everything before you block anyone. The evidence is what makes tracing possible, and it is the thing people destroy first.

3. Call your bank now, before anything else. Ask for the fraud department, not general support. Ask explicitly for a recall or reversal, ask them to flag the destination account, and get a case number. Speed matters more here than anywhere else in this list — a domestic wire can sometimes be stopped within hours, and almost never after that.

4. Contact whoever moved the money. The gift card issuer, keeping the card and the receipt. The crypto exchange, with wallet addresses and transaction hashes. If you posted cash, the US Postal Inspection Service on 1-877-876-2455 can sometimes intercept a package.

Be prepared for this to be hard. Credit card payments have real chargeback rights. Cryptocurrency almost never comes back, and payments you authorised yourself sit in genuinely unsettled legal territory. Ask your bank in writing to treat it as fraud and to give you their decision in writing. If they refuse, you can escalate to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at consumerfinance.gov/complaint or 855-411-2372.

5. Report it. The links are in the next section.

6. Secure yourself. Change passwords, turn on two-factor authentication, and if you were asked to install anything at all, treat that device as compromised.

7. Tell one person you trust. Isolation was the method. It is also what the next set of people will exploit.

8. Get support if you want it. The AARP Fraud Watch Network helpline is 877-908-3360. It is free, and it is open to anyone — you do not need to be a member, and you do not need to be over 50.

Where to report

FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center — ic3.gov. The main federal route. Include every transaction detail you have; for crypto, wallet addresses and transaction hashes are what make seizure possible.

Federal Trade Commission — reportfraud.ftc.gov, or 1-877-382-4357 if the site is unavailable.

Your state attorney general — find yours at naag.org/find-my-ag.

The platform where it started, and the messaging app they moved you to. Preserve the profile before you report it, because reporting often removes your access to it.

If it was framed as an investment — the SEC at sec.gov/submit-tip-or-complaint and the CFTC at cftc.gov/complaint.

One warning, from the FBI: type those addresses in yourself. Criminals run spoofed versions of IC3, and in July 2026 the FBI warned that they are now using AI-generated video to impersonate FBI and IC3 staff. The real IC3 has no social media presence and will not contact you on Messenger, Telegram or WhatsApp.

The second wave

Within weeks, sometimes days, someone will offer to get your money back.

They will know what you lost. They may know the dates and the amounts. They will sound official, or legal, or technical. The FTC's description of how they got your details is blunt: people who have already paid get sold on lists, and the trade calls them "sucker lists."

In August 2025 the FBI described a version using fake law firms with convincing letterhead, claiming partnerships with government agencies, citing the victim's real prior transfers to establish credibility, and then collecting "bank fees" in cryptocurrency.

So here is the rule, and it has no exceptions:

Nobody who can actually get your money back will ask you to pay to get it back. No government agency charges a fee for it. Nobody who contacts you first can recover your funds. If a stranger knows what you lost and offers to retrieve it, that is the same crime, happening to you a second time.

The only parties who ever recover anything are your bank, the payment provider and law enforcement — and none of them will approach you out of the blue on a messaging app.

If it is someone you care about

Being right is not the same as being effective, and this is the part most people get wrong.

Confrontation reliably backfires. Anger and humiliation push people closer to the person scamming them, not further away. Showing someone proof addresses what they know; it does not touch what they feel, and if every conversation with you becomes an argument, defending the relationship becomes their job.

What the evidence supports:

• Go early. Australian researchers found warnings in the first few days are substantially more effective, and that later ones are frequently dismissed. Say something before you are certain.
• One person, in private. Not a family intervention. A group makes it a defence.
• Ask, do not tell. Open questions, then listen. Let them find the inconsistencies themselves, because a conclusion they reach is one they can keep.
• Drop the blame entirely. As AARP puts it, think about their intent rather than their mistake. They were trying to love someone, or help someone. That is not a character flaw.
• Bring in someone neutral. Warnings from banks and platforms get read as self-interested. A helpline, a therapist, or someone who has been through it lands differently. 877-908-3360 is exactly that.
• Ask the harder question. What is this person providing that is otherwise missing — company, purpose, a reason the phone lights up? Removing the scammer without replacing any of that rarely holds.
• Redefine winning. The goal is not an admission. It is stopping the next payment.
• Hold the financial line without withdrawing the relationship. No cash, no gift cards, no forwarded transfers, no loans. Keep talking to them anyway.

One statistic worth knowing if you are the one who is worried: in the Australian data, 9 in 100 romance scam reports came from a third party, against 3 in 100 for other scams. Friends and family are already the detection system. You are not being paranoid.

If there are photographs

If intimate images are being used as leverage — which is a documented stage of these scams, not a separate problem — then:

Do not pay. It does not end it; it establishes that you pay. Keep the evidence, then block. Report to the FBI at ic3.gov, which for adults is the right route.

To get images taken down, adults can use StopNCII.org, which is free. It hashes the images on your own device and shares only the hash with participating platforms — the pictures themselves never leave your phone. Anyone under 18 should use takeitdown.ncmec.org instead. If a platform does not remove the material, the FTC takes reports at takeitdown.ftc.gov.

And the thing the FBI says that is worth repeating: you are not the one breaking the law here.

A last thing

The person on the other end of this is often not who you are imagining either.

In February 2026 the UN human rights office reported that at least 300,000 people are working inside scam operations in Southeast Asia, trafficked from 66 countries, held in guarded compounds and working up to 19-hour days under threat of violence. FinCEN has documented confiscated passports and captivity until ransom is paid.

This is not a clever individual who outsmarted you. It is an industry, running a script, at scale, often with a trafficking victim at the keyboard.

That is not a comfort exactly. But it is accurate, and the shame that stops more than half of people from ever reporting this is itself part of how the business works. If it happened to you, the most useful thing you can do next is tell someone.