Romance scams
Romance scams involve fraudsters building fake romantic relationships online, often over weeks or months, before requesting money for fabricated emergencies, and they consistently rank among the costliest forms of consumer fraud reported to U.S. and UK authorities each year.
What we know
Romance scams involve a fraudster creating a fake online persona, often using stolen photos of attractive people, to build a romantic relationship with a target through dating apps, social media, or messaging platforms. The relationship typically develops over an extended period, sometimes weeks or many months, during which the scammer builds emotional trust and intimacy before introducing a financial request, commonly framed as an emergency, a business opportunity, travel costs to finally meet in person, or a medical crisis affecting the scammer or a fabricated family member.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission reported that romance scams caused more than 1.1 billion dollars in reported losses in 2023, with a median individual loss of 2,000 dollars, among the highest median losses of any fraud category the FTC tracks, reflecting how effectively the emotional manipulation involved can extract large sums over time rather than a single transaction. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center similarly ranks romance and confidence fraud among the costliest categories of cybercrime reported annually, frequently exceeding total losses from more technically sophisticated attacks.
Many romance scams originate from organized fraud operations rather than individual scammers, and investigative reporting, including work by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime published in 2023, has documented large scam compounds in Southeast Asia, particularly in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, where trafficked workers are sometimes forced under threat of violence to conduct romance and investment scams targeting victims in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. This has shifted some public and law enforcement framing of the issue to recognize both the victims who lose money and the frequently trafficked individuals compelled to conduct the underlying scam operations.
Common patterns include scammers who claim to be working overseas, often as members of the military, engineers on international oil rigs, or contractors, providing built-in explanations for why they cannot video call frequently or meet in person. Requests for payment typically involve untraceable methods such as gift cards, cryptocurrency transfers, or wire transfers, which are difficult to reverse once sent, unlike credit card transactions that carry some fraud protection.
A related and increasingly reported variant, sometimes called pig butchering, combines the romance scam relationship-building approach with a fraudulent cryptocurrency or trading investment scheme, where the scammer eventually convinces the victim to invest through a fake trading platform showing fabricated returns, before the victim's funds are stolen entirely once a large amount has been deposited.
Consumer protection agencies including the FTC and the UK's Action Fraud recommend being cautious of online-only relationships that move quickly toward professions of love, requests to move communication off a dating platform to less monitored channels, reluctance or excuses around video calls, and any request for money, gift cards, or cryptocurrency, regardless of how compelling the stated emergency seems, and recommend independently verifying a romantic partner's identity through reverse image searches of profile photos and video calls before sending any money.
Common claims
- Romance scams only target lonely or naive peopleFalse - scammers use psychological manipulation that can affect anyone
- If someone video chats with me, they must be realUnreliable - deepfake video technology can be used in scams
- Romance scams always involve obvious red flagsFalse - sophisticated scammers invest months building credible relationships