Dating Scammers, what are they, how to spot them and what to do
Americans aged 60 and over reported $7.7 billion in losses in 2025, according to the FBI's annual report, which is roughly 60% more than the year before. Romance scams accounted for $929 million of it. Those are the reported numbers, and reporting rates for this particular crime are low, so the real figure is larger.
Before anything else, the part that matters most: if this happens to you, it is not because you were foolish. These are organized operations, staffed by people who do it full time and follow a script that has been refined on thousands of people before you. They target considerate, trusting people on purpose, because a considerate person helps when somebody says they are in trouble. The shame afterward is what keeps this business running, and it is the one part you can refuse to participate in.
What Is A Dating Scammer?
Somebody using the site to get at your money rather than to meet you. The FBI files it as confidence and romance fraud. The structure barely varies: build the attachment first, introduce a problem second, ask third. Everything before the ask is setup.
How to spot a dating scammer
The details do not survive follow-up questions
Forget imperfect English as a signal, because it tells you nothing. What tells you something is detail that falls apart when you press on it. Somebody says twenty years in Sacramento but cannot name a neighborhood, a highway or a ball team. Ask a normal follow-up and the answer comes back late, vague, or slightly off. Real lives survive questions. Scripts do not.
Certain phrases also recur, because they come off the same crib sheets: "Hello Dear" as an opener, and oddly constructed lines like "I am George by name, I am 50 by age" or "I hope to be reading from you soon."
The pace is wrong
Declarations of love within two weeks. Talk of a future together before you have heard each other's voices. Wanting daily contact almost immediately. It is flattering, which is precisely the function it serves. The attachment has to exist before the ask, so it gets built fast.
The ask, in one of its forms
Never send money to another member, no matter how long you have been talking or how convincing the emergency. The standard versions are a plane ticket to finally come and visit, a medical bill, a customs fee on a package, a business deal that stalled, or being stranded overseas. The version that runs the other way is worse: they want to deposit an inheritance or a large sum into your account for safekeeping, which turns your account into a channel for somebody else's money.
The newest version asks for nothing at first. It mentions how well an investment is going, usually cryptocurrency, and offers to walk you through it. The platform looks convincing and your balance appears to climb. It is not real and you will not get it out. If money and romance turn up in the same conversation, that is the end of the conversation.
Profiles built to explain the distance
Deployed overseas, working an offshore rig, on a contract abroad, doing relief work somewhere remote. It is a tidy explanation for why they can never meet and why the connection is always bad. Sparse profiles are worth a second look too, not because quiet people are suspicious but because somebody running forty accounts does not bother filling them in. Run the photo through a reverse image search on Google Images. It takes a minute.
And be careful about video
A short, poor-quality video call no longer proves anything, because AI-generated video and cloned voices are now part of this. What still holds is meeting in daylight, in a public place, near where they claim to live.
Trust your instincts
If something feels wrong, it very probably is. You have spent decades reading people and that ability does not switch off because the conversation is on a screen. You need no proof and you owe nobody an explanation.
Protect your privacy
Watch for the early push to move off the site, onto text, email, WhatsApp or Facebook. The reason is simple: off here there is no moderation, no report button and no record of what was said. A genuine person will not mind staying put a while longer.
How do I report a suspected scammer?
Scroll to the bottom of the profile and click "Report profile":
Reports are confidential and the person reported is never notified. Use "Ignore" afterward and they can no longer see your profile at all. Do not wait until you are certain. We would much rather check ten hunches that come to nothing than miss the one that mattered.
If money has already gone, move fast. Call your bank or card issuer first, because speed decides whether anything can be pulled back. Then report it. There is no single national hotline here, so it is worth knowing the four that count:
FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov, the main consumer fraud channel, a web form rather than a phone line. FBI IC3 at ic3.gov for anything that happened online. The National Elder Fraud Hotline, run by the Justice Department, on 833-372-8311, Monday to Friday, 10am to 6pm Eastern, which assigns you an actual case manager to walk you through reporting. And the AARP Fraud Watch Network helpline on 877-908-3360, weekdays 8am to 8pm Eastern, free whether or not you are a member, which also runs free confidential support groups for people this has happened to.
One warning that matters. None of those agencies can recover your money, and they say so themselves. Anybody who contacts you afterward offering to get it back is running a second scam on the same victim, and IC3 has issued public alerts about people impersonating IC3 to do exactly that.
Then tell somebody you trust. The isolation is part of how this works, and it is the part you can end today.
Read more about romance scams and report one at the FTC: consumer.ftc.gov/romance-scams
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