Safety
Romance scams in 2026: where they actually start
People reported losing about $1.48 billion to romance scams in 2025. Of those who lost money and told the FTC how the contact began, nearly 60% said it started on social media rather than on a dating app. This page keeps the agency, the year and the denominator attached to every number, because most pages that quote these figures do not.
Think this is happening to you now?
Do these two first
- Stop sending money, and stop communicating. Do not announce it, do not argue, do not send one last payment to “sort it out”. A scammer who knows they are discovered switches to pressure, threats or a fake refund, all of which cost you more.
- Call your bank, card issuer, payment app or crypto exchange now. Say the words “I am reporting fraud”. Ask them to attempt a recall or chargeback, freeze the account, and flag the transactions. This is the only step on this list where hours change the outcome — wires and crypto transfers get harder to reach by the day, and often by the hour.
Then, today
- Preserve everything before you block anyone: messages, usernames, phone numbers, profile URLs, receipts, transaction IDs and wallet addresses. Screenshot it, then export or email it to yourself, because the account may vanish.
- Report it to the FTC and to the FBI’s IC3. Neither will recover your money directly, and neither will judge you. The reports are how accounts, payment rails and wallet clusters get traced across thousands of victims.
- Report and block the account on the platform where it started.
- If you shared identity documents or account credentials, start a recovery plan at IdentityTheft.gov and consider freezing your credit with all three bureaus.
- Ignore anyone who contacts you offering to recover the money for an upfront fee. Recovery scams target people who have just been scammed, often within days, sometimes using details only the first scammer could have known.
Nobody here can see your case. If money has just moved, the bank call comes before you finish reading this page.
US The reporting links and legal steps on this page are for the United States. The warning signs, the scam mechanics and the first two emergency steps — stop paying, call your bank — are the same everywhere; only the addresses change. Readers elsewhere should substitute their own national fraud reporting body: Action Fraud in the UK, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, Scamwatch in Australia, or the local police in most of the EU.
The scale, from the two agencies that count it
The FTC’s most recent published figure for a full calendar year is 2025: reported losses to romance scams rose 22% to about $1.48 billion, which the agency puts at roughly $2,020 per person reporting a loss.2
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center counts separately, under a category it calls Confidence/Romance fraud. Its 2025 report records 23,159 complaints and $929.3 million in losses, up about 38% in a single year, with $584 million of that lost by people aged 60 and over.3
A third figure circulates widely and is usually attributed to the FTC directly: 55,604 reports and $1.16 billion over the first nine months of 2025, with a median individual loss of $2,218 in the third quarter. That is real Consumer Sentinel data, but it reached the public through a Detroit Free Press story carried by the USA TODAY Network, not through an FTC publication. It is an interim nine-month figure, now superseded by the full year, and we cite it as journalism rather than as an agency source.5
For scale in the other direction: the FBI logged 1,008,597 complaints and $20.9 billion in losses across all internet crime in 2025. Romance fraud is a small share of the complaint volume and a disproportionate share of the personal damage.3
The finding that should change your advice
Nearly 60% of people who reported losing money to a romance scam in 2025 — and who identified how the contact began — said it started on a social media platform.1
The safety advice everyone repeats is aimed at the window where the minority of the money is lost.
The surrounding numbers point the same way. People reported losing $2.1 billion to scams that began on social media in 2025 — nearly 30% of all reported scam losses, and roughly eight times the 2020 figure. Facebook accounted for more reported loss than any other platform, with WhatsApp and Instagram second and third.16
This is not an argument that dating apps are safe, and it is not an argument that social platforms do nothing. The major platforms all run reporting and moderation systems. The defensible difference is narrower and still worth acting on: dating apps carry romance-specific safeguards — photo or ID verification, in-app messaging that stays on the record, match-based contact that a stranger cannot initiate at will — that general social platforms mostly do not, and an unsolicited DM or friend request is a far cheaper way to approach ten thousand strangers than a dating profile is.
So the practical rewrite of the standard advice is this: the rules you have been told to apply on dating apps apply at least as hard to the person who slid into your messages, and nobody ever told you that.
The warning signs, as a checklist
None of these is proof on its own. Real people do work offshore, and real conversations do move to WhatsApp. What matters is how many appear together, and how fast.
Tick anything you recognise
- An unexpected DM, friend request, or “wrong number” message you did not initiate
- Rapid emotional intimacy — endearments, future plans, or talk of destiny within days
- Claims to be deployed, offshore, travelling, or otherwise unable to meet
- Repeated avoidance of live, verifiable contact, always with a reason attached
- Pressure to move the conversation to WhatsApp or Telegram
- Investment advice, or screenshots of extraordinary returns
- Requests involving cryptocurrency, gift cards, wire transfers or payment apps — or asking you to receive and forward money for them
- A sudden medical, travel, customs, business or legal emergency
- Requests for intimate images, followed by threats
- Instructions to keep the relationship, or the payment, secret
The arc most of these follow
- 1 Unexpected contact A DM or friend request
- 2 Fast trust Intensity, far too soon
- 3 Move off-platform WhatsApp, Telegram
- 4 Never quite meets A reason, every time
- 5 The ask Emergency or investment
- 6 Repeat payments Each unlocks the last
- 7 Recovery scam Often a second crew
The arc is not always complete, and it does not always run in order. The two stages people miss are the first and the last: the contact that arrived uninvited, and the “investigator” who turns up afterwards offering to get the money back.
How the money leaves, and what the payment data does say
This is where most articles, including an earlier version of this one, go wrong. The most recent payment breakdown the FTC has published for romance scams specifically covers 2022, and it measures shares of dollars lost — not shares of reports. Those two are very different distributions, and mixing them produces figures that look authoritative and mean nothing.4
Romance scams, 2022 reporting year, share of reported dollars lost4
- Cryptocurrency — about 34% of dollars lost
- Bank wire or transfer — about 27% of dollars lost
- Together, those two accounted for more than 60% of every dollar reported lost to romance scams that year
- Gift cards — the most common method by headcount, named by 24% of people who reported losing money, but a far smaller share of the dollars
The median losses show why the two rankings diverge. In 2022 the median reported loss was $4,400 overall, but $10,079 where the money went in cryptocurrency and $10,000 where it went by bank transfer. Gift cards catch more people; crypto and wires take more money from each of them.4
The FTC has not published an equivalent romance-specific breakdown for a more recent year, so we are not going to invent one. Anyone quoting a crisp four-way split for 2025 should be asked which agency published it, for which year, and out of what denominator.
What survives all of that caveating is the only part you need at three in the morning: the red flag is not what someone says, it is what they eventually ask to be paid in. There is no legitimate version of a romantic interest you have never met in person needing cryptocurrency, gift cards, a wire transfer, or your bank account to move somebody else’s money through. None.
The scripts that keep coming back
Romance fraud is run at industrial scale, much of it out of compounds where the operators work from written manuals. That is why the same handful of stories recur across unrelated victims, in near-identical wording.
If you have heard one of these, you have heard a script
- Military deployment — a service member overseas who cannot video call for “security reasons”, and needs help with leave papers, a satellite phone, or shipping a footlocker
- Offshore engineering — an oil rig, a subsea contract, a mine in West Africa; the salary is enormous, the internet is bad, and the company will not release funds
- The doctor or surgeon abroad — an aid posting, and then a hospital that will not treat a patient until a transfer clears
- Customs or shipping fees — a gift, an inheritance, gold, or a cash-filled parcel held by a courier or customs officer who needs a fee first
- The frozen account — a large sum they cannot touch until a tax, a legal fee or a “verification deposit” is paid
- The inheritance — a lawyer, an estate, and a documented fortune that needs one small unlock payment
- Guaranteed crypto returns — a trading platform they introduce you to, where the numbers only ever go up
- The wrong number — a text that opens with a stranger’s apology and becomes a friendship, then a trading tip
The tell is structural rather than verbal, which is why learning the specific stories only helps so much. Every one of these supplies three things at once: a reason they cannot meet you, a reason money has to move right now, and a reason you should not discuss it with anyone. Any story doing all three is the same story.
What verification can and cannot do
Reverse-image search is worth the fifteen seconds. It catches recycled stock photos, stolen influencer galleries and profiles built from one unlucky person’s Instagram. But a clean result proves nothing at all: an AI-generated face has no earlier copy to find, and a photo stolen last week may not be indexed yet.
Live video used to settle it. It no longer does. Prerecorded loops, borrowed footage, beauty and background filters, and real-time face replacement are all cheap now, and all have turned up in romance fraud. A short, poor-quality call that ends abruptly is not evidence of a bad connection; it is the most common way a video “verification” actually goes.
Verify behaviour instead of identity, because behaviour is what will cost you. Has this person asked for money, in any form, under any story? Have they steered you to a platform they chose? Have they discouraged you from telling anyone? Those questions have answers you can trust. “Is this face real?” increasingly does not.
When the romance is only the doorway
The variant that takes the most money per victim is not really a romance scam by the time it ends. Affection is the entry point; the fraud itself is presented as an investment. It is widely called pig butchering, a translation of the operators’ own term for fattening a victim before slaughter, and it is worth knowing under whatever name you meet it.
The shape is consistent. Weeks of ordinary, warm conversation with no request for anything. Then a mention of their own trading, an uncle in finance, a platform they have done well on. You are invited, not pressured. The platform looks professional, the dashboard shows your balance rising, and a first small withdrawal goes through without a hitch — which is the point of it.
What separates it from an investment that is merely bad
- The platform was introduced by them, not found by you, and does not appear in any regulator’s register
- A small early withdrawal succeeded, and a larger one now requires a tax, fee, deposit or “verification” payment first
- Your balance only ever goes up, on a dashboard only they can point you to
- You are coached on what to tell your bank if it asks about the transfer
- Deadlines appear: a closing window, a bonus tier, an expiring rate
- They offer to lend you money, or suggest borrowing, to make the deposit larger
If the fee to release your own funds has appeared, the money is already gone and every further payment is a fresh loss. Stop there, keep the account records, and treat the withdrawal fee as the moment you found out rather than a hurdle to clear.
If intimate images are being used against you
A separate playbook: the relationship moves quickly to intimate images or video, and then to a demand for money against the threat of sending them to your family, employer or followers. It is fast, it is often automated, and the people running it move on quickly if there is no payment.
What to do
- Do not pay. Paying identifies you as someone who pays, and demands almost always continue afterwards.
- Do not delete the account or the conversation yet. Screenshot the profile, the usernames, the payment details and the threats first.
- Report and block the account on the platform, and report it to the FBI’s IC3.
- Use a hash-based takedown service to stop the images spreading — Take It Down for anyone whose images were taken under 18, StopNCII for adults.
- Tell one person you trust. Isolation is the leverage the whole scheme runs on.
If the person targeted is a minor, this is a crime against a child and reporting it that way changes how quickly it is handled — NCMEC’s CyberTipline takes reports at 1-800-843-5678. And if the shame of it is turning into something darker, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline takes calls and texts at 988, at any hour. Sextortion has cost lives, almost always in the first day, almost always in silence.
If you shared documents or account details
Money is the loss people count. Identity is the one that keeps arriving for years, and it is common in romance fraud, because a passport photo or a “verification” selfie is an ordinary-seeming thing to send someone you trust.
Match the step to what was shared
- Social Security number — start a recovery plan at IdentityTheft.gov, and place a free credit freeze with Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. A freeze is free, reversible, and stops most new-account fraud outright.
- Passport, driving licence or ID photos — report the document as compromised to the issuing authority, and expect it to be reused in other scams rather than against you directly.
- Banking logins or card details — change the credentials, call the bank’s fraud line, and ask for the account to be flagged rather than simply reissued.
- Any reused password — change it everywhere it was reused, starting with the email account, and turn on two-factor authentication there first.
- Remote-access software you were asked to install — assume the device is compromised: disconnect it, remove the software, change passwords from a different device.
- Intimate images — see the sextortion steps above; the takedown services work whether or not money was ever demanded.
The second scam, aimed at people who just lost the first one
This is the stage most safety guides leave out, and it is the one that turns a bad year into a ruinous one. Lists of romance-fraud victims circulate and get resold. Being scammed is the qualification for the next approach.
It arrives within days or weeks, from a “blockchain forensics firm”, a “recovery agent”, a lawyer, a fake regulator, or someone claiming to be from the platform’s fraud team. They know details — amounts, dates, the name your scammer used — because they bought them, or because they are the same crew running the second half of the script.
How to recognise it
- They contacted you, rather than the other way round
- There is an upfront fee, retainer, “gas fee”, or tax before anything is recovered
- They guarantee recovery, or quote a specific percentage they can get back
- They ask for your wallet seed phrase, banking credentials, or remote access to your computer
- They present themselves as a government agency and ask for payment — no US agency does this
- They pressure you to move fast, before a supposed window closes
The plain rule: nobody legitimate charges you upfront to get your money back. Reporting to the FTC and IC3 is free. Your bank does not charge you to attempt a recall. A lawyer worth hiring will tell you honestly that recovering funds sent by crypto or international wire is rare, and will not promise otherwise to get a retainer.
How to help a parent or a friend who is in one
Start from this: they are going to defend the relationship. Not because they are gullible, but because you are asking them to accept simultaneously that the money is gone and that the person who has been the best part of their year does not exist. Most people take the first version they can live with, and that version is “my family does not understand”.
Ridicule ends the conversation and hands the scammer the isolation the whole scheme depends on. Scripts explicitly coach victims that their family will not approve — so a furious intervention confirms the prediction the scammer already made.
What actually works
- Ask about the money, not about the person. “When did they last ask you for something?” lands where “they’re not real” does not.
- Follow inconsistencies rather than declaring conclusions. Ask to see the profile, the messages, the receipts — and let them find the gaps out loud.
- Go to the bank early, together. Banks have fraud teams who have this conversation weekly and carry an authority no relative does.
- Name the pattern, not the personality. Showing them a scripts list like the one above works better than any argument you make yourself.
- Give it more than one conversation. Recognition usually arrives days later, alone, and they need a door left open to come back through.
- Watch for the second approach. The recovery scam often lands while they are still deciding whether they were scammed at all.
If they are elderly and the sums are large, escalate. The FBI recorded $584 million lost by people aged 60 and over to Confidence/Romance fraud in 2025 alone — the age skew in that figure is the single strongest argument for stepping in early rather than waiting to be asked.3
Common questions
How much money is lost to romance scams?
The FTC reports about $1.48 billion in romance-scam losses for 2025, up 22% year on year, at roughly $2,020 per person reporting a loss. The FBI’s IC3 separately recorded 23,159 Confidence/Romance complaints and $929.3 million in 2025. The two come from different reporting systems with different category boundaries and must not be added together. Both are floors: most romance fraud is never reported at all.
Do most romance scams start on dating apps?
No. Nearly 60% of people who reported losing money to a romance scam in 2025, and who identified how contact began, said it started on a social media platform rather than a dating app. That share is calculated only among people who both lost money and named a usable contact method — the FTC excludes reports with no contact method, and write-in answers classed as "other".
What is the biggest warning sign of a romance scam?
What they eventually ask to be paid in. In the FTC’s most recent romance-specific breakdown, covering 2022, cryptocurrency accounted for about 34% of the dollars reported lost and bank wires about 27%; gift cards were named by 24% of people who lost money, though they made up a much smaller share of the dollars. Someone you have never met in person asking for any of these is the clearest single signal available.
What should I do if I have been scammed?
Stop paying and stop communicating, then call your bank, card issuer, payment app or crypto exchange immediately — that is the only step where hours change the outcome. Preserve the messages, usernames, receipts and wallet addresses before blocking anyone. Then report it to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov, to the FBI at ic3.gov, and to the platform. If you shared identity documents, start at identitytheft.gov and consider freezing your credit. These links are US-specific.
Can someone offer to recover money lost to a romance scam?
Treat any unsolicited recovery offer as a second scam. Recovery fraud specifically targets recent victims, often within days, sometimes quoting details only the original scammer had. Nobody legitimate charges an upfront fee to recover your money: reporting to the FTC and IC3 is free, and your bank does not bill you to attempt a recall.
Does a video call prove someone is real?
Not any more. Prerecorded footage, filters and real-time face replacement are all cheap and all appear in romance fraud, and a reverse-image search that finds nothing proves nothing either — AI-generated and freshly stolen photos have no earlier copies to find. Both are useful for catching inconsistencies, and neither is a reason to send money or follow investment advice.
Sources
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Reported losses to scams on social media are eight times higher than 2020
Source of the ~60% figure and of the $2.1bn social-media total. States that the percentage excludes reports giving no contact method, and write-in methods classed as “other”.
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New trends in reports of imposter scams
Source of the full-year 2025 romance total and the $2,020 per-person figure. Printed as “$1.48 million”, which is inconsistent with its own 22% rise and with the $1.16bn reported through September 2025; read here as $1.48 billion.
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2025 Internet Crime Report (PDF)
Source of every FBI figure here. The category is “Confidence/Romance” fraud, which is not necessarily the same boundary as the FTC’s romance-scam category.
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Romance scammers’ favorite lies exposed
Covers the 2022 reporting year, and remains the most recent romance-specific payment breakdown the FTC has published. Crypto and bank-wire shares are of dollars lost; the gift-card share is of people reporting a loss.
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“$1.16B lost to romance scams in 2025, FTC says”
A newspaper report of Consumer Sentinel data, not an FTC publication — this page previously cited it as one, which was wrong. It is where the widely-quoted 55,604 reports and $2,218 Q3 median originate.
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New FTC data show people have lost billions to social media scams
The announcement accompanying reference 1, and the source for the platform ranking.
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