What is Romance scam?
In short
Romance scam — A fraud in which someone builds a romantic relationship over weeks or months purely to ask for money — and where the relationship itself, not the request, is the part that was constructed.
It usually does not start where people think
The picture most people carry is of a dating app. The reporting says otherwise: the US Federal Trade Commission found that nearly 60% of people who reported losing money to a romance scam in 2025 said it started on a social media platform — a message from a stranger on Instagram or Facebook, a follow, a comment answered. Dating apps are part of it, but the larger share now begins somewhere nobody is on guard, because nobody opens a social feed braced for a stranger's affection.
The other thing worth unlearning is that the money comes early. It does not. Weeks of ordinary conversation come first — good morning messages, plans, the texture of a real relationship — and the request arrives only once refusing it would feel like abandoning someone. That is the design, not an accident of pacing. It is also why the usual advice to spot a scammer by their bad grammar is close to useless: by the time money is mentioned, months of writing have already read like a person.
How to recognise the pattern
- Meeting in person never happens, and each excuse is structural: working offshore, deployed, stuck abroad on a contract.
- Video calls are deflected — a broken camera, bad signal — while messages continue without interruption.
- The first request is small and urgent: a medical bill, a customs fee, a plane ticket to finally visit you.
- Payment is asked for in a form that cannot be reversed: wire transfer, gift cards, a payment app, cryptocurrency.
What to do about it
The FTC's advice is one sentence and it does the work of a whole checklist: never send money or gifts to a sweetheart you have not met in person. Around that, two searches cost nothing. Run their photos through a reverse image search — a stolen picture usually belongs to someone with a public account elsewhere. And search their job description together with the word scammer; the scripts are reused, and other people have written up the same story.
If it has already happened, the useful thing is speed rather than shame. Stop contact, keep the messages and payment records, tell the bank or the payment service immediately, and report it — in the US at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, elsewhere to the national fraud line — and report the account on the platform where you met. Being deceived by a professional is not a failure of intelligence, and the people running this do it full time, to many people at once, from a script.
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