How financial grooming works, the warning signs that appear before the first dollar moves, and the safeguards that can help stop it.

Who this paper is for

• Investors of every age and level of sophistication — including retirees, widows and widowers, and anyone managing a lifetime of savings.
• Adult children, family members, and trusted contacts who may be the first and only person positioned to notice.
• Financial professionals who want a plain-language resource to place in a client's hands before a problem starts.

At a Glance

Romance fraud is not a dating problem. It is one of the largest categories of financial crime by dollars lost, and it now arrives most often as an investment pitch from someone the victim has never met.

(See important Sources and Disclosures at the end of this paper.)

And the number behind all of them: only a low single-digit percentage of fraud victims ever report it to anyone. Every figure above is a floor, not a measurement.

What this paper will give you

• The six phases of the scam — from how targets are selected to the second scam that follows the first — so you can recognize which phase you or someone you love is in.
• Three lists of warning signs: about the person, about the money, and about your own behavior. The third list is the one almost nobody writes down, and it is the most useful.
• The single red flag that ends the discussion: the moment someone tells you what to say to your bank, your custodian, or your adviser. There are very few legitimate reasons for that conversation.
• Seven safeguards that cost nothing, including the two that can help disrupt this type of scheme  — naming a trusted contact, and adopting a waiting period before large or unusual transfers.
• What to do in the first twenty-four hours if it is already happening, and where to report it. Speed matters: last year the FBI froze $679 million of the $1.164 billion reported to it in time to act.f

I. Executive Summary

A romance scam is not a dating problem. It is a financial crime that uses a manufactured relationship as the delivery mechanism, and by the time money starts moving, the criminal has usually spent weeks or months preparing the victim to move it. The relationship is the weapon. The withdrawal is only the wound.

Three findings drive everything else in this paper:

• Losses are large and concentrated among older investors. Federal reporting for 2025 shows romance and confidence fraud losses climbing sharply, and investors age 60 and older reporting the highest total fraud losses of any age group — with average losses roughly double the overall average.
• The most reliable warning signs are behavioral, not technical. Artificial intelligence has made fake faces, fake voices, and fake video calls cheap and convincing. What has not changed is the script: the isolation, the urgency, the reason you can never meet, and the moment you are coached on what to tell your bank.
• The single most protective step is arranging, in advance, for someone else to see the money move. Naming a trusted contact and adopting a personal waiting period on large or unusual transfers costs nothing and helps disrupt the scam's central requirement: secrecy and speed.

II. The Scale of the Problem

Romance fraud has moved from the margins of consumer protection to one of the largest categories of financial crime by dollars lost. The public data understates it, and the agencies that publish it say so.

What the reported numbers show

• Federal Trade Commission (Consumer Sentinel Network). Consumers reported a record $15.9 billion in total fraud losses to the FTC in 2025, up from $12.5 billion in 2024. Imposter scams — the Consumer Sentinel category that contains romance scams — were the most-reported fraud type for the fifth consecutive year, with roughly $3.5 billion in reported losses. Adults age 50 and older reported $4.3 billion in fraud losses, against $2.3 billion among younger adults. The FTC has not published a stand-alone romance-scam annual total for 2025 in the form of its earlier data spotlights, so the romance-specific figures in this paper are drawn from the FBI instead.
• FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), 2025 Internet Crime Report. IC3 recorded 23,159 confidence fraud and romance scam complaints with reported losses of $929,287,469, up from $672,009,052 in 2024 — a 38% increase in a single year. Overall, IC3 received 1,008,597 complaints and $20.877 billion in reported losses in 2025 — the first year its annual total passed $20 billion.
• Older investors carry the heaviest losses. Americans age 60 and older filed 201,266 IC3 complaints in 2025 — up 37% — and reported $7.748 billion in losses, a 59% year-over-year increase. The average loss in that age group was $38,500, against $20,699 across all complainants, and 12,444 older complainants each lost more than $100,000. Confidence and romance losses in that age group rose from $389.3 million in 2024 to $584.0 million in 2025.
• Where it starts. In an April 2026 data release, the FTC reported that close to 60% of people who reported losing money to a romance scam in 2025 said it started on a social media platform. Across all scam types, more money was reported lost to scams beginning on Facebook than on any other platform, with WhatsApp and Instagram a distant second and third. Dating apps often public attention; the data suggests many cases begin elsewhere.
• Under-reporting is severe. Law enforcement consistently describes romance fraud as among the most under-reported crime categories, because shame and disbelief keep victims silent. FTC staff research on mass-market fraud has found that only a low single-digit percentage of victims ever complain to a government agency or the Better Business Bureau. Every figure in this section should therefore be read as a floor rather than a measurement.

About these figures: all amounts above are reported-case data compiled from complaints filed by victims, not audited losses. Romance-specific 2025 figures come from the FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report; FTC figures describe total reported fraud and how contact began. Both agencies note that their data may be revised, and neither agency verifies individual reports.

A practical implication follows from the last bullet. If you are reading this and thinking "I have never heard of this happening to anyone I know," that is the expected result of a crime whose victims do not talk. Silence is a feature of the scheme, not evidence of its rarity.

Losses rose 38% in a single year. Source: FBI IC3, 2025 Internet Crime Report.

Chart: All reported fraud losses in 2025, by age of the person reporting

Investors 60 and older lost more than the next two age groups combined. Source: FBI IC3, 2025 Internet Crime Report.

A note on the vocabulary

Several terms describe overlapping versions of the same crime, and it helps to know them:

The distinction that matters to an investor is this: the older form asked for money for an emergency. The dominant modern form asks you to invest. That shift is why romance fraud is now, properly understood, an investment fraud topic.

Chart: Losses reported by adults 60 and older in 2025, by type of fraud

Romance fraud increasingly arrives as an investment pitch, which lands it in the top category. Source: FBI IC3, 2025 Internet Crime Report.

III. Anatomy of the Scam: Six Phases

These operations are not improvised. Many are run out of organized compounds using written playbooks that tell the operator how to open, how to escalate, how to answer doubts, and how to respond when a family member gets suspicious. Recognizing the phase may help somone intervene earlier. 

The scheme needs secrecy, speed, and a single decision-maker. Removing any one of the three may help disrupt the scheme.

Phase 1 — Target selection

Criminals select rather than stumble. They read what is publicly posted: recent widowhood or divorce, retirement, relocation, health difficulties, an interest in faith or charity, photographs of a comfortable home, mentions of grandchildren. Loneliness and recent loss are the two attributes most sought. Increasingly, automated tools scrape social profiles at scale to identify and rank candidates and to draft a persona that mirrors the target's stated values.

Notably, this is not a crime of low intelligence or low sophistication. Documented victims include physicians, professors, engineers, attorneys, and career finance professionals. Education does not confer immunity, because the attack is not aimed at your reasoning — it is aimed at your attachment.

Education does not confer immunity. The attack is not aimed at your reasoning — it is aimed at your attachment.

Phase 2 — Contact

First contact usually arrives somewhere other than a dating app: a friend request from someone with mutual-looking connections, a comment on a church or hobby group post, a wrong-number text that turns into pleasant conversation, a LinkedIn message from a plausible professional. The opening is deliberately low-pressure. A message as bland as "Are we still on for today?" or "So sorry, I think I have the wrong number" is a standard opener, because a polite correction is an opening.

An early move is to shift the conversation off the platform where it started — to WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, or ordinary text — before the platform's fraud systems can flag the account. Watch for that migration. It is one of the earliest and most reliable signals.

Phase 3 — Grooming and love bombing

Over weeks or months, the volume and intensity of contact rise steeply: good-morning and good-night messages, hours of daily conversation, rapid declarations of love, talk of a shared future, and detailed reciprocal disclosure that manufactures intimacy quickly. The operator is patient because patience pays. The purpose of this phase is to build a relationship whose loss the victim cannot bear to contemplate — which is what will later prevent the victim from testing it.

Two things happen simultaneously and both are deliberate:

• Elevation of the scammer. He or she becomes the person you talk to first and most, the one who understands you, the confidant.
• Isolation from everyone else. You are asked to keep the relationship private — because family "wouldn't understand," because they will be told when the time is right, because a business matter requires discretion. Requests for secrecy are rarely romantic. They are often operational.

Where a family member has already grown suspicious, a brief video call or voice note is now often produced to settle the matter. Synthetic video and cloned voice are inexpensive and no longer need to be flawless. A live video call is no longer proof that a person is who they claim to be.

Requests for secrecy are never romantic. They are operational.

Phase 4 — The reason you can never meet

Many romance scams involve a permanent, sympathetic obstacle to meeting in person, and the obstacle is always renewable. The classic covers: deployed overseas with the military; working on an offshore rig or a construction contract abroad; a physician with an international relief organization; an engineer on a mining or oil project; a diplomat; a widowed parent with a child in boarding school abroad. Travel is always planned, funded, and then derailed by something urgent.

Phase 5 — The ask

The first request is almost always small, testing, and easy to say yes to — a phone card, a customs fee, a small loan to be repaid next week, help with a medical bill. It is frequently repaid, which is not generosity; it is calibration. Once a payment has been made and reciprocated, the amounts escalate quickly. The requests generally take one of these forms:

Phase 6 — The bleed, and then the second scam

Escalation is the phase in which retirement savings are destroyed. In the investment version, the fabricated dashboard shows steady profits, a small "withdrawal" may even be permitted early on to prove the platform works, and the victim is then encouraged — often by an apparent account manager alongside the romantic partner — to move progressively larger sums. When the victim finally attempts a real withdrawal, a tax, a fee, a compliance charge, or a minimum-balance requirement appears. That demand is the definitive end of any remaining ambiguity.

A final cruelty follows. Victim lists are sold and reused. Within months, many victims are approached by a supposed recovery service, law firm, government office, or investigator offering to retrieve the lost funds for a fee. Within its 2025 cryptocurrency-related complaints, IC3 identified 10,516 recovery-scam complaints and about $1.4 billion in associated losses; complainants age 60 and older accounted for 2,529 of those complaints and roughly $540.5 million. IC3 cautions that these amounts may also include losses from the original scam that prompted the contact, so they should not be read as recovery-scam losses alone. Government agencies generally do not require victims to pay fees in order to recover stolen funds; requests for advance fees should be treated as a recovery-scam warning.

IV. Warning Signs

The signs below are organized by what they attach to. The third group is the most important and the least discussed, because it is the only group you can observe about yourself.

A. Warning signs about the person

• The relationship began with an unsolicited message from a stranger — a friend request, a group comment, a wrong-number text, or a professional networking message.
• The conversation was moved quickly off the original platform to a private messaging app.
• Affection escalated far faster than the acquaintance justified: declarations of love within days or weeks, talk of marriage or a shared future before meeting.
• The profile is thin, brand new, or unusually polished; photographs look professional or stock-like; there are few authentic-looking friends or long-term posting history.
• A career that conveniently explains permanent absence: overseas military service, offshore work, international medicine or engineering, diplomacy.
• Every plan to meet in person collapses. Flights are booked and cancelled; visas, emergencies, and detentions intervene.
• Video calls are refused, or are brief, low-quality, oddly lit, or feature stiff audio-visual timing. Note that a good video call proves nothing today.
• You are asked to keep the relationship — or the money — private from family, friends, your bank, or your adviser.
• A second character appears: an attorney, doctor, account manager, customs officer, or business partner who needs something from you.
• Reverse image searching the photographs returns other names, or nothing at all.

B. Warning signs about the money

• Any request for money, in any amount, from a person you have never met in person. This is the bright line.
• A small first request that is promptly repaid, followed by a larger one.
• Payment demanded by a method that is difficult or impossible to reverse: gift cards, cryptocurrency or a crypto ATM, wire transfer, peer-to-peer payment app, or a courier collecting cash.
• An investment opportunity you did not seek out, introduced by someone you met online, on a platform or app you were sent a link to.
• Returns that are unusually high, unusually smooth, or unusually consistent — real markets are none of those things.
• A dashboard or app showing your gains that you cannot verify anywhere independent of the link you were given.
• Being asked to pay a fee, tax, commission, or minimum balance in order to withdraw your own money.
• Being asked to receive funds into your account and forward them onward.
• Being asked to send money to a third party — a business name, an entity, or an individual who is not the person you have been speaking with.
• Requests to open a new account, at a new institution, that no one else knows about.
• Pressure to liquidate long-held retirement assets, borrow against a home, take a margin loan, or cash out an annuity or life policy for a time-sensitive opportunity.

C. Warning signs about your own behavior

If a family member has raised this paper with you, read this section twice.

• You have not told your children, your closest friend, or your financial adviser the whole story.
• You have found yourself deciding what to say if the bank asks — or you have been told what to say.
• You feel defensive, irritated, or protective when someone questions the relationship.
• You have thought: I will just recover what I have put in, and then stop.
• You have declined to test a simple, obvious verification — a video call at a time you choose, or a reverse image search — and you have a reason for declining that you would not accept from someone else.
• The money you are moving is money you previously told yourself you would never touch.
• Your pattern of financial behavior over the last several months looks nothing like the previous ten years.

If you have found yourself deciding what to say if the bank asks, you already have your answer.

D. The transaction pattern that should alarm you and your family

Viewed on a statement rather than in a conversation, these cases have a recognizable shape. The pattern below is worth reviewing periodically for your own accounts and for those of a parent whose finances you help oversee:

• A long-dormant account, or one used only for routine required distributions, suddenly becomes active.
• Withdrawal sizes jump by an order of magnitude relative to the prior decade of activity.
• Frequency increases — monthly, then twice monthly, then weekly.
• The type of payee changes: after years of transfers only between the client's own accounts, a new individual or business name appears.
• Transfers move promptly onward after arriving, rather than sitting in the destination account.
• Tax consequences are ignored. Large retirement liquidations are made without any discussion of the resulting tax bill — a strong sign the decision is not really about the money.
• Explanations become vague, shifting, or irritable, and are given reluctantly.
• The account trends toward full depletion over a compressed period of months.

V. Why It Works on Careful People

Understanding the mechanism removes the shame, and removing the shame is what lets people act early. Five forces do most of the work:

1. Reciprocal disclosure builds real attachment on a fake foundation

Intimacy is produced by mutual self-revelation, and it does not require the other person to be genuine. The victim's feelings are authentic even though the relationship is not. This is why "how could you not see it?" is the wrong question — the attachment is real, and it is defended like any real attachment.

The victim's feelings are authentic even though the relationship is not.

2. Isolation removes the only reliable correction

An outside observer would probably catch most of these schemes in a single conversation. Secrecy is therefore engineered from the first weeks, and it is the reason the crime survives long enough to be expensive.

3. Sunk cost inverts the exit

Once significant money is committed, stopping means accepting the loss and the humiliation. Continuing preserves the hope of recovery. The victim's rational-feeling choice at every step is to send more — which is precisely what the escalation structure is designed to exploit.

4. Urgency suppresses consultation

Every request arrives with a deadline: a court date, a surgery, a closing window, a market opportunity. The purpose of the deadline is not the deadline. It is to make talking to anyone else feel like a luxury you cannot afford.

5. Shame prevents disclosure — and then prevents reporting

Victims anticipate being judged as foolish or infatuated, so they do not tell the person who could stop it, and afterwards they often do not report at all. That silence is why the statistics in Section II are floors, not measurements.

A word to family members: confronting a victim with the accusation that they have been duped reliably backfires. It forces a choice between the relationship and you, and at that stage the relationship may be prioritized over outside concerns. Ask questions instead of making assertions. Ask to see the platform. Ask to join a video call at a time you pick. Offer to look at something together rather than telling them what it is. Stay in contact even if they refuse, because the moment they are ready to doubt, they will call whoever is still speaking to them kindly.

VI. Practical Safeguards

Every safeguard below is free, and each one attacks a requirement the scheme cannot do without. The scheme needs secrecy, speed, and a single point of decision. Reducing any one of the three may significantly impair the scheme. 

1. Name a trusted contact on every account — and keep it current

A trusted contact is a person your financial institution is authorized to reach out to if it becomes concerned about your account, your wellbeing, or possible exploitation. Broker-dealers and custodians are required under FINRA Rule 4512 to make reasonable efforts to obtain one for non-institutional accounts, and FINRA has proposed permitting firms to use the friendlier label "emergency contact" and to apply one designation across all of a customer's accounts. Many investment advisers request one as a matter of policy or state law.

Two points are widely misunderstood. First, a trusted contact has no authority over your account — it is not a power of attorney, and the person cannot trade, withdraw, or direct anything. Second, the value of the designation is precisely that it operates when you do not want it to. Name someone who will disappoint you rather than someone who will agree with you.

2. Adopt a personal 48-hour rule, in writing, before you need it

Decide now that no transfer above a threshold you set — and no transfer to any new payee — will be executed until 48 hours have passed and one named person has been told the actual reason. Put it in a note to your adviser and to your family. This single commitment can reduce the effectiveness of the urgency mechanism, and unlike a bank control, no one can talk you out of it in the moment because you made the decision when you were calm.

3. Verify identity out of band, and do not accept a video call as proof

• Reverse image search every photograph (Google Images, TinEye). Stolen photographs are the norm, not the exception.
• Search the name together with words like "scam," "fake," and "fraud."
• Propose a video call at a time you choose, on a platform you choose, and ask for something spontaneous — turn the camera to the room, hold up today's newspaper, answer an unexpected question about a shared conversation.
• If a company, platform, or professional is named, verify it independently: look up the firm through a regulator's own website rather than a link you were sent, and check registration status through the SEC's Investment Adviser Public Disclosure site, FINRA BrokerCheck, or your state securities regulator.
• Never install an app or visit a trading platform through a link sent to you. Type the address yourself, or better, do not use it at all.

4. Treat these five things as automatic stop signals

No analysis in the moment is required. If any of the following occurs, stop and verify independently before proceeding:

1. You are asked to pay a fee, tax, or charge in order to withdraw your own money.
2. You are coached on what to tell your bank, custodian, or adviser.
3. You are asked to send funds to a third party who is not the person you have been dealing with.
4. You are asked to receive money and forward it on.
5. You are asked to keep a financial transaction secret from your family or your adviser.

5. Give your adviser and your custodian permission to slow you down

Tell your adviser, in writing, that you want unusual distribution requests questioned, and that you will not treat a question as an insult. Ask whether your custodian participates in temporary-hold protections. Broker-dealers may, under FINRA Rule 2165, place a temporary hold of up to 15 business days — extendable in defined circumstances — on a disbursement from the account of a "specified adult" when the firm reasonably believes financial exploitation is occurring or has been attempted, and notify the trusted contact. Comparable authority extends to investment advisers in the many states that have adopted the NASAA model act on vulnerable adult financial exploitation.

These protections have a structural limitation every investor should understand: they generally require that someone form a reasonable belief that exploitation is occurring. A withdrawal request supported by a plausible, confidently delivered explanation — which is exactly what a coached victim provides — may not generate that belief. The hold is a backstop, not a substitute for the trusted contact and the waiting period.

6. Reduce your own targeting surface

• Set social media profiles to private, and review who can see friend lists, photographs, and posts.
• Avoid publicly posting recent widowhood, divorce, retirement, serious illness, relocation, or financial detail — these are selection criteria.
• Decline unsolicited friend requests and messages from strangers, including ones that appear to share mutual connections.
• Enable multi-factor authentication on every financial account and email account, and never share a one-time code with anyone.
• Consider adding a verbal password with your bank and custodian for telephone instructions.

7. Build a second set of eyes into the structure of your finances

• Give a trusted family member read-only or duplicate-statement access, which permits observation without control.
• Consider a standing instruction requiring a call-back to a second designated person for transfers above a set amount.
• Review your own last twelve months of transfers annually against the pattern list in Section IV.D.
• Keep the conversation open in both directions: an adult child who has said out loud "if anyone ever asks you to keep money secret from me, call me first" has done more good than any monitoring system.

VII. If You Think It Is Happening

1. Stop sending money immediately. Do not send "one last payment" to unlock funds, and do not warn the other person that you are investigating.
2. Contact your bank and your custodian at once, using a number you look up yourself. Ask specifically about recall of recent wires and about placing a hold on further disbursements.
3. Change passwords on financial and email accounts, and enable multi-factor authentication. Check whether any account permissions, beneficiaries, or contact details were altered.
4. Preserve everything: screenshots of the profile and conversations, phone numbers, email addresses, usernames, wallet addresses, platform links, and a written timeline of transfers with dates and amounts. Do not delete anything, however embarrassing.
5. Report it. Filing takes minutes and materially improves the odds of disruption for you and for others.
6. Tell one person you trust. Isolation is what made the loss possible and is what makes the aftermath dangerous.
7. Expect a second approach and refuse it. Anyone who contacts you offering to recover funds for an advance fee should be treated as a likely follow-on scam.

Where to report

VIII. A Closing Note for Advisers and Family Members

Two asymmetries are worth stating plainly.

The client's explanation is the weakest evidence available. The pattern of the money is not.

First, the client's explanation may be the weakest evidence available. A victim in the middle of a romance scam has usually been coached, believes the coaching, and will deliver a fluent, consistent, entirely plausible account of why the money is needed. Anyone relying on the stated reason for a withdrawal is relying on the scammer's script. The pattern of the money — dormancy ending, size jumping, frequency rising, payee type changing, tax consequences ignored, account trending to zero — is far more reliable than anything said in the conversation.

Second, the discomfort is worth it. Asking a longstanding client a direct question about who is on the other end of a large transfer feels intrusive, and clients sometimes react badly. But the cost of an awkward five-minute conversation is trivially small next to the cost of a retirement account emptied over six months. Firms that document the question, escalate honest concerns internally, obtain and use trusted contacts, and train front-line staff to recognize the pattern protect their clients first and themselves second — in that order, and the order matters.