The order matters
If money has moved, call your bank before you do anything on this page. The recovery window is measured in hours. Then come back and file the report. Your country's reporting service, with numbers: Get help in your country
Why report at all
Be honest about the maths first, because false hope helps nobody. Most romance scam reports do not end with an arrest, and most individual scammers operate from overseas networks that one national police force cannot reach alone. If reporting only mattered when it produced a conviction, this page would be shorter.
It matters for three other reasons. Your report is evidence in your bank's reimbursement decision, and a crime reference number is often the difference between a claim that moves and one that stalls. Your report is intelligence: fraud services aggregate reports to map networks, freeze mule accounts, and feed the international operations that have taken down entire scam compounds this year. And your report protects the next target, because the accounts, phone numbers and payment routes you hand over get burned for everyone the scammer is working on right now. You are not filing paperwork. You are returning fire.
Where to report
Every country does this differently, which is exactly why we keep one page with every route and number: Get help in your country. The shape of it: the UK has a central service (Report Fraud, previously Action Fraud), the US wants both the FBI's IC3 and the FTC, Canada has the Anti-Fraud Centre, Australia has Scamwatch, New Zealand runs through 105 and Netsafe, South Africa is your SAPS station plus SAFPS, and Ireland is in person at any Garda station, no online route, so bring everything with you.
Report to the dating platform too, always. It is not either-or. The police report pursues the person; the platform report kills the account and its siblings today. On any community our team moderates, your report goes to human review and feeds the detection that protects every other member. And report it to us, whichever platform it happened on: Report a scam
What to bring
Police and fraud services can only act on what you give them, so gather this before you file. Do not tidy anything up or delete the embarrassing parts; investigators have seen it all, and gaps hurt the case more than anything in the messages could.
The profile: username, profile URL, screenshots of photos and bio, on every platform they used. The conversation: exports or screenshots, especially first contact, the move off-platform, and every message about money. The money: dates, amounts, account numbers, crypto wallet addresses, gift card numbers and receipts, courier details, anything they told you about where to send what. Wallet addresses deserve special mention: for crypto payments, investigators consistently say the wallet address is the single most useful thing a victim can provide, because the blockchain can be traced even when the person cannot. Their details: every phone number, email address and name they used, including the "friends", "commanding officers" and "customs agents" who appeared in supporting roles. They are all the same production.
What to expect afterwards
A reference number, first and always. Save it: your bank, your insurer and any follow-up all key off it. After that, expect intelligence-led handling rather than a detective at your door. Your report is scored, linked to others, and actioned where the network is reachable. You may hear nothing for months, and silence does not mean nothing happened; takedowns are built from thousands of reports that individually looked like they went nowhere.
What you should never expect is anyone contacting you to return your money for a fee. Police do not charge victims, and no recovery service that asks for money up front is legitimate. Reported victims get resold as leads, and the follow-up caller claiming to be an investigator, a lawyer or a fund-recovery firm is the same scam wearing a new lanyard. Take their details, hang up, and add them to your report.