In a hurry?
If someone you met on a dating app is coaching you to invest, it is a scam. The profits on your screen are not real, and the "tax" or "fee" you are being asked to pay to withdraw them is how they take the last of your money. Stop paying. Call your bank, then report it to your national fraud service. UK: reportfraud.police.uk or 0300 123 2040. Everywhere else: Get help in your country
Why this scam costs more than any other
Classic romance fraud takes thousands. This one takes life savings. Investigators call it pig butchering, an ugly name taken from the scammers' own slang: befriend the victim, fatten the account, then take everything at once. UK regulators increasingly call it romance baiting, which describes the mechanics better. The romance is not the point. The romance is the delivery system for a fake investment.
The numbers are in a different league from every other scam in this library. The FBI's latest figures put investment fraud losses at $8.6 billion in a single year, double the year before, with cryptocurrency schemes making up 72% of it. The average pig butchering victim loses around $120,000. Chainalysis, which traces the money on the blockchain, found the average payment to these operations grew 253% between 2024 and 2025. In the UK, romance scam losses through bank transfers rose 35% in the first half of 2025, and this hybrid is the engine of that rise.
Now the reframe, because it is the most useful fact on this page. These scammers do not target gullible people. They target capable ones. The FBI's victim profile is educated, financially comfortable, mid-30s to early 50s, often recently divorced or bereaved. They are chosen because they have real money and the confidence to move it. If you think you are too smart for this scam, you match the profile.
The four-stage script
Our moderation team sees this script attempted constantly, and it barely varies. Knowing the stages is the defence, because each stage only works if you cannot see the next one coming.
Stage one: the match. A polished, successful-looking profile. Attentive, patient conversation, quickly moved to WhatsApp or Telegram. Weeks can pass here. No money is mentioned at all, and that patience is the point. This stage exists to make stage two feel like it came from a friend.
Stage two: the mention. Money enters sideways. They talk about their own trading wins. A screenshot of a profit. An uncle who works in finance. They are never pushy, and if you show no interest they wait and try again. What they are selling is not an investment yet. It is curiosity.
Stage three: the small win. You are invited to try it, sometimes with their money staked for you. You put in a modest amount on a trading platform they recommend. The dashboard shows a profit within days. Then they let you withdraw it. That withdrawal is the most expensive money you will ever receive, because it is manufactured proof that the platform pays out. It does, exactly once, while the amounts are small.
Stage four: the harvest. Confident now, you invest properly. Savings, then more when the returns climb. Some victims are encouraged to borrow or remortgage. When you finally try to withdraw a large amount, the platform produces a reason you cannot: a tax bill, a verification fee, an account freeze that a payment will lift. Every one of those demands is the scam's final act. Some victims pay the "fee" several times before the platform and the partner vanish on the same day.
The platform is a stage set
This is the part most guides skip, and it is the part that inoculates you. The trading platform is not a bad investment. It is not an investment at all. Court filings in a US case this year set out how these sites are built: either cloned trading software or licensed tools fitted with a plug-in that fabricates balances, trades and prices. The tickers move, the graphs climb, your balance grows. All of it is a display layer controlled by the person who sent you the link. No trade has ever been executed. Your money left the moment you deposited it.
Which gives you a clean set of tells:
- The platform came to you through a person, not through research. Real exchanges do not need a romantic partner to introduce them.
- It is not on the Apple App Store or Google Play, or it asks you to install it through a link.
- It is not registered with your national regulator. In the UK that is the FCA register; the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and South Africa each have an equivalent, all listed on our country page. Two minutes on the register settles this.
- Withdrawals below a threshold work, then a "tax" or "fee" appears when you try to take out more. Genuine platforms deduct fees from your balance. Only scams demand fresh money to release your own.
The money rule still decides it
If someone you have never met in person asks you for money, it is a scam. Not sometimes. Not "but this feels different". Every time.
This scam's genius is disguising the ask. You never feel like you are giving money to a person; you feel like you are investing in a platform. Strip the staging away and the rule holds: a stranger from a dating app has directed your money somewhere they control. The dashboard is decoration.
What to do at each stage
Caught it at stage one or two: stop replying, keep the evidence, report the profile to the platform and to us. On the communities our team moderates, that report feeds the detection systems that block these accounts at scale. Report a scam
At stage three, money in but "profits" showing: do not invest more, and do not announce your doubts. Attempt a full withdrawal quietly. The refusal, and the fee demand that follows it, is your confirmation. Keep every message and screenshot.
At stage four, money gone: call your bank immediately. In the UK, say "authorised push payment fraud"; bank transfer losses have a real recovery route under the reimbursement rules brought in from October 2024. Then report to your national fraud service, reportfraud.police.uk (previously Action Fraud) or 0300 123 2040 in the UK, IC3.gov in the US, Scamwatch in Australia, and the equivalents for our other territories on the country page. Get help in your country Wherever you report, include every cryptocurrency wallet address you sent funds to. Investigators are clear that wallet addresses are the single most useful thing a victim can provide, because the blockchain is traceable even when the scammer is not.
Then guard against round two. Known victims get contacted by "recovery agents" who can retrieve the funds for an upfront fee. That is the same crew, or their customers, coming back for the rest. No legitimate recovery service asks for money up front.