In a hurry?
If someone you have never met in person is asking you for money, stop. Do not send it. If you have already sent money, call your bank now, then report it to your national fraud service. In the UK that means saying "authorised push payment fraud" to your bank, then reportfraud.police.uk or 0300 123 2040. Elsewhere, our country page lists the right numbers for Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, Canada and the US. Get help in your country Bank first, report second. That order matters everywhere.
What a romance scam actually is
Romance scammers are not lonely chancers improvising. They are organised teams working from scripts, and our moderation team removes their profiles every day across more than 1,000 dating communities. The scripts work because they are rehearsed and you are not. That is the whole imbalance, and it is fixable. Read the five signs below and you take the rehearsal advantage away from them.
The scale is worth being honest about. In 2025, UK victims reported over £102 million lost to romance fraud, from 10,784 reports. That is nearly £280,000 a day. The average victim lost £9,500. The worst single case lost £1 million. And those are only the reported cases. The Crime Survey for England and Wales estimates that roughly 13% of fraud gets reported at all, because victims feel ashamed.
That shame is misplaced, and it is doing the scammers' work for them. You were not stupid. You were targeted by a professional running a script that has been refined on thousands of people before you. The people who fall for it are not careless. Nearly half of all money lost comes from people aged 55 to 74, a group with savings, life experience, and every reason to believe a warm and attentive person is what they appear to be.
How it starts
The pattern in our moderation data is consistent enough to set your watch by.
Days one and two: fast, flattering attention. Long messages, quick replies, lots of questions about you. It feels like being chosen.
Days two to five: the push to move off the dating site. WhatsApp, Telegram, sometimes email. The reason given is always thin: "I'm hardly ever on here", "my subscription is ending". The real reason is that dating platforms run fraud detection and WhatsApp does not. When our systems can see the conversation, we can stop it. That is exactly why they want to leave.
Week one onwards: the relationship accelerates far faster than any real one. Declarations of love inside a fortnight. Talk of a future together. Pet names. Some victims describe messages arriving morning and night, structured like a job, because it is one. These teams work shifts.
Then comes the reason they can never meet. Working on an oil rig. Deployed overseas. A surgeon with a UN contract. The story varies, the function does not: it explains the missing video calls and buys time until the ask.
The ask itself usually arrives as a crisis. A customs fee. A medical emergency. A frozen bank account. Flights home that fell through. Small at first, sometimes as little as £50, because a small first payment is the real prize. Once you have paid once, saying no gets harder, and the crises get bigger.
The five warning signs
Our moderation team reviews scam conversations every day. These are the five patterns that appear over and over, with real examples, details changed.
Love arrives on a schedule.
Real feelings take time. Scripted ones take days.
"I know we only matched on Tuesday but I have never felt a connection like this. I think God brought you to me."
There is always a reason you cannot video call.
Broken camera, bad signal on the rig, security rules on deployment. One excuse is life. A pattern of excuses is the tell.
"The internet here is military restricted my love, video is not allowed. Just trust my heart."
They want off the platform fast.
Usually within the first three messages. Remember why: the platform can see them, WhatsApp cannot.
"This app keeps glitching. Message me on WhatsApp instead, here is my number."
A crisis appears that only money can fix.
And the payment method is always hard to trace: bank transfer, cryptocurrency, gift cards. No genuine emergency on earth is solved by an Amazon voucher.
"My luggage is held at customs and they need £800 in fees. I am so embarrassed to ask. I will pay you back the moment I land."
They pull you away from your people.
They ask you to keep the relationship private, or they get prickly when you mention that a friend or family member has doubts. Isolation is not romance. It is technique. City of London Police list one more tell that matches our data exactly: tell them plainly that you are fraud aware and take precautions. A real person respects that. A scammer bristles, because it threatens the script.
The money rule
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.
It does not matter how long you have been talking. It does not matter how well you feel you know them. It does not matter that the amount is small or that they promise to repay it. The request is the proof. Real partners you have never met do not need your money, your cryptocurrency, or your gift cards, and they do not test how you feel about them by asking.
What to do if you think you're talking to a scammer
Stop replying, but do not delete anything. Screenshots, usernames, phone numbers and payment details are evidence, and evidence protects the next person.
Do not confront them or announce that you know. It changes nothing for you and tips them off to burn the identity and open a fresh one.
Report the profile to the dating platform. On any of the communities our team moderates, that report goes to a human review and feeds detection that protects every other member. Then report it to us as well, whichever platform it happened on. Report a scam
Run their photos through our photo checker. Scammers reuse images across dozens of profiles, and a match ends the doubt in seconds. Check a photo
Then tell one person you trust what happened. Scams survive on silence. Saying it out loud to a friend is often the moment the spell breaks.
If you have sent money
Move fast and do these two things in this order.
First, your bank. Call them immediately. In the UK, say the words "authorised push payment fraud": since October 2024, UK banks operate under rules from the Payment Systems Regulator that require reimbursement of APP fraud victims in most cases, and in the regime's first year around 88% of in-scope losses were paid back. Reimbursement rules differ by country, but the bank-first principle does not. Speed improves your odds everywhere, and in Ireland, where recovery depends on recalling the payment before it moves on, speed is nearly everything.
Second, the police. In the UK, report it at reportfraud.police.uk (the service previously called Action Fraud) or on 0300 123 2040. In Scotland, call Police Scotland on 101. Outside the UK, every one of our key territories has its own route, from the FBI's IC3 in the US to Scamwatch in Australia, and our country page lists them all with the numbers that matter. Get help in your country Every report, everywhere, builds the intelligence picture that takes these networks down.
If you paid in cryptocurrency or gift cards, recovery is harder, and anyone who contacts you afterwards promising to get your money back for a fee is running the second half of the same scam. Recovery fraud targets known victims. Hang up.
One more thing, and it matters as much as the practical steps. Losing money to a romance scam is a bereavement twice over: the money and the person, who never existed. Victim Support is free, confidential, and used to exactly this. There is no shame in either call.