A wolf in sweetheart’s clothing: How romance scammers manipulate their victims — and how we can stay safe
March 6, 2025 | By Christine Gibson
Online dating was originally her friends’ idea. Kirsty, a British mother of four, was putting her life back together after divorce when her friends convinced her to join a dating site. She quickly started getting messages from a wealthy London businessman. Before long they were talking on the phone multiple times a day.
He said he wanted to meet in person, but first he had to travel to Turkey on business. Then, suddenly, he disappeared. For three days, he didn’t return her texts or calls. She panicked, wondering whether she had said something wrong, or in darker moments, if he was dead.
When he finally responded to her messages, he said he’d woken up in the hospital — a claim he backed up with pictures of his face, bruised and swollen, in front of a wall of medical equipment. His car had been hijacked and his wallet and phone stolen. He had no way to pay his hotel bill. Could Kirsty loan him £5,000?
A day later, he needed more. And again, more than a dozen times over the next two weeks. When Kirsty ran out of money, she borrowed from her parents and sister, who eventually suspected something was amiss. They found the real social media account the supposed businessman’s photos had been copied from, down to the hospital snapshot.
In all, he had stolen £80,000 — a little over $100,000 in U.S. currency — from Kirsty and her family, including her entire life savings.
Kirsty is just one of millions of people who have been manipulated by online scammers in recent years. As security for banking and payments has tightened, fraudsters have shifted their focus to impersonation tactics. Masquerading as romantic partners, they bypass typical security measures by convincing victims to send them money or hand over their credentials. Masters of psychological control, scammers weaponize people’s best impulses in well-practiced acts of social engineering.
Although evidence of romance scams dates back as far as the sixteenth century, the internet and automated tools have facilitated unprecedented economies of scale. In 2023, American authorities fielded 17,823 confidence and romance scam complaints with losses totaling $652 million. Research last year by Barclays on romance scam reports in the U.K. showed that men are more likely to fall victim, but women lose 2.5 times as much money as men.
And the Global Anti-Scam Alliance ranks romance scams as the seventh most common scheme, although the true incidence is probably much higher: It’s impossible to say for certain, but experts in the field estimate that as many as 90% of victims, ashamed of being conned in this most intimate of ways, never report the crime.
Anatomy of a scam
One of those experts is Anna Rowe. After Rowe was sexually exploited by a married man who used fake dating-site and social-media profiles to carry on physical relationships with more than a dozen women, she started infiltrating online scammer groups to understand their tactics, using what she learned to launch the victim support organizations Catch the Catfish and LoveSaid. She founded the latter with Cecilie Fjellhøy, one of the victims featured in the hit Netflix documentary “The Tinder Swindler.” Although the details vary depending on the perpetrator’s resources, Rowe says romance scams tend to follow the same basic outline.
Using fake profiles with stolen photos, the fraudster spams dating sites and social media pages until somebody engages. From there, the relationship intensifies quickly. Scammers intentionally mimic the manipulations of abusive partners, starting with love bombing — a near-continuous blitz of affection. The scammer mirrors the victim’s beliefs and interests, asks for their advice, makes them feel like the center of the universe.
“If you have low self-esteem, as many victims do, feeling that important is really powerful,” Rowe says. “It’s like, ‘Someone finally gets me. It’s my turn to be happy.’”
But, as the relationship deepens, the fraudsters take control, veering between smothering adoration, aloofness and anger to keep victims off balance. They might instigate a disagreement with the victim, then ghost them for several days. When they reappear, the victim is usually more compliant, because they don’t want to feel abandoned again.
Perhaps months or even years into the relationship, the scammer introduces the first request for a loan — to release an inheritance tied up in a trust fund, to pay for emergency surgery, to fly in to visit the victim — weaving the lies into the ongoing story they have fabricated.
Eventually, as the missed visits, inconsistencies, and demands for money pile up, the victim begins to accept that something isn’t right. That means coming to terms not only with financial losses, but also with the void left by what seemed like the most intense relationship of their life.
“You've got to cope with the fact that this person you were madly in love with, and who you thought loved you, didn't even exist,” Rowe says. “It was just a character created purposefully to destroy your life.”
Rowe is also trying to combat the shame victims suffer from after a scam. Because these crimes are often portrayed as something they “fell for,” many victims fail to appreciate the enormity of the scammers’ manipulation; they feel gullible for exhibiting empathy and generosity, admirable traits that should not be a source of embarrassment. This feeling of shame can be exacerbated by friends, family and often the media, who mock those targeted in these scams for their naivete, or even by law enforcement, which might be tempted to blame the victim.
“We don't say that victims ‘fell’ for a burglary — it was theft,” she says. “But we will say that victims ‘fell’ for the fraud. They didn't. The money was stolen, just like in other crimes.”
Stopping scams at the account level
For financial institutions, detecting and preventing these scams is an arms race. Criminal tactics are always evolving, and to be effective, an anti-scam strategy must approach the problem from multiple angles. Most fraud detection systems home in only on unusual payer behavior, flagging, for example, an elderly customer who is sending a large sum to an international bank.
To add another dimension to banks’ safeguards, Mastercard in 2023 introduced Consumer Fraud Risk, an AI solution that also scrutinizes the recipient account — including its transaction volume, payment values, and links to other accounts — to detect the telltale traits of a scammer. Layering that intelligence with the bank’s existing systems, Consumer Fraud Risk infers the risk of every impending payment and delivers a fraud score in real time.
Once Consumer Fraud Risk flags a payment, the bank can reject it outright, stopping the money from leaving the sender’s account, or contact the sender to share their concerns. That extra information from a neutral source might plant doubt for the victim — or magnify their existing suspicions.
A new collaboration between Mastercard and Feedzai, whose AI-powered fraud prevention platform protects consumers and banks in more than 90 countries, will speed deployment of Consumer Fraud Risk to many key markets globally.
“We’re trying to break the emotional kill chain,” says Luke Reynolds, the senior vice president for financial crimes at Mastercard. “The more insights we can give banks to share with their customers, the more likely they are to see through the scam.”
People can also keep themselves safe by looking out for red flags: a new contact who wants to move from the original platform to an encrypted messaging app (making it difficult to trace), a relationship that progresses unusually fast, any request for money from someone you’ve never met in real life.
“If you feel something is wrong, trust your gut,” Rowe says. “It's telling you something's wrong for a reason.”
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