Published on 2026-07-25
How can you tell if the person you're falling for online is a scam?
Romance scams cost people in the US over 800 million dollars in 2024. The signs are consistent: fast love, a refused video call, and money that starts small.
It rarely starts with a request for money. It starts with attention: good morning texts, long messages at midnight, someone who seems to have been waiting their whole life to meet exactly you. That warmth is the first ingredient of a romance scam, not an afterthought to it. By the time money enters the conversation, the emotional groundwork has usually been laid for weeks.
The scale of this is not small. In the United States, reported losses to romance scams topped 823 million dollars in 2024, according to Federal Trade Commission data. Behind that figure sit ordinary people: not gullible, not lonely in any unusual way, just human beings who were spoken to with skill by someone whose full-time job was the conversation.
The pace is the first tell
Real affection builds unevenly. It stalls, it doubts itself, it takes weeks to say the big things out loud. A scam script skips all of that. Within days you'll hear about a shared future, a soulmate feeling, sometimes even talk of marriage, long before either of you has earned the right to say it. Researchers call the pattern love bombing: constant contact, grand declarations, a flood of warmth designed to make you feel chosen before you've had time to check whether any of it holds up.
None of that proves someone is lying. Some real relationships do move fast. What should catch your attention is the mismatch: enormous emotional intimacy paired with an almost total absence of anything you could verify.
The video call that never happens
This is the test that quietly does most of the work. Ask for a short video chat, nothing elaborate, just a few minutes to say hello with a camera on. A real person, even a shy one, will find a way to make that happen eventually. A scammer will not, because the profile photos usually belong to someone else entirely: a model, an officer, a stranger whose pictures were lifted from somewhere public. According to AARP, the excuses tend to repeat themselves: a broken camera, a bad connection, a work policy against video, one delay after another that never quite resolves.
Watch, too, for the push to leave whatever app or site you met on. Mark Solomon, president of the International Association of Financial Crimes Investigators, notes that scammers want the conversation moved off dating platforms quickly, because those platforms can identify suspicious accounts and shut them down. A private messaging app has no such safety net, and that is exactly the appeal for someone running the same script on several people at once.
Why the guard comes down
Sharing something painful, a divorce, a health scare, a hard year, tends to accelerate whatever comes next, because vulnerability is precisely what makes the approach work. Petros Efstathopoulos, VP of research at RSAC, has pointed out that once someone reveals what they're missing or struggling with, a scammer knows exactly how to shape their attention around it. It isn't a coincidence that the perfect partner keeps turning out to want exactly what you needed to hear.
Then comes the ask, and it rarely arrives as a lump sum. It starts smaller than you'd expect: a phone bill, a plane ticket to finally meet, a medical bill for a relative you've heard about but never met. AARP's most recent survey found that among adults aged 50 and older, one in ten had been asked for money or a cryptocurrency investment by someone they'd met online, with the 50 to 64 age group reporting it at roughly twice the rate of those 65 and older. Each request is framed as the last one. It rarely is.
A scammer can fake a face, a job, an accent, a whole biography. What's much harder to fake is a working camera on a video call.
What actually protects you
None of this requires becoming suspicious of everyone who's kind to you online. It requires one habit: before any money moves, insist on a real-time video call, and treat every excuse against it as data rather than bad luck. Search their photos elsewhere online and see where else they turn up. Tell one friend or relative about the relationship early, before affection has a chance to talk you out of listening to them later. People running these scripts are counting on isolation and speed. Slowing down costs you nothing that matters, and it's the one move they can't script around.