Romance fraud is slow. The money moves in instalments, over weeks or months, each payment framed as the last obstacle before the promised meeting finally happens.

In 2022, close to 70,000 people in the United States told the Federal Trade Commission they had been caught in a romance scam. Losses came to $1.3 billion, with a median individual loss of $4,400, per the agency’s February 2023 data spotlight. The following year the shape held: 64,003 complaints, $1.14 billion, and a median loss of $2,000, which the FTC described as the highest of any imposter scam category it tracks.

Whether that billion-dollar figure is still climbing is a harder question than it looks. Overall fraud losses across every category reached a record $15.9 billion in 2025, up from $12.5 billion the year before, as reported by AARP. That is all fraud, not romance fraud specifically, and the two do not necessarily move together. The FTC has not published a headline romance-only annual total for 2024 or 2025 in the same form as its earlier spotlights, so the direction of the romance line on its own should be treated as unsettled rather than assumed.

One scope note before going further. These are self-reported figures, filed by people who chose to fill in a complaint form. They are a floor, not a census, and the gap between the two is almost certainly large.

The rate is lower, the sums are bigger

Released on 1 December 2025, the FTC’s annual report to Congress on older consumers puts the age pattern plainly. Total losses among people aged 60 and over rose from roughly $600 million in 2020 to about $2.4 billion in 2024, a fourfold increase. The agency attributes most of that rise to a surge in claims above $100,000, often tied to investment schemes, romance scams, or impersonations.

Buried in the same document is a finding that complicates the usual story. Older adults filed fraud complaints at a lower rate than younger adults, a pattern the FTC says has held for years. Its own reading is that older people may be more likely to walk away without paying when a scam reaches them, more likely to notify the agency even when nothing was lost, or some mix of the two.

Fewer older people appear to get caught by a scam, but the ones who do lose considerably more, which cuts against the idea that this age group is simply more credulous. In the FTC’s analysis of 2018 data, people aged 40 to 69 filed the highest number of complaints, while those aged 70 and over recorded the highest median individual losses, at $10,000. Retirement accounts, paid-off houses, and accumulated savings are simply available to be moved in a way that a thirty-year-old’s current account is not.

Why the money keeps moving after the doubt starts

The most useful research on how these frauds hold together predates the current loss figures by a decade. In a 2013 paper in the British Journal of Criminology, Monica Whitty interviewed twenty people who had been targeted through online dating and built what she called the Scammers Persuasive Techniques Model, a staged account of how the relationship is constructed, tested with small requests, then escalated.

What we find useful in Whitty’s paper is the argument that the errors victims make resemble those seen in other mass-marketing frauds, and her borrowing of the near-win idea from gambling research to explain why some stay in after suspicion arrives. Whitty and Tom Buchanan later found, in Criminology and Criminal Justice, that the loss of the imagined relationship was itself a serious harm, separate from the money, including among people who never sent a cent.

This is qualitative work with a small sample, and it describes mechanism rather than measuring how often that mechanism operates.

Where the approach actually comes from

Dating apps get the blame, and the data does not really support the emphasis. In its 27 April 2026 release, the FTC found that close to 60 per cent of people who lost money to a romance scam in 2025 said it began on a social media platform, with Facebook the most commonly named.

A companion data spotlight breaks the all-scam social media share down by age, and the gradient is steep: 40 per cent of complaints from people aged 18 to 29 named social media as the origin, falling to 23 per cent among those in their seventies and 14 per cent among people 80 and over. That breakdown covers every scam category rather than romance alone, but it suggests the oldest cohorts are being reached, disproportionately, by other routes.

What the figures cannot settle

Consumer Sentinel counts complaints, and in our reading of the data it cannot say whether a widowed person is more likely to be approached, more likely to engage, or simply more likely to have assets worth pursuing. The tempting causal story about isolation and vulnerability isn’t in this dataset, and treating a rising loss total as evidence of rising susceptibility confuses reporting behaviour with risk.

Under-reporting probably runs the other way from what people assume. Losing a large sum to someone you believed loved you is embarrassing in a way that a fake parcel-delivery text is not, and the recorded medians are drawn only from those who chose to come forward.

Complaints can be filed with the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov, and the AARP Fraud Watch Network runs a free helpline for people working out what has happened to a relative or to themselves. Neither recovers money often, but both feed the counts that everything above is built on.

Full figures for 2026 will not arrive until well into next year.

The gap between what’s filed and what actually happened will still be there when they do.