Looking for Love on All the Wrong Pages

Romance scams have become a permanent feature in the online fraud landscape, according to financial services and government officials. Losses linked to scams that ensnare internet users in fake relationships and defraud them of their money totaled $1.14 billion in the U.S. in 2023, according to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. In January 2025, a 53-year-old woman was reportedly tricked out of $855,000 in what she believed was a secret long-term relationship with actor Brad Pitt.

Through our ATLAS intelligence reporting, Graphika regularly detects, tracks, and helps disrupt a wide array of scams on multiple online platforms. Working with industry partners at Meta, we’ve joined a campaign to raise public awareness about online scams. This report focuses on romance scams ahead of Valentine’s Day celebrations in multiple countries.

Our findings are not exhaustive but rather a set of case studies illustrating how these types of scams attempt to engage, deceive, and defraud people of their money. We’ve selected the examples based on a combination of key attributes, including their relevance as romance scams, prevalence across internet platforms, and notable tactics, techniques, and procedures.

 

Key Findings

• As seen in our previous reporting on shopping scams, romance scams occur globally. We’ve observed actors linked to locations in Nigeria and Kenya targeting users from the U.S. to Japan, often tailoring activities to specific target audiences. A network predominantly targeting older U.S. women, for instance, used inauthentic accounts impersonating U.S. military officials, while fake dating scams catering to Southeast Asians and Africans dangled the promise of visas for Western countries.
• These scams span the entire internet, with operators using different web surfaces at different stages in the kill chain. Social media and other public platforms are typically among the channels by which scammers first engage targets before directing them to messaging apps such as Telegram – where they’re less likely to be detected and disrupted. There, the scammers can engage in social engineering and manipulate the target into sending money via wire transfers, gift cards, or cryptocurrency exchanges.
• Impersonation and fake personas are a core component of romance scams, providing a character for the target to build an emotional relationship with. They might be a celebrity or other high-profile public figure, or an ordinary member of the public whose images the scammers use in fake dating posts.
• Although deception and inauthentic behaviors are integral, romance scammers seem to focus on quantity over quality; the case studies in this report often comprised hundreds of online accounts engaged in low-quality, unoriginal deception that was quickly exposed with basic checks. Many of the accounts were newly created, suggesting they are regularly removed by the platforms, and listed locations, languages, and phone numbers that didn’t match the persona’s claimed location, or gave inconsistent and implausible biographical details. Others impersonated celebrities known to not use social media, or used photos proven by a reverse image search to come from real people’s accounts.