Romance Scam: How to Check a Profile Before You Send Money

The investigation started with a woman in Mandeville, Louisiana, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. She was 77, and she had lost more than $100,000 in a romance scam. Federal prosecutors in New Orleans followed the money and found a network that had been working the same play for years. Its members posed as generals, including a four-star general, as philanthropists and as oil rig workers. They reached out on Facebook and Instagram, moved the conversations to WhatsApp, and asked for money for charity work or medical emergencies. Their favorite targets were widows over sixty.

In July 2025 a jury in the Eastern District of Louisiana found a man from Marietta, Georgia, guilty after a four-day trial. A federal judge later sentenced him to 25 years in prison. According to the government, he was responsible for more than $3.5 million in losses.

That case is unusual mainly because it ended in court. Everything else about it is the standard romance scam pattern: a stolen identity, a job that explains distance, a long run of affection, and then a request for money. The stories change from case to case. The script barely does.

This guide walks through that script, shows how to check a profile and its photos yourself, and covers what to do if money has already moved. One thing first. People who fall for this are not stupid or gullible. They are up against practiced operators who do this for a living.

How big the romance scam problem is

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, known as IC3, publishes the most detailed numbers. Its 2025 report lists a category for fraud that runs on fake relationships and trust. The FBI counts romance scams in it, along with schemes like the grandparent scam. That category drew 23,159 complaints in 2025 and reported losses of about $929 million, up from roughly $672 million the year before. People over sixty accounted for about $584 million of it.

The Federal Trade Commission collects reports separately. In April 2026 it published an analysis of social media fraud. Nearly 60 percent of people who lost money to a romance scam in 2025 said it started on a social media platform. Dating apps are one door among several.

Both agencies stress that reported numbers understate the problem. Many people never report at all. Some feel ashamed. Others still believe the relationship is real when the money is long gone.

The script behind every romance scam

The opening is unremarkable. A match on a dating app, a friend request on Facebook, sometimes a “sorry, wrong number” text that turns into a friendly chat. Nothing about it feels like a scam.

Within days comes the suggestion to switch apps. WhatsApp, Telegram, Google Chat. The excuse sounds reasonable: the dating subscription is about to expire, or the person rarely logs in. The real reason is that platforms have reporting tools and moderators, while a private chat has neither. In an earlier FTC review of romance scam reports, about 40 percent of the detailed accounts mentioned one of those three messaging apps.

Then the intensity picks up fast. Good morning messages, long conversations at night, pet names after a week, talk of fate and a shared future soon after. Police investigators have a name for it: love bombing. It works because it meets real needs. Many targets are widowed, divorced, recently moved or simply lonely, and here is someone who listens at any hour and never seems tired of them.

The profile always comes with a job that explains why meeting is impossible. In that FTC review, the most common lie was that the person was stationed at a faraway military base. Offshore oil rig work was another favorite. The job does double duty. It explains the distance, and it makes money trouble believable, because bank accounts are supposedly frozen while deployed or overseas.

Video calls never quite happen. The camera is broken, the base has no bandwidth, a commanding officer has forbidden it. Occasionally there is a short, grainy call, and afterward it is back to text.

Only when the bond is solid does money come up, and the first ask is usually small. A customs fee for a package. A plane ticket. A hospital bill. Once someone has paid, the next emergency arrives, and with each payment it gets harder to walk away from the ones before. Often a second character appears around this point, a lawyer, a diplomat or a shipping agent, who confirms the story from the outside. In that same FTC review, crypto and bank transfers made up more than 60 percent of reported losses, and gift cards showed up in about a quarter of the cases.

The investment version, sometimes called pig butchering

A second kind of romance scam never asks for help at all. The person on the other end seems successful and comfortable. In passing they mention how much they make trading crypto or foreign currency, and they offer to show you how. The FTC describes exactly this shift: scammers casually offer investment tips and then steer their target to a fake trading platform.

The platform looks professional and shows quick gains. Small withdrawals may even work at first, which builds trust for larger deposits. When the victim finally tries to cash out, a tax, a fee or an unlocking charge comes due. That gets paid too. Nothing comes back. English-language coverage often calls this “pig butchering,” because the victim is fattened before the slaughter. It is an ugly term, and it describes the scammers’ logic precisely.

How convincing this can be shows up in the FBI’s own outreach. Under an effort called Operation Level Up, the Bureau contacted 3,780 victims of crypto investment fraud in 2025. Seventy-eight percent of them did not know they were being scammed. They thought their accounts were real.

Romance scammer pictures: check the profile yourself

You cannot fact-check a feeling. You can fact-check a profile, and that is where the odds tip in your favor. Scammers almost always work with borrowed material. The face in the photos belongs to a real person who has no idea they are playing someone’s online partner.

Reverse search the photos

The most useful test takes five minutes. Save a profile photo and upload it to a search engine that supports image search. The FTC recommends exactly this step. Our guide to reverse image search explains how the major services differ and why one often finds what another misses.

If the same face turns up under a different name, you have your answer. Common finds are a real soldier with his own Instagram, a dentist with a practice website, a fitness model with an agency page. Romance scammer pictures are chosen with care. Uniforms, scrubs and hard hats signal reliability and explain absence at the same time.

A blank result proves nothing, though. Some images are mirrored or cropped to throw off search engines, and others come from private accounts that search engines do not index. Try several photos, and try a crop of just the face. More and more often, the images were never stolen at all. They were generated.

When nobody owns the face

A reverse search will not find an AI-generated face, because there is no original. How common that is remains hard to measure. In its 2025 report, the FBI counted more than $19 million in losses within its relationship and trust fraud category that likely involved AI, and it named fake profiles and scripts produced by AI chat generators. Measured against the total, that is small. It is probably only the part victims were able to recognize.

What helps then is the context around the photos. Real people have friends who comment, old blurry pictures, vacations spread across years. A profile with a dozen flawless photos, all apparently from the same week, with nobody else in any of them, deserves a second look.

Read the backstory twice

The second check is the story itself. Name, employer, posting, hometown: which of these can you confirm independently? A doctor working for a large aid group usually shows up somewhere. An engineer who runs his own company has a business filing. Our guide on how to search yourself online covers the same open sources from the other direction, and they work just as well on someone else.

Inconsistencies show up when you reread the chat. An American officer whose English reads like machine translation. Messages arriving at hours that make no sense for the claimed time zone. A daughter who is eight in one conversation and twelve in another. Keeping a fake biography straight for months is hard, and it shows.

Military romance scams

Service members are the most borrowed identity in this business, which is why “military romance scam” has become its own search term. U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division, the Army’s own detectives, has been warning about it for more than a decade. Scammers take the real name and rank of an actual soldier, pull photos from the internet and build a fake identity around them. Then they ask for money for things like special laptop computers, international telephones, military leave papers and transportation fees.

None of those requests make sense. Army CID has called requests to “purchase leave papers” outright theft and points to the support programs that exist for soldiers serving overseas. Leave is not something you buy. A “soldier” who needs money for leave paperwork is not a soldier. The real service member in the photos is a victim too, often flooded with messages from people who believe they were in a relationship with him.

The network from Louisiana went a step further and claimed to be generals. A general who needs a widow’s savings should end the conversation. By the time that request arrives, months of daily messages have usually done their work.

Who is on the other end

The image of a lone con artist charming one widow at a time no longer fits most romance scams. Behind many profiles are organized groups that split the work. Some people write, others supply bank accounts, others move the money onward.

Part of this industry sits in Southeast Asia, and there the people typing are often victims themselves. In August 2023 the UN human rights office reported that at least 120,000 people in Myanmar may be held in situations where they are forced to carry out online scams, with estimates for Cambodia around 100,000. Many were lured with fake job offers. Survivors describe punishment for missing daily targets. These compounds are best known for the investment version.

For anyone who was taken in, that context matters. You were not outwitted by one unusually clever person. You faced a tested process, scripted excuses and possibly several people taking turns on the same chat.

If money has already been sent

The first impulse is often to confront the person. It is better not to. Warning them gives them time to empty accounts and invites a new story about why everything is different from how it looks. Ending contact quietly works better.

Call your bank or card issuer first, before anything else. Transfers can sometimes be recalled in the first hours, and that only works if someone calls immediately. Then file reports with the FBI at ic3.gov and with the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. If the person used a dating app or social network, report the profile there as well, so it is harder to reuse.

Before you report, save everything. Export the chat history. Write down profile names, usernames and phone numbers. Collect transfer receipts, wallet addresses and gift card numbers, and take screenshots of the profile photos. Deleting the conversation can wait until it is all backed up, and ideally it never happens.

The second wave: recovery scams

A few weeks later, someone often reaches out to help. A law firm, a recovery service, a private investigator, sometimes a caller claiming to be from the FBI. They say they have traced your money and can get it back for a fee. This is almost always the same fraud in a second round, and the people behind it often know details from the first one.

The numbers are striking. The FBI received 10,516 complaints about recovery schemes in 2025, with reported losses of about $1.4 billion. The Bureau notes that this figure can include money lost in the original scam. In August 2025 it published a public warning about fictitious law firms targeting crypto scam victims with offers to recover funds, and it has separately warned about scammers impersonating IC3 itself.

Legitimate help does not charge you upfront to find your money. Real law enforcement does not call victims to sell them a refund.

When someone you love won’t believe it

Often it is an adult child, a sibling or a friend who spots the scam first. That conversation is hard, and it tends to fail the same way. The more the relationship is attacked, the harder the person defends it, because to them it is about someone who has written every morning for months.

Checking together works better than arguing. A reverse search of a single photo can do more than any argument, especially when it turns up the real officer with his own name and family. Suggesting a video call with a family member present is a fair request too. Someone who means it will agree. Someone running a scam will find a reason not to.

Blame does not help. Shame keeps people from admitting further payments and from reporting. It is the same mechanism behind the grandparent scam: the scammers benefit from every conversation a family does not have. Saying plainly that these are professionals, and that smart, educated people get caught, opens more doors than a lecture.

In the end a romance scam is a game of time. The scammer needs weeks to build trust, and needs those weeks to pass without anyone asking questions. That is why one image search matters so much, or one evening spent showing the chat to a friend before the next transfer goes out. Questions are bad for this business.

Frequently asked questions

What is a romance scam?

A romance scam is fraud built on a fake relationship. The scammer makes contact through a dating app or social media, spends weeks building trust and affection, and then asks for money, either to solve an emergency or to join an investment that looks profitable. The person in the photos is not the person typing, and a real meeting never happens. Most of the time the pictures are stolen from someone who has no idea they are being used.

How can I tell if romance scammer pictures are stolen?

Run a reverse image search. Save one or two profile photos and upload them to a search engine that supports image search. If the same face shows up under a different name, for example on a real service member's account, a dentist's practice page or a model's portfolio, the profile is fake. Cropping the image to just the face sometimes finds matches the full picture misses. No result does not prove the profile is real, because some pictures are AI-generated or come from private accounts.

What is a military romance scam?

A military romance scam uses the identity of a real or invented U.S. service member, usually someone deployed overseas. The uniform explains why the person cannot meet or video chat, and it makes money problems sound plausible. The requests are typical: fees for leave papers, a special phone or laptop, transportation home. The Army's criminal investigators have warned for years that these requests are a giveaway. Service members do not pay to go on leave.

Can I get my money back?

Sometimes, if you move quickly. Call your bank or card issuer right away, because transfers can occasionally be recalled within the first hours. Then file a report with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov and with the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. Crypto and gift card losses are much harder to recover. Be very careful with anyone who contacts you afterward offering to recover the money for a fee.

What is a recovery scam?

A second fraud aimed at people who already lost money. Someone posing as a lawyer, a recovery firm or even a government agency reaches out and claims they traced the funds. Getting them back only requires an upfront fee. The FBI received more than 10,000 complaints about these schemes in 2025. Real law enforcement does not charge victims to return stolen money.