The four requests
Each is a way of moving money that is difficult or impossible to reverse. That difficulty is the point: it is why these four recur, rather than any characteristic of the person asked.
The emergency abroad
Request type · urgent transfer, wire or bank
A medical bill, a customs charge, an arrest, an accident — presented as sudden, expensive and time-limited. The person is always physically unreachable, and the reason for being unreachable was established long before the emergency was mentioned.
Why this one: a bank wire, once sent and collected, leaves no consumer chargeback route. Urgency exists to prevent the twenty-four hours in which someone would tell a family member.
The account they cannot access
Request type · receive and forward funds
Money is described as arriving into your account, to be forwarded onward — because theirs is frozen, or a transfer is stuck, or a payment cannot clear internationally. It is framed as a favour rather than a request for your money.
Why this one: forwarding funds on behalf of someone else can constitute money laundering regardless of intent. Beyond any loss, this request exposes the person asked to legal consequence.
The investment they want to share
Request type · cryptocurrency or trading platform
Not a request for money at all, in its own framing — an opportunity, often with a small early withdrawal that genuinely pays out. Larger deposits follow. Withdrawal then requires a fee, then a tax, then a compliance charge.
Why this one: a cryptocurrency transfer is final on settlement. The FTC has repeatedly reported cryptocurrency as a leading payment method by loss value in romance-related reports.
The small favour in cards
Request type · gift cards, codes read aloud or photographed
The lowest-value request and the most common opening one. A gift card for a birthday, a top-up, a small sum — with the card numbers sent by photograph or read out over a call.
Why this one: the value moves the instant the code is shared, and no retailer can reverse it. A gift card request is also a test: compliance with a small one reliably precedes a larger one.
What the reported figures do and do not say
Every figure here comes from a body that publishes its own methodology. Read the second column as carefully as the first.
Two limits worth stating plainly. First, all of these are reported figures: fraud that is never reported is absent from every one of them, and shame is a well-documented reason for not reporting. Second, aggregate losses in a band reflect both how often fraud occurs and how much money that band holds — a larger total does not by itself mean a higher chance of being targeted.
Behaviour that separates distance from evasion
Plenty of genuine people are far away, busy, or bad at video calls. The distinction is not distance itself but whether verification is met or deflected.
Ordinary, even if inconvenient
- A poor connection, a short call, an awkward camera angle — but the call happens.
- Reluctance to move quickly, including reluctance about money and about meeting.
- Details that stay consistent across weeks without needing to be re-explained.
- Willingness to be known by other people in your life, however slowly.
Evasion, in a recognisable pattern
- Every video attempt fails, and each failure arrives with a new and specific reason.
- Rapid intensity early — declarations of love before any verification has occurred.
- A profession that explains permanent unreachability: offshore, deployed, at sea.
- Discouraging you from mentioning the relationship to family, framed as privacy.
- The first money request arrives soon after the first refusal of a video call.
Where a report actually goes
Reporting routes differ by country. These are the official national ones; a police non-emergency line can direct you locally where neither applies.
The Federal Trade Commission operates the national consumer fraud reporting route, and the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center receives internet-enabled crime reports. Reports feed the datasets the figures above are drawn from.
Action Fraud is the national reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Police Scotland receives reports directly in Scotland.
Contact the bank or payment provider first where a transfer has just been made. Some transfers can be stopped before settlement; the window is short and measured in hours, not days.
Report the profile to the dating service itself. This does not recover money and is not a substitute for the routes above, but it is what removes the profile from circulation.
One thing worth saying to anyone reading this after the fact: the shame that stops people reporting is exactly the mechanism the fraud relies on. Reports are what make these patterns visible in published data at all.
Sources for every figure above
Each number is tied to the body that publishes it, so a reader can go and look rather than take this page’s word.
- Federal Trade Commission — Consumer Sentinel Network data and accompanying analysis. Source for the age-band loss pattern, for the fewer-reports-larger-sums direction, and for cryptocurrency's position among payment methods by loss value.
- FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center. Source for the US reporting route for internet-enabled crime.
- Action Fraud, the UK national fraud and cybercrime reporting centre. Source for the UK reporting route.
Published fraud figures are revised annually and the ranking of payment methods moves between editions. Where this page names a pattern rather than a single number, that is deliberate: the pattern has held across editions while individual totals have not.