A friend in her sixties, recently widowed, started messaging someone on Facebook who claimed to be an engineer working on an oil rig off Western Australia. Six months later she’d sent him close to $40,000 and was planning to remortgage the house. That’s not a hypothetical. Scamwatch’s own loss figures for romance scams in Australia routinely run into the tens of millions of dollars a year, and the real number is almost certainly higher, because most victims never report it. Shame does a lot of the scammer’s work for them, long after the scammer has moved on to the next target.
Our take, and we’ll say it plainly: the hardest part of a romance scam isn’t the money. It’s getting someone to believe, while they’re still emotionally attached to a person who may not exist, that the relationship was built to extract cash from them. That takes longer than cancelling a card. If you’re reading this because someone you love is in the middle of one right now, the steps below are the ones that actually move the needle, in the order we’d do them this afternoon.
How these relationships actually get built
Romance scams rarely start with a request for money. They start with weeks, sometimes months, of ordinary-seeming attention: good morning texts, questions about the grandkids, a shared joke about a TV show. The scammer, often running several of these conversations at once from a script, is patient in a way genuine early dating rarely is. There’s no messiness, no bad mood, no cancelled plan. That smoothness is itself a signal, though it rarely reads as one from the inside, because it feels like finally being listened to.
The profile photos are usually stolen from a real person, often someone with a public-facing job like a surgeon, a soldier deployed overseas, or an oil rig worker, precisely because those jobs provide a built-in excuse for never video-calling and never meeting in person. Reverse image searching the profile photo is one of the fastest tells, and it’s worth doing before any feelings are involved, not after.
The ask for money, when it comes, is almost never framed as “give me money.” It’s a medical emergency, a customs fee to release a package of gifts, a visa problem, an investment opportunity the scammer is generously letting them in on. That last one has started overlapping heavily with crypto investment scams, where the romantic relationship becomes the on-ramp to a fake trading platform. We’ve written separately about the investment scams on social media that often share the same playbook, and it’s worth reading if the person you’re worried about has started talking about “a trading app my partner showed me.”
The signs that are easy to miss
Family members usually spot something’s wrong before the victim does, but they often describe the wrong thing. They focus on “he’s never met her in person” when the more useful signal is usually financial: sudden secrecy about bank accounts, new loans, selling jewellery or a car, or a sharp defensiveness when money comes up at all. That defensiveness isn’t suspicious behaviour from a guilty person. It’s the behaviour of someone who has been quietly coached, over months, to expect that “everyone else won’t understand our love.”
That coaching is the part people underestimate. Scammers actively pre-empt the intervention. They tell the victim their family will be jealous, or racist, or only care about money, specifically so that when family does raise concerns, it confirms what the scammer already predicted. If you come in hot with “this is a scam, he’s not real,” you’re stepping directly into a line the scammer rehearsed with the victim weeks ago.
What to actually say first
Lead with curiosity, not correction. Ask to see some messages, ask how they met, ask whether they’ve ever spoken on video with their camera and his camera both on at the same time. Genuinely listen to the answers rather than treating the conversation as a trap to spring. A gentle, specific question like “has he ever asked you to pay for something before you two have had a proper video call” tends to land better than a flat accusation, because it invites them to notice the pattern themselves rather than defend against your conclusion.
If they get defensive, that’s normal and it isn’t a sign you’ve failed. Drop it, and come back to it later rather than pushing. Scam counsellors who work with victims consistently say the same thing: trust takes longer to rebuild than it took to break, and nagging accelerates nothing.
What to do with the money, immediately
Separate from the emotional conversation, there are concrete financial steps that don’t require the victim to accept the relationship is fake yet. If money has already moved, call the bank straight away and ask about a scam or fraud hold; banks have gotten noticeably faster at freezing transfers in the last couple of years when a customer reports it quickly, though recovery still isn’t guaranteed once funds have left Australia.
It’s also worth freezing access to credit in the person’s name, because romance scam victims are sometimes talked into opening new credit cards or personal loans to keep the “relationship” funded, and a scammer with enough personal detail can occasionally go further and attempt identity fraud on top. We’ve laid out the exact process in our guide to how to freeze your credit file in Australia, and it’s a half-hour job that costs nothing.
Report the scam through Scamwatch, run by the ACCC, which tracks patterns across the country and feeds that intelligence to banks, telcos and law enforcement. If the scam involved a compromised account or there’s a cybercrime element, such as the scammer gaining remote access to a device, ReportCyber at cyber.gov.au is the right channel, run by the Australian Signals Directorate’s cyber security centre. Reporting rarely gets the money back, and we won’t pretend otherwise, but it does help regulators build the pattern recognition that eventually gets scam numbers and accounts shut down faster.
The platforms could do more, and mostly don’t
Here’s our mildly unpopular opinion: dating apps and social platforms carry more responsibility for romance scams than they’re usually given credit for, and the current verification systems are closer to theatre than protection. A blue tick or a photo-verification badge confirms someone’s selfie matches their profile photo at the moment of signup. It confirms nothing about whether that same account starts asking a match for gift cards eight weeks later, and it does nothing to stop a scammer from simply creating a fresh account once the first one gets reported.
We’d like to see mandatory, visible friction, things like a default delay before money or gift card language can even be typed into a dating app chat, similar to the fraud warnings some banks now show before a first transfer to a new payee. It wouldn’t stop everything. But it would stop the impulsive three-in-the-morning transfer that happens when someone’s emotionally flooded and not thinking clearly, and that’s exactly the moment these scams are designed to create.
If the scammer has access to devices or accounts
Some romance scams evolve into something closer to coercive control, where the scammer asks the victim to install remote access software “so I can help you fix your computer” or asks for passwords “because we shouldn’t have secrets.” If that’s happened, treat it as a security incident, not just a relationship problem. Check the router for unfamiliar connected devices using our home router security checklist, change passwords on email and banking first, and move to a password manager if the person’s been reusing the same one everywhere. Our rundown of password managers compared for Australians covers which ones are actually manageable for someone who isn’t especially tech-confident, which matters more than picking the objectively most secure option nobody will use.
Turning on multi-factor authentication matters here too, and if the household hasn’t already moved toward passkeys as explained for Australians, a scam like this is as good a prompt as any to start.
Why shame is the real obstacle, and what helps
We’d argue the single biggest barrier to recovery isn’t the money, it’s the silence afterwards. Victims often don’t tell family the full extent of what happened, sometimes for years, because the embarrassment of having been fooled feels worse than the financial loss itself. That silence is exactly what lets scammers occasionally re-contact the same victim months later under a new name, because the victim never processed the first loss publicly enough to recognise the second attempt.
The most useful thing a family member can do, once the immediate financial steps are handled, is simply remove the judgement from the conversation permanently. Not performatively, but genuinely: these scams succeed against intelligent, careful people because they’re built by people who do this full time, often running dozens of targets through well-tested scripts. Anyone lonely, recently bereaved, or going through a hard stretch is a plausible target, not a foolish one.
Our take on getting through the next few weeks
If someone you love is in a romance scam right now, the order of operations we’d actually follow this afternoon is: secure the money and the accounts first, report it to Scamwatch and the bank second, and only then start the slower work of helping them see the relationship clearly, at their pace rather than yours. Trying to do all three at once usually backfires, because the emotional conversation goes better once the practical fires are out and nobody’s arguing about a transfer that’s still mid-flight.
It won’t be quick. But we’ve seen enough of these play out to say the families that stay calm, keep the door open, and don’t make the victim relive their own embarrassment on repeat are the ones whose person eventually comes all the way back, both financially and otherwise.
— Em Castellano, Security Writer, Tech Geek
Featured image: AI-generated illustration.
