As the country gets ready Valentine’s Day, the
FBI,
Better Business Bureau,
Global Cyber Alliance, and other government agencies and industry groups are sending out warnings about the surge in online romance scams.
The fraud campaigns, which are year-round threats, unsurprisingly ramp up this time of year as the focus on personal connections grows: gifts are often exchanged, flowers are sent, and people continue to go online searching for potential significant others.
“Valentine’s Day runs on emotion. Surprise, urgency, curiosity, trust, love,”
Emma Stevens, threat intelligence researcher for
Bitsight,
wrote this week. “For threat actors, that combination is hard to beat.”
Anne Cutler, cybersecurity evangelist at
Keeper Security, told MSSP Alert that “Valentine’s Day is one of the easiest moments of the year for romance scams to succeed, largely because people are more open to connection. When emotions run high, caution often slips quietly into the background, and scammers understand exactly how to use that to their advantage.”
A problem is that the romance scam environment has evolved, tilting the advantage even more to the fraudsters’ advantage. AI technologies – with their ability to write more convincing and more personal email messages, create deepfake audio and video, automate and accelerate operations – give the scammers more weapons to work with.
In addition, the scams are no longer run by a person or two using their PCs. Romance scams – along with investment and other financially motivated campaigns – are increasingly run out of
industrialized scam compounds in Asia and other regions that use hundreds of people who often are forced to run these scams, significantly scaling their numbers and extending their reach.
The Evolving Scam World
“Romance scams are not new, but how they operate has changed in meaningful ways,” the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA)
wrote this week. “What once relied on manual messaging and obvious inconsistencies has evolved into something more polished and harder to recognize. This combined with scalability means that we’ll only see the number of romance scams increase.”
AI-based tools and chatbots remove many of the warning signs people typically have relied on, so conversations are smoother, responses arrive quickly, and “emotional cues are picked up and reflected back with surprising accuracy. The result is a form of deception that feels less mechanical and more personal, even when it is anything but,” the organization wrote.
“Another important shift is how these scams are organized,” the GCA wrote. “What once looked like individual bad actors running long cons has increasingly become coordinated, scalable operations. These groups use automation to reach more people, sustain conversations longer, and refine their tactics over time.”
Familiar Patterns
Romance scams tend to follow a familiar pattern: initial contact is made by the bad actor on social media or a dating app, the communication moves quickly to establish an emotional connection, and then a suggestion to move the conversation to a private app like WhatsApp, Signal, or Telegram.
They dodge attempts to meet or talk over video, and eventually a request is made for money, financial help, or access to accounts. Once they have the money or information, communication is cut off.
“With the rise of AI-generated images, videos and voices, scammers can create extremely convincing identities that are hard to spot,”
Consumers Credit Union wrote.
“What tends to catch people off guard is how ordinary these interactions feel at the start,” Keeper Security’s Cutler said. “The profile looks believable, the conversation flows naturally and the attention feels steady rather than intense. In many cases, that sense of comfort builds gradually over days or even weeks, which is entirely intentional.”
The scammers don’t tend to ask for passwords or money immediate for fear of raising suspicions, she said. They’re patient.
Romance Goes Online
Such scams are happening as more people are gravitating to online dating apps. eHarmony says about 80 million Americans
use dating apps or websites.
The industry numbers put the threat into focus.
McAfee in its
Valentine’s Day research found that between December 1, 2025, and January 22, it
blocked hundreds of thousands of romance-related malicious URLs, with thousands tied to dating app-themed content and saw a surge in fake AI dating bots, with some users receiving more than 60 messages over 12 hours.
In addition, one in four Americans were presented with a fake profile or AI-generated bot, 35% spotted AI-generated or modified photos on dating apps or social media, and 53% said they’d been asked for money or financial information.
Big Money Lost
Victims can lose a lot of money in these scams. The
Federal Trade Commission reported that
$1.14 billion in losses to romance scams were reported in 2023. The FBI’s Boston Division said that more than 700 victims from Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island
lost about $20 million last year, and that other losses likely were unreported by victims who felt shame or embarrassment.
The agency’s San Francisco Division said victims in its territory
lost more than $40 million in 2025, almost twice as much as the $22 million lost the year before.
“These scams can be devastating,”
Krishna Vishnubhotla, vice president of product strategy at
Zimperium, told MSSP Alert. “Victims might lose a few hundred dollars or their entire savings, and in crypto cases, it can be millions with no way to recover. The problem is that the damage doesn’t stop at money. When someone falls for a scam text, phishing email, or fake wallet app, they often give away more than just money.”
Vishnubhotla added that “attackers collect personal info like names, addresses, birth dates, ID numbers, or even copies of documents. That data is then resold or used for identity theft, opening credit cards, taking loans, or filing fake tax returns in the victim’s name. It's a vicious cycle.”
Looking into a Difficult Future
It doesn’t promise to get much better. Credit rating company
Experian last month listed romance and relative-in-need scams among the
top five tech-driven threats that will affect businesses and consumers the most this year, saying AI-powered bots will run complex scams without much human intervention.
“These bots will respond convincingly, build trust over time, and manipulate victims with precision and emotion,” Experian experts wrote. “As they become harder to distinguish from real people and good bots, Experian predicts fraud will scale faster and become more financially and psychologically damaging.”
