Broken Hearts, Empty Wallets
Don’t Get Fooled By Romance Scams
Canadians who go online to seek a romantic partner may fall in love and end up spending the rest of their lives with a perfect match. In many cases, however, romance seekers end up just as lonely as they were before, only thousands of dollars poorer.
Every year, roughly one thousand Canadians report to authorities that they’ve fallen for romance scams, with total losses of about $50 million, says the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC). Those are just the reported incidents. Since most victims are too embarrassed to admit they’d been taken in, the actual number of romance scams is likely many times higher, says the CAFC, a national police service for fraud and identity-theft reporting jointly managed by the RCMP, the Ontario Provincial Police and the Competition Bureau of Canada.1
Most romance scams begin on social media and dating platforms that have minimal verification processes, although even dating sites with strict verification requirements have generated complaints. The safest vehicles for finding romance are generally those that require the most effort to create a profile.
The Victims
Most romance scam victims are middle-aged, but seniors account for the largest individual losses, says a report from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. Those dabbling in cryptocurrency are similarly frequent targets. Here are some Canadian examples from last year alone in which scam victims stepped forward. The news clips make for disturbing viewing.
In June 2025, Barbara Grant, 75, a former oil and gas executive in Calgary, reported to Global News that she had lost her $800,000 life savings through a romance scam that had begun on a dating site during the pandemic. The scammer earned her trust, then made up financial emergencies like an arrest in Qatar that required multiple bank transfers.2
In August 2025, another Calgary woman, Shawna Nelson, 63, reported that she’d gradually lost her life savings of $380,000 through a romance scam that lasted several years. The relationship had begun on WhatsApp about five years earlier. The man claimed he worked for the U.S. government and was not allowed to show his picture. Ms. Nelson began transferring the man money about three years later, then grew suspicious.3
In August 2025, a Toronto man, David Aning, said he lost his life savings of nearly $200,000 after meeting a fake “Pierre.” The victimization came despite Mr. Aning’s careful efforts to ascertain that Pierre was a real person, insisting he show a photo with a sign indicating the date and time and follow up with a video call, all of which the scammer did. Pierre built up trust via daily chats and photo verification before luring Mr. Aning to a fraudulent cryptocurrency platform. Mr. Aning appeared to be making investment gains for a while, but was never able to withdraw his money.4
The Scam
Regardless of the platform on which the relationship begins, the scams tend to follow a pattern. Online romance seekers should watch for these red flags:
1. Suspicious profile photos and videos
Scammers often illustrate fake profiles with stock or stolen photos from the internet. A set of sharp shots of a handsome man or beautiful woman could indicate that you’re looking at a stolen image of a model in an advertisement, a celebrity or an influencer. Similarly, if the photo is blurry or obscures the person’s face, you may be dealing with a scammer. You can check a photo’s authenticity by using reverse image search tools such as those found on Google Lens, Bing, TinEye, PimEyes and FaceCheckID. Once a photo is saved and uploaded to their sites, it gets checked to see if it has appeared anywhere else.
Fraudsters are making increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate fake profile photos and videos. Programs can compose artificial, but very convincing, faces by copying images of ears, eyes, mouths, hair and so on, and turn the resulting image into a video. Some still do a less-than-perfect job, however, so minor glitches are a giveaway.
2. Suspicious biographies
Romance scammers tend to cut and paste generic, formulaic biographies to capture victims’ trust and appeal to the broadest possible audience. Your fake romantic interest will often claim to be wealthy or a professional, usually working offshore or in a remote location, and be recently widowed or divorced.
3. Love bombing, but no in-person meeting
Once you begin communicating, your prospective romantic partner showers you with compliments and wants to know all about you. By collecting details about your hobbies and opinions, they can claim to share interests and agree with your views on everything. If the fraudsters have used AI, your fake boyfriend or girlfriend will never have to go to work, sleep or otherwise step away, making them always available to chat. Over weeks and months, the scammer continues to shower you with compliments and begins using increasingly endearing terms through a process called “love bombing.” You won’t be able to meet them in person just yet, since they’re working on an offshore oil rig or in a far-off corner of the world (see above), but a meeting is always just around the corner.
4. Secrecy and a need to move off-platform
Scammers don’t want you to mention your online relationship to anyone else, lest they warn you away or want to investigate themselves. The scammer comes up with some apparently valid reason why your relationship must be kept secret. For the same reason, they may ask you to move communication off the original platform to apps that have less moderation and oversight, such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Google Hangouts, emails or texts.
5. A financial emergency
Once they’ve built up an attachment with you and won your trust, the fraudster creates a financial emergency—a lost wallet or a need for money for plane tickets, legal fees or for medical expenses—that can be remedied only through untraceable transactions via gift cards, wire transfers or cryptocurrency.
6. They’re not finished yet
Victims of romance scams seeking to recover their losses often get burned for a second time through “recovery room” scams. These fraudsters pose as lawyers, government agents or recovery companies and claim to be able to help recover lost money in exchange for an up-front fee to cover initial expenses that can be paid through cryptocurrency, gift cards or wire transfers. Those who suspect they may have been victimized should instead contact the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.
The Scammers
Romance scams are often run by Southeast Asian criminal syndicates operating from compounds in countries like Myanmar, Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand or Laos, or in Africa in Ghana and Nigeria. The scammers themselves are trafficked people who get lured to the compounds with promises of interesting jobs and high pay, only to discover that there is little pay beyond food and a mattress, and that the office is surrounded by barbed wire and perhaps even local militia to prevent escape. These poor souls sit at computers where they communicate with dozens or even hundreds of unsuspecting Westerners, each of whom thinks they’ve found a new love interest.5
Money Mules
In some cases, instead of losing money, you’ll be offered it. Your fraudulent romantic partner may pose as the heir to a fortune, a lottery winner, a business person or an investor who has a pile of money they can’t move themselves. The scammer may ask you to open a bank account, use peer-to-peer apps or recruit others to help them deposit cash, cheques, wire transfers or cryptocurrency and may offer you a commission for your trouble. What they are doing is turning you into a “money mule” through which they can launder ill-gotten gains, often the proceeds collected from other romantic victims.
Victims who get sent money by scammers can end up worse off than those whose money was taken. Once a bank’s computers detect a suspicious pattern of money movement, an account may be frozen for months or years while bank officials investigate, ruining the account holder’s credit rating in the process. Unknowing money mules may be charged with money laundering or fraud, and may be forced to pay restitution, have their assets frozen, and face fines or even jail time.
Approval Phishing
Don’t know anything about cryptocurrency? Your new boyfriend or girlfriend will teach you how to buy it. The fraudster may share success stories about people who’ve made millions from Bitcoin, Ethereum or Tron and encourage you to buy cryptocurrency and keep it in an electronic wallet. Once the cryptocurrency is bought, the “crypto service” may send a request asking you to approve access to your wallet. Unfortunately, there is no crypto service, and you’ve just given the fraudster access to your wallet. This scheme is called “approval phishing.”
Mail-Order Partners
It makes basic economic sense that people in developing countries would be eager to partner with those in developed countries. Western men—it’s almost always men—seeking partners in other countries can save the cost of airfare and accommodation by paying mail-order bride platforms to match them with eligible women, most often in Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America. The find-a-bride platforms generate revenue through membership fees, and in some cases, the man has married, or at least entered into a satisfying relationship, with the woman he met online. Often, however, the pattern follows the traditional scam route, with fraudsters using a stolen or AI-generated photo of an attractive woman to pose as a prospective bride, then building up trust via love bombing while simultaneously urging the target to move offline and dodging video calls or meetings. Once trust is established, the overseas fiancée develops an urgent need for money.
Richard Morrison, CIM, is a former editor and investment columnist at the Financial Post. richarddmorrison@yahoo.ca
1 https://antifraudcentre-centreantifraude.ca/scams-fraudes/romance-rencontre-eng.htm
2 https://globalnews.ca/news/11217545/alberta-romance-scam-td-bank/
3 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/romance-scam-calgary-woman-1.7600484
4 https://toronto.citynews.ca/2025/08/06/speakers-corner-suspected-romance-scam-200k/
5 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw076g5wnr3o