Romance Scams Don't Start on Dating Apps: What the FTC Data Actually Shows

Last updated: August 2026. All figures from the FTC Consumer Sentinel Network and the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. Sources listed at the end.

Ask most people where romance scams happen and they will say dating apps. It is the intuitive answer. Dating apps are where strangers go to meet strangers with romantic intent, so that is presumably where romantic fraud lives.

The Federal Trade Commission publishes the data to check that assumption, and the assumption does not survive it.

In April 2026, the FTC's Division of Consumer Response and Operations released its analysis of 2025 fraud reports. Buried in a spotlight mostly about shopping and investment scams is a sentence that should have reframed a decade of public safety messaging: nearly 60% of people who reported losing money to a romance scam in 2025 said it started on a social media platform.

Where romance scams actually start

The FTC asks people how the scammer first reached them. Ranked by fraud reports that indicated a financial loss, 2025 looked like this:

• Website or app: 31%
• Social media: 28%
• Phone call: 11%
• Email: 10%
• Text: 7%

That is across all fraud types. Narrow it to romance scams specifically and social media climbs to nearly 60% of loss reports. Romance fraud is not evenly distributed across the internet. It concentrates where the profiles are free, the volume is enormous, and nobody is checking whether the person behind the account exists.

Reported losses to romance scams that originated on social media came to $298 million in 2025. Total losses to all scams that started on social media reached $2.1 billion, roughly eight times the 2020 figure of $261 million. The trend has been relentless: $789 million in 2021, $1.2 billion in 2022, $1.5 billion in 2023, $1.9 billion in 2024.

Facebook is the single biggest venue

The FTC names names. In 2025, people reported losing more money to scams that started on Facebook than on any other social media platform, with WhatsApp and Instagram a distant second and third.

The comparison that lands hardest: in 2025, people reported far more money lost to scams originating on Facebook alone than they reported losing to text scams or email scams. Text message fraud gets the public awareness campaigns. Facebook quietly takes more money.

The victim profile is backwards

The stock image of a romance scam victim is a lonely widow in her seventies. The FTC's age data points the other way, at least for scams that begin on social media.

Here is the share of loss reports where the scam started on social media, broken out by the age of the person reporting:

• 18 to 29: 40%
• 30 to 39: 32%
• 40 to 49: 32%
• 50 to 59: 32%
• 60 to 69: 29%
• 70 to 79: 23%
• 80 and over: 14%

Young adults are the most likely to be scammed via social media, not the least. The reason is not that they are more gullible. It is that they live there. Social media was the costliest fraud contact method in 2025 for every age group under 80, measured by total reported losses.

One important caveat, and we would rather state it than let someone catch it: this age breakdown covers all scams that started on social media, not romance scams specifically. The FTC does not publish a romance-only age split at this level of detail. Anyone who quotes these percentages as romance scam victim ages is overstating what the data supports.

Why the misdirection matters

This is not a point about which company deserves blame. It is a point about where people drop their guard.

Someone who has been told for years that romance scams live on dating apps arrives on a dating app braced for it. They read profiles skeptically. They notice the model-grade photos and the reluctance to video call. Then they accept a friend request on Facebook from someone attractive who shares three mutual connections, and none of that skepticism activates, because this is not a dating app. It is just a person who found them.

That gap is the product. Scammers work where the target is not expecting them.

Dating platforms, for all their flaws, impose friction that social media does not. Identity and photo verification, in-app messaging that can be scanned, reporting flows, and account bans that actually cost the scammer something. Facebook was not designed to broker introductions between strangers with money involved, so it never built the machinery for it.

None of which makes dating platforms clean. In August 2025, Match Group agreed to pay $14 million to resolve FTC charges stemming from a 2019 complaint over its six-month guarantee, its handling of users who filed billing disputes, and how hard it made cancelling a subscription. The industry has earned plenty of scrutiny. It has just earned it for different things than the public assumes.

How the scam runs once contact is made

The FTC's reporting describes a consistent pattern. Scammers tailor the approach using what the profile already tells them, which on social media is a great deal. Where you work, who your family is, whether you recently moved, whether you are grieving.

From there it forks. One path invents a crisis requiring money, the classic version. The other, increasingly common, casually offers investment advice and steers the target onto a fake trading platform where balances and profits are fabricated. Small withdrawals are honoured early to build trust, which is what makes the later, larger deposits feel safe.

Investment fraud was the costliest category of social media scam in 2025 at $1.1 billion, more than half of all reported social media losses. A meaningful share of that began as romance. The categories bleed into each other, and the FTC counts a scam by how it was reported rather than by how it opened.

A third variant skips money entirely at first. The scammer coaxes intimate photos, then threatens to send them to the target's contact list unless they pay. Social media makes this one work precisely because the contact list is right there, visible, and obviously real.

What the numbers can't tell you

Two limits worth stating plainly, because most articles quoting these figures state neither.

The first is underreporting. FTC-cited research found that only about 4.8% of people who experienced mass-market consumer fraud complained to a government entity or the Better Business Bureau. Every figure here is a floor, not a measurement. Romance fraud carries shame on top of financial loss, so its reporting rate is plausibly worse than average, though nobody can say by how much.

The second is a gap in the 2025 data itself. The FTC did not collect reports during the government shutdown that year. The annual totals are drawn from an incomplete collection window, which means year-over-year comparisons involving 2025 should be read as directional rather than exact.

For a second source on scale: the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center logged $929,287,469 in confidence and romance fraud losses in 2025, within a total of 1,008,597 complaints and $20.877 billion across all internet crime. Different collection method, different reporting population, same order of magnitude.

What actually protects you

The defences that work are unglamorous and they are the same regardless of where you met.

• Insist on a live video call before any emotional or financial commitment. Not a recorded clip, not a photo. A call where you can ask them to do something specific and see them do it. Refusal is the single most reliable signal there is.
• Reverse image search the photos. It takes twenty seconds and it catches the lazy majority.
• Treat any pivot to money as the end of the conversation, whether it arrives as a crisis or as generosity. Unsolicited investment advice from a new romantic interest is not a different thing from asking for money. It is the same thing with more steps.
• Be more suspicious off dating platforms, not less. The friend request from a stranger deserves more scrutiny than the dating profile, not less, because it arrived somewhere you were not braced.
• Lock down what your profiles broadcast. The FTC's advice here is specific: restrict who can see your posts and contacts, because that is the raw material for the tailored approach.

If you want the platform-side version of this, we have written separately about how to spot fake dating profiles, verifying that someone is who they claim to be, and the payment-app scams that target this space specifically. For meeting in person, our first date safety guide covers the practical version.

Frequently asked questions

Are dating apps safe from romance scams?

No platform is immune, and dating apps carry real romance fraud. But the FTC's 2025 data shows nearly 60% of romance scam losses began on social media rather than dating apps. The relative risk is not where public messaging has placed it. Dating platforms with identity verification, in-app messaging, and functioning reporting impose friction that open social networks do not.

Which platform has the most reported romance scams?

By reported dollar losses, Facebook leads all social media platforms, with WhatsApp and Instagram second and third by a wide margin. In 2025 people reported more money lost to scams starting on Facebook than to text or email scams.

How much money is lost to romance scams each year?

Reported losses to romance scams that originated on social media were $298 million in 2025 per the FTC. The FBI's IC3 recorded $929,287,469 in confidence and romance fraud for the same year across all contact methods. Both figures are floors, since research suggests roughly 4.8% of mass-market fraud victims report to authorities.

Who is most likely to be targeted by a social media scam?

For scams beginning on social media, adults aged 18 to 29 filed the highest share of loss reports at 40%, declining steadily with age to 14% for those 80 and over. This runs against the common assumption that older adults are the primary victims of social-media-originated fraud. Note this covers all scam types, not romance scams alone.

What is the first sign of a romance scam?

Consistent refusal or inability to appear on a live video call, usually explained by work, travel, a military deployment, or a broken camera. It is the one requirement a scammer using stolen photos cannot satisfy. A pivot toward money, whether asking for it or offering investment guidance, is the second.

Sources

• Federal Trade Commission, Data Spotlight: "Reported losses to scams on social media eight times higher than in 2020," Division of Consumer Response and Operations Staff, April 2026.
• Federal Trade Commission press release, "New FTC Data Show People Have Lost Billions to Social Media Scams," April 27, 2026.
• Federal Trade Commission, "Match Group Agrees to Pay $14 Million...," August 2025.
• FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2025 Internet Crime Report.
• Anderson, K. B., "To Whom Do Victims of Mass-Market Consumer Fraud Complain?" (May 2021).