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The cost of heartbreak: Americans lost over a billion dollars to romance scams in 2025
Published on March DATE, 2026
As the world celebrates Valentine’s Day, love is in the air — and criminals are once again getting ready to tug at your heartstrings with romance scams. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), over 55,500 Americans reported being shot through the heart in the first three quarters of 2025, with scammers to blame, giving online love a bad name.
Caught in a bad romance
The FTC data on fraud helps us see the most recent romance fraud trends. Of the 55,604 reported incidents in the first three quarters of 2025, 33,914 (61%) were related to some financial loss. While the median loss across all victims was only around $2,050, the overall sum came to a whopping 1.162 billion dollars — which suggests that the cases in the upper end of the data set involved truly staggering amounts of money.
Why are romance scams so successful? Unlike many other cons that prey on greed or other vices, romance scams exploit emotional vulnerability and attachment. In a romance scam, the criminal builds a fake relationship with the victim over time, establishing trust. When they start asking for money or favors, the target is often so invested in the “relationship” that they’re unwilling to admit they were caught in a scam.
Romance scams are a constant threat to people seeking companionship — in a 2023 NordVPN consumer survey, nearly one in four US respondents admitted that they had been targeted by these scams in the past. Even official dating sites and apps don’t feel safe: 45% of the surveyed adults believed dating apps didn't do enough to verify their users, while 42% further claimed that the number of fake profiles and bots was growing.
