Lonely Hearts, Open Wallets

Singles’ Day started in China as a student joke holiday for people without partners and is now the biggest online shopping event in the world, with retailers in many other countries running their own 11.11 sales. On the same day, millions of people are reminded that they are single and pushed to act before a deal runs out.

Police in Macao and security firms like Kaspersky put out warnings every year around 11.11, mostly about fake shops and phishing links. Romance fraud gets far less attention, even though it works on the same impulse: someone who has spent weeks talking to a person they now trust is far more likely to act on a tip that comes with a deadline.

That blind spot shows up in the numbers too. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded about $929 million in romance scam losses in 2025, spread across roughly 23,000 complaints. In the same report, investment fraud cost Americans $8.65 billion. The two figures sit in different rows of the table, but a large share of both comes from the same crime.

How The Scam Has Evolved

Ten years ago, a typical romance scam ended with a request for gift cards, a plane ticket or money for a hospital bill. The current version takes longer and pays far more. Organized groups, many run from scam compounds in Southeast Asia, work on a single target for weeks or months before moving the conversation to cryptocurrency, where the amounts are bigger and the money is much harder to get back.

Singles’ Day is mainly a shopping event, but the surge in online activity around it shows how many ways fraudsters now have to reach people. Dating apps, social media and messaging platforms all give scammers a way in and a way to stay in contact. AI has made the whole operation cheaper to run: the FBI’s 2025 report says scammers now use AI chat tools to write fake profiles and scripts, which lets one operator keep dozens of conversations going at once.

A few factors make these schemes particularly difficult to detect.

• Convincing fake identities: Fraudsters can use stolen photographs, fabricated biographies, and AI-generated images to make their profiles appear genuine. Some may also use manipulated video or audio to make it harder for victims to question who they are communicating with.
• Emotional manipulation: Romance scams rely on more than convincing stories. Scammers deliberately build trust and emotional dependence, making victims less likely to question their intentions. Some may even discourage victims from discussing the relationship or financial requests with friends and family.
• Moving conversations between platforms: Initial contact may take place on a dating application or social media platform before the scammer encourages the victim to move to a private messaging service. This can make the interaction harder to monitor and remove it from platforms where suspicious profiles might otherwise be reported.
• Different ways of extracting money: Requests may involve bank transfers, gift cards, cryptocurrency, or payments to third-party accounts. In some cases, victims are persuaded to receive and transfer money themselves, unknowingly becoming part of a wider fraud or money laundering operation.

The financial consequences can extend beyond the individual victim, particularly when fraud proceeds move through multiple accounts and payment channels.

The Financial Crime Risks for Financial Institutions

For banks and other financial institutions, romance scams can be difficult to identify because the customer may be making payments voluntarily. Unlike an unauthorized card transaction, the victim may personally initiate and approve each transfer.

However, the activity surrounding these payments can offer clues.

Unusual Payments to New Beneficiaries

A customer who suddenly begins making frequent or high-value transfers to unfamiliar individuals may warrant closer attention, particularly when the payments are inconsistent with their usual activity. Repeated transfers to newly added beneficiaries, unexpected international payments, or sudden changes in transaction patterns may indicate possible financial exploitation.

Rapid Movement of Funds

Some romance scams involve several accounts or payment channels. Money may be transferred from a victim’s account to an intermediary before being moved elsewhere. Where victims are instructed to receive and forward funds, their accounts may also be used to move proceeds of fraud.

Cryptocurrency-Related Transfers

Romance-investment scams often involve cryptocurrency. A victim may be persuaded to make repeated transfers to a virtual asset service provider to fund an investment on a fraudulent platform. Unusual transfers to cryptocurrency exchanges, particularly when accompanied by other indicators of social engineering, may warrant further investigation.

Potential Money Mule Activity

Not every person involved in moving fraudulent funds is aware of what they are doing. Some romance scam victims are persuaded to receive money from other individuals and transfer it onward, sometimes in exchange for a commission. They may believe they are helping a partner or assisting with a legitimate business transaction, when their account is actually being used to move illicit funds.

These indicators should be considered in context. An unusual transfer or payment to a cryptocurrency exchange does not automatically indicate fraud. The customer’s transaction history, circumstances, and other available information should inform any decision to investigate or intervene.

What Financial Institutions Can Do to Reduce the Risk

Identifying romance scams requires more than monitoring transactions. Employees also need to understand how these schemes work and why customers may not recognize that they are being deceived.

There are several practical steps institutions can take:

• Train customer-facing staff. Frontline employees are often in a position to notice unusual payment behavior or hear explanations that raise concerns. They should understand common romance scam tactics and know how to approach customers who may be sending money under pressure or emotional manipulation.
• Review transaction monitoring rules. Fraud and AML teams should consider whether existing monitoring scenarios capture patterns such as repeated transfers to new beneficiaries, rapid movement of funds, and unusual payments to virtual asset service providers.
• Improve coordination between fraud and AML teams. Romance scams can generate both fraud and money laundering concerns. Sharing information between these functions can help institutions identify connections between individual transactions, beneficiary accounts, and wider networks involved in moving fraudulent proceeds.
• Intervene when payments raise concerns. When a transaction appears unusual, employees should be equipped to ask appropriate questions and explain the risks without immediately assuming the customer is acting fraudulently. A well-timed conversation may prevent a customer from losing money they cannot recover.
• Keep customer education relevant. General warnings about online fraud are useful, but customers also need to understand how romance scams actually work. Institutions can use targeted communications to explain common tactics, including requests for emergency payments, pressure to move conversations off-platform, and unsolicited investment advice from online contacts.

Institutions that train for this conversation catch cases earlier and usually keep the customer, even after delaying or blocking a payment. Those that rely on monitoring alone are up against a scheme designed so that every payment looks like something the customer chose to do.