First comes the person. The money comes later.
He might appear on a dating app, smiling beside a luxury car. He might arrive through Instagram with a compliment that seems casual enough. Sometimes he is a soldier stationed overseas, an engineer on an oil rig, a doctor working abroad. In the federal case that prompted this article, prosecutors say the persona was more glamorous: a wealthy real-estate investor who sometimes presented himself as a player for the San Francisco 49ers.
The details matter because they do more than make a stranger interesting. They explain why he is busy, why he travels, why he has money and why, eventually, he knows about investments that ordinary people do not. A good false identity is not merely attractive. It is useful. Every invented fact anticipates a question the victim has not yet thought to ask.
According to a criminal complaint filed in Oregon, Daejon Labrayae Love and Taylor Jamie Chan created fictitious investments that defrauded more than two dozen women of over $1.3 million. Prosecutors allege that Love met most of the women online, persuaded them that they were in sincere romantic relationships and presented Chan as the adviser behind his supposed fortune. The men allegedly used false balances, screenshots and three-way FaceTime calls. Some women were encouraged to take out personal loans. The case is pending; the allegations have not been proven in court.
What is striking is how little the alleged scheme resembles the cartoon version of an internet scam. The victims were not simply asked to believe one man. They were asked to believe an ecosystem. There was wealth they could see, an adviser they could speak to and accounts whose numbers appeared to rise. The romance supplied trust; the theater supplied proof.
That combination has come to define the past five years of romance fraud in the United States. The scam still begins in the heart. Increasingly, it ends in a fake brokerage account.
The romance is now the front door
For years, the most familiar romance scam followed a melodramatic script. An online partner suffered an emergency. A passport was confiscated. A child needed surgery. A shipment was stuck in customs. The story changed, but the request did not: Send money, and our life together can begin.
That version has not disappeared. But the more consequential development is the merger of romance fraud with investment fraud, particularly cryptocurrency schemes. Instead of presenting himself as a person in distress, the scammer presents himself as a person who has figured out how money works. He does not ask to be rescued. He offers to make the victim rich.
The approach is psychologically elegant. An emergency request introduces tension into a relationship. An investment offer appears to deepen it. The couple is no longer merely exchanging affectionate messages; they are supposedly building a future. A fraudulent trading site displays profits. A small withdrawal may be permitted. Customer-service agents answer questions. The victim sees numbers moving and mistakes activity for evidence.
By the time the victim is asked for a large deposit, the decision no longer feels like sending money to a stranger. It feels like trusting a partner—and trusting the version of oneself that has already chosen that partner.
The FBI saw this hybrid emerging clearly in 2021, when more than 4,325 people reported romance scams involving investments or cryptocurrency. Their reported losses exceeded $429 million. In the agency’s broader confidence-and-romance category, Americans filed 24,299 complaints that year and reported about $682 million in losses.
Complaint totals dipped during the next several years, but the damage remained enormous. The FBI recorded roughly $736 million in confidence-and-romance losses in 2022, $653 million in 2023 and $672 million in 2024. Then, in 2025, complaints rose to 23,159 and reported losses reached approximately $929 million. Altogether, the five-year period produced 102,212 FBI complaints and about $3.67 billion in reported losses.
Those numbers are substantial and incomplete. The FBI category includes some family and friendly confidence schemes, not only romantic relationships. Federal Trade Commission data use different definitions and cannot simply be added to the FBI totals. The FTC, for example, received 64,003 romance-scam reports in 2023, representing $1.14 billion in reported losses. The median loss was $2,000, the highest for any kind of imposter scam tracked by the agency that year.
And government databases can count only the people who come forward. Romance fraud has its own method of suppressing evidence: humiliation. Victims fear that a police officer will dismiss them, that a bank will restrict their access or that their children will say what they have perhaps already said—How could you not see it?
A scam built out of ordinary days
The popular image of fraud emphasizes the moment of deception: the bad link, the false document, the transfer. Romance scams are better understood as a campaign against a person’s sense of reality. They work through repetition.
A message arrives in the morning. Another comes before bed. The scammer remembers a doctor’s appointment, asks about a difficult colleague and adopts the small rituals from which real intimacy is made. Contact may be nearly constant. The pace is part of the design. A person who becomes woven into every day can begin to feel more real than the friends who appear only occasionally to issue warnings.
Social media has made this kind of approach easier. In FTC reports from 2022, 40 percent of people who lost money to a romance scam said the contact began on social media; 19 percent said it began on a dating site or app. A dating profile announces its purpose. An unexpected message about travel, a photograph or a favorite team can feel like chance.
The conversation often moves quickly to a private messaging service. That migration is usually described as a technical warning sign, and it is. It also changes the emotional setting. The exchange is no longer one conversation among many on a dating platform. It becomes its own private room.
Inside that room, the scammer can create intensity while controlling what counts as evidence. Requests for an in-person meeting encounter plausible obstacles: a deployment, a work contract, a family crisis. A live call seems to settle the question of whether the person exists. It does not necessarily settle who the person is. An accomplice can appear on camera. A stolen identity can be performed by a real human being. And artificial intelligence is making the distinction harder still.
When proof can be manufactured
For years, reverse-image searches offered one of the simplest ways to expose a false identity. A photograph of a supposed military officer might appear under six different names. Now a criminal can generate a face that has no earlier life on the internet at all.
The FBI has warned that generative AI is being used to produce profile pictures, private photographs, false identification, fluent messages, cloned voices and video intended to demonstrate that an online contact is real. It can correct the awkward grammar that once gave some foreign scammers away. It can help one operator maintain many relationships at once, each with its own remembered details and emotional tone.
In 2025, victims reported more than $19 million in confidence-and-romance losses in complaints with an apparent AI connection. That is not a complete accounting; it measures only cases in which the connection was identified. Its significance is not that most romance scams now depend on deepfakes. It is that the old hierarchy of proof is collapsing. A photograph is weak evidence. A voice is weak evidence. Even a brief video call may be weak evidence.
This does not mean that reality has become impossible to establish. It means verification has to move away from artifacts supplied by the person being verified. Search the official team roster, not the screenshot of it. Call the company through a number found independently, not the number in a message. Check a professional license at the government agency that issued it. A convincing object is not the same as an independent source.
Behind the screen, another kind of victim
Some romance scams are still run by individuals or small groups. Others have become an industry, with supervisors, scripts, fake customer-service departments, money mules and specialists who launder proceeds through layers of cryptocurrency accounts.
In 2025, the Justice Department alleged that a Cambodian conglomerate operated prisonlike scam compounds in which trafficked workers were forced, sometimes under threat of violence, to conduct cryptocurrency investment fraud. Investigators described dormitories behind high walls and barbed wire, banks of phones and ledgers recording profits. A Brooklyn-based network allegedly helped move money taken from more than 250 victims across the United States.
The fact that some scam operators are coerced does not make the American victim’s losses less real. It reveals the scale of the machinery. In certain cases, the conversation joins two exploited people: one whose need for connection is being converted into money, and another whose labor is being extracted by force. Above them is an organization designed to profit from both.
The question we keep asking victims
When a romance scam becomes public, observers often ask how an intelligent person could believe such a story. The question flatters the observer. It also misunderstands the crime.
People do not usually fall for a romance scam because they have examined all the evidence and reached a foolish conclusion. They fall because the evidence is introduced gradually, inside a relationship that has been designed to make doubt feel like betrayal. Each small act of trust makes the next one easier. Each payment raises the emotional cost of admitting that the last payment was a mistake.
Discovering the fraud is therefore not like discovering an incorrect charge on a credit card. It can feel like bereavement. The person may have been fictional, but the victim’s attachment was not. The morning conversations were real experiences. So were the plans, the private disclosures and the imagined future. The victim loses money and, in the same instant, loses the person they believed would help them survive the loss.
Shame compounds the grief. A person may hide additional payments to preserve the relationship or avoid proving relatives right. A scammer who senses family resistance can turn it into another instrument of control: They do not understand us. They are jealous. They only care about your money.
This is why ridicule is not merely cruel; it is counterproductive. It confirms the scammer’s claim that the outside world is hostile and makes retreat into the invented relationship more appealing.
How to interrupt the story
The usual advice—never send money to someone you have not met—is sound, but it arrives too late in the emotional sequence. Protection works best when it is decided before a particular person makes the exception feel reasonable.
One useful practice is a trusted-contact rule: No large transfer, new investment platform, personal loan, retirement withdrawal or cryptocurrency purchase will be made at the suggestion of a new romantic partner without a 48-hour pause and a conversation with someone outside the relationship. This is not an admission of gullibility. It is the emotional equivalent of requiring two signatures on a consequential financial decision.
Other boundaries should be equally firm. Do not send account credentials, one-time passcodes, intimate financial documents, gift cards or cryptocurrency. Do not install an investment app from a link supplied in a private message. Do not allow remote access to a phone or computer. Keep early conversations on the original platform, and preserve profiles and messages rather than deleting them when something begins to feel wrong.
Verification should be independent and layered. A reverse-image search is worth doing, but a clean result proves little in the age of synthetic photographs. Confirm employment through an official source. Search for the person’s name alongside words such as “scam” or “fraud.” Look up the age of an investment website’s domain. If an online partner claims to be a professional athlete, member of the military or licensed adviser, verify the claim with the institution itself.
Most important, notice what happens when you ask for time. Legitimate partners can tolerate due diligence. Scammers manufacture urgency. They need a decision before a bank employee, relative or ordinary night’s sleep can reintroduce doubt.
If it is happening to someone you love
A family member who begins with “You are being ridiculous” may be factually correct and practically useless. The first goal is not to win an argument about the entire relationship. It is to stop the next transfer while preserving enough trust for the victim to accept help.
Start with facts that can be tested together. The team roster does not include this person. The state has no record of this adviser’s license. The investment website was created last month. Ask for a two-day pause. Offer to call the bank together. If the person refuses, remain in contact. Isolation is an asset to the scammer.
Do not confuse support with passivity. If an older or disabled adult may be experiencing exploitation, contact local Adult Protective Services. If there is immediate danger, call emergency services. But whenever possible, speak to the person as an adult whose trust has been abused, not as a child whose judgment has been revoked.
After the truth becomes undeniable, resist the temptation to focus only on the money. Help preserve messages, receipts, profile links, wallet addresses, telephone numbers and transaction records. Help change passwords, secure accounts and monitor credit. And recognize that the victim may need the same patience we extend to anyone leaving a controlling relationship: relief can coexist with longing, anger and grief.
When the money is gone
Speed matters. A bank, wire service, payment app, gift-card issuer or cryptocurrency exchange should be contacted immediately and told plainly that the payment was induced by fraud. Some transfers can be recalled or frozen if the report arrives quickly enough. Cryptocurrency is difficult to reverse, but wallet addresses and transaction hashes can help investigators connect cases and trace funds.
The victim should file reports with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at IC3.gov and the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, and notify the platform where the relationship began. Evidence should be saved, not erased in embarrassment. If Social Security numbers, identity documents or account credentials were shared, passwords should be changed, multifactor authentication enabled and a credit freeze considered.
Then comes one final warning. People who have lost money are often approached by “recovery specialists” promising to retrieve it for an upfront fee. The second scam borrows its credibility from the first. Anyone offering recovery should be independently verified; unexpected guarantees should be treated as another attempt to exploit hope.
The human firewall
The alleged fake-NFL scheme stands out because its details are theatrical. Yet its essential mechanism is ordinary. A person appeared. A relationship formed. A future took shape. Only then did the money move.
Technology can make that future look increasingly real. Platforms can detect suspicious clusters of accounts and repeated scripts. Banks can slow unusual transfers and encourage customers to name trusted contacts. Artificial intelligence can perhaps be used to detect some of the deceptions it helps create. All of that matters.
But the most reliable interruption may still be another person—a friend who can hear the story without laughing, a relative who asks to verify one fact instead of attacking the whole relationship, a bank employee who recognizes that urgency is part of the script.
We do not protect people by teaching them never to trust. A life without trust would be its own kind of theft. We protect them by making verification an ordinary part of trust, by separating intimacy from financial access and by ensuring that asking for a second set of eyes is treated as wisdom rather than weakness.
Romance scammers need privacy to harden into secrecy. They need hope to become urgency. And they need the victim to believe that admitting doubt will be more painful than sending one more payment. Break any one of those conditions, and the story becomes harder to sell.