Romance Scam
A romance scam is a form of confidence fraud in which an attacker creates a fake romantic persona — typically on dating apps, social media, or messaging platforms — to build trust with a victim before requesting money or directing them toward fraudulent investments.
Mechanism
- The scammer constructs an appealing online identity (often using stolen photos).
- They invest weeks or months in relationship-building, creating emotional dependency.
- Once trust is established, they introduce a financial request: an emergency, a business opportunity, or a “can’t-miss” investment platform.
- Victims transfer funds, usually via cryptocurrency, which is irreversible and pseudonymous.
- Once funds are sent, the scammer disappears or continues to extract more.
Relationship to Pig-Butchering
Pig-butchering (also called sha zhu pan) is a subcategory of romance scam that adds a sophisticated fake investment platform. The victim is “fattened” (encouraged to see growing “returns”) before being “slaughtered” (the platform vanishes with all deposits).
Scale
The FBI’s IC3 2025 report (weisman-2026-ic3-cryptocurrency-investment-scams) found that investment fraud — overwhelmingly romance-scam-driven — accounted for 72% of all investment scam losses ($8.65 billion), with cryptocurrency as the preferred payment vector.