Romance scam or fraud
What is a romance scam?
A romance scam, often referred to as "confidence fraud" or "romance fraud," is a growing threat in the domain of cyber-enabled crimes, exploiting psychological vulnerabilities to defraud individuals, primarily through the manipulation of romantic or emotional attachment.
At their core, romance scams involve a perpetrator creating a false identity, through dating websites, social media platforms, or even professional networking services, with the intent to establish an emotional or romantic relationship with a victim. Over time, the fraudster cultivates trust and emotional dependency, ultimately leading the victim to willingly transfer funds, disclose sensitive information, or become complicit in illegal activity (such as money laundering), often without immediate awareness of the deceit.
The psychological manipulation used in these scams is highly sophisticated. Fraudsters typically employ behavioral conditioning techniques to groom their targets. They may simulate affection, vulnerability, shared values, and long-term commitment, weaving narratives that often include obstacles such as medical emergencies, travel difficulties, or family crises that purportedly require urgent financial support. These narratives are designed to elicit sympathy, urgency, and a sense of responsibility from the victim. The communication is intensive and sustained, creating a pseudo-intimate environment that mimics the progression of a genuine relationship.
Perpetrators frequently obtain not only financial assets, but also personal information such as copies of passports, banking credentials, and other identifying data. This information can be reused for identity theft, and identity fraud.
Legal complexity arises from the cross-border nature of these crimes. Perpetrators often operate from countries outside the jurisdiction of the victim, using false IP addresses, proxy servers, or hijacked accounts. This geographical dispersion creates enforcement barriers and limits the efficacy of national investigative powers. Mutual legal assistance treaties, international arrest warrants, and cooperation through agencies such as Interpol or Europol may be necessary but are often slow and resource-intensive. Meanwhile, victims may experience irreparable harm, including psychological trauma, financial ruin, reputational damage, and in extreme cases, suicidal ideation.
Online platforms that enable interpersonal communication, including dating services and social media providers, carry a degree of responsibility. Failure to prevent, report, or respond adequately to romance scams may attract legal scrutiny, especially where platforms profit from user interactions and engagement. Under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), for example, very large online platforms (VLOPs) are required to conduct risk assessments, implement mitigation measures, and establish notice-and-action mechanisms to address such content.
Romance scams expose the intersection of human psychology and systemic vulnerabilities within digital and financial ecosystems. Addressing them requires a multidisciplinary approach, combining legal enforcement, technological innovation, behavioral understanding, and ethical responsibility. Only through coordinated effort and sustained vigilance can the threat be mitigated and the harm reduced.
How a romance scam works?
Scammers create profiles that contain attractive photos and a nice description about their personality and business. They attract persons and convince them to communicate out of the online dating website, social networking website or application, asking for a personal e-mail address, instant messaging, or phone number. In these ways they avoid the risk to be tracked by the website or application, and reduce competition with other scammers or visitors. Victims also believe that scammers are really interested in them, when they ask to call them or exchange emails.
Online dating apps often employ persons that monitor suspicious behavior. If they notice a user sending the same message to many different users or members, they may flag the activity as suspicious. Scammers try to avoid detection.
Scammers contact their victims frequently, until they gain their trust. They gather information and understand the way their victims think, something that makes the next steps easier.
Scammers portray themselves as very romantic and passionate, they may use literature and poetry, they look cool and funny. They seem concerned about the victims and their problems, and willing to listen and offer advice. They are willing to commit in a relationship or marriage.
Many scammers get very serious very quickly. They send extravagant compliments, claim to be falling in love, and claim they have never felt this way about anyone before.
After some time, scammers may test the readiness of the target to be supportive. They describe some form of crisis that they or their family members are in, such as accidents, illness, deaths, travelling mishaps, lawsuits, business failures. They request money again, as long as the victims are still unaware of the deception, or refuse to believe that they have been scammed.
Easy victims
Lonely persons
Albert Einstein has said that it is strange to be known so universally, and yet to be so lonely.
Loneliness is an important problem and a pervasive public health concern, significantly correlated with increases in health problems and mortality rates, including heart disease, lung disease, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, atherosclerosis, stroke, and metabolic disorders, such as obesity and metabolic disease. Psychological problems include depression, stress, anxiety, feelings of emptiness or abandonment, associated with a lack of relationships or intimacy.
According to Weiss, loneliness is a feeling that may arise at certain moments in life and affect anyone, regardless of gender, age, or other socio-demographic characteristics. He makes the distinction between emotional loneliness and social loneliness.
Emotional aspects that accompany loneliness, include sadness, melancholy, frustration, shame, or desperation. Our own subjective evaluation regarding the quality and quantity of our social relationships, is based on our personality, our expectations, our life events, our interpersonal engagements, and socio-economic variables.
In psychology, loneliness is often defined as the unpleasant experience that occurs when there is a subjective discrepancy between the desired and the perceived availability and quality of social interactions. The quality of one’s social relationships is a very important factor.
Loneliness can be a very distressing experience. We must understand people that are desperate and use online dating sites and applications. Victims of the romance scam are very often lonely persons that do not want to lose one more hope.
Romantic persons
In 1989, Sprecher and Metts devised the Romantic Beliefs Scale. They consider romanticism as an ideology, a relatively coherent individual orientation toward love, that may function as a cognitive schema for organizing and evaluating one’s own behaviour, and the behaviour of a potential or actual romantic partner.
Those who score high on the Romantic Beliefs Scale strongly believe in the romantic destiny, the idea that people are meant to be together. Persons with strong romantic beliefs are more likely to perceive someone who approaches them online as having real feelings and emotions.
Paulo Coelho writes in The Alchemist: “So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.”
Victims of the romance scam are very often romantic persons that believe that Paulo Coelho's words are often true.
Adventure and sensation seekers
According to Lord Byron, the great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.
According to Zuckerman, high sensation seekers consider risks as lower, and feel less anxious in risky situations. They engage in in risky sexual behavior and they play the online dating game, believing they will not be burnt. They do not realize that they may engage with professionals, sometimes working for the organized crime, that can outsmart them.
Persons with a lack of experience or judgement
Judgment is the ability to combine personal qualities with relevant knowledge and experience to form opinions and make decisions. Unfortunately, it often involves instinct, “gut feeling”, experience, and skills to produce an insight, recognize a pattern, or pick up on what’s not said. Although we are all capable of forming views and interpreting evidence, we are not all good at that.
Romance scammers often do not have a digital footprint, or pretend to be someone else. A smart person can easily verify the information scammers give. Privacy advocates that have no social presence or try to minimize the amount of personal information about them on the internet, can also give some information to the persons they "love", to give them the opportunity to ensure they are not dealing with scammers.
We all know that some people have better judgment than others. Poor judgment leads to irrational actions and risk-taking behaviors. When they make mistakes, react to feedback by getting emotional, or by refusing to recognize facts.
Romance scams in espionage: A strategic threat at the intersection of deception, intelligence, and human vulnerability
Romance scams are typically perceived as crimes motivated by financial gain, targeting individuals’ emotional vulnerabilities in order to illicitly acquire money, sensitive data, or access to bank accounts. However, in the realm of espionage and intelligence operations, romance scams, or more broadly, “romantic entrapment”, constitute a strategic and often state-sponsored tool of human intelligence (HUMINT) collection, recruitment, compromise, or influence. These operations are not merely criminal acts, but calculated components of broader geopolitical, counterintelligence, and national security agendas.
In the context of espionage, a romance scam is re-engineered as a targeted manipulation technique deployed by hostile intelligence services or adversarial actors. The goal is not to defraud for money, but to extract classified information, obtain access to restricted systems, influence political or corporate decision-making, or recruit the victim as an unwitting agent. The operational mechanics remain deceptively familiar, and include false identities, emotional grooming, flattery, staged affection, but the stakes are profoundly different. The intent is strategic compromise, not immediate financial enrichment.
One of the most historically recognizable forms of romantic entrapment in espionage is the “honeypot” operation. In such scenarios, the intelligence agency deploys an operative, often trained in psychology, seduction, and counter-surveillance, who systematically builds an emotional or sexual relationship with the target. This relationship is then leveraged to extract sensitive data, coerce behavior, or compromise the target’s integrity. Notably, the target is often an individual with access to critical assets: diplomats, military personnel, scientists, executives of strategic companies, or even compliance officers with access to regulatory systems and processes.
Modern digital communication tools have exponentially increased the reach and scalability of such operations. Intelligence services no longer need to operate exclusively in physical proximity. Instead, they can initiate and sustain elaborate romance scams via messaging apps, dating platforms, professional networks, and social media, often without ever meeting the target in person. These operations can last weeks, months, or even years, carefully calibrated to maintain psychological influence over the target. Artificial personas, deepfake-generated images, and convincingly fabricated personal histories are commonly employed to create a believable yet fictitious identity, further complicating attribution and detection.
From a legal and compliance standpoint, the ramifications are extensive. Organizations operating in critical sectors and the critical infrastructure are particularly vulnerable to such vectors of infiltration. An employee compromised via a romance-based espionage tactic may unwittingly divulge intellectual property, strategic plans, access credentials, or geopolitical intelligence. Even regulated industries with strong cybersecurity postures often fail to adequately account for the human vector, a gap that espionage actors actively exploit. This is not merely a cybersecurity issue, but a human security issue.
Compliance programs must therefore evolve to integrate social engineering threat scenarios and romance scams into their risk assessments, training modules, and incident response protocols. Regulatory obligations increasingly require organizations to demonstrate a holistic understanding of insider threats, including those involving emotional compromise or coercion. Internal security awareness programs must explicitly address the reality that state actors, not just financially motivated criminals, use romantic manipulation as a tool of espionage. Training must go beyond generic phishing warnings to educate personnel on the psychological tactics used by intelligence operatives.
Victims of such scams within organizations may face complex legal consequences. If the relationship results in the unauthorized disclosure of classified or proprietary information, the victim could be charged under espionage laws or internal compliance policies, even if the disclosure was not intentional. The organization may suffer reputational damage, regulatory sanctions, or the loss of government contracts due to a breach in information security attributed to human compromise.
When a romance scam is revealed to be part of a broader foreign intelligence operation, it may trigger obligations to report to national counterintelligence authorities. In multinational environments, this creates additional complications around data sharing, confidentiality, and cross-border legal exposure.
Romance scams in the context of espionage are calculated tactics in an evolving playbook of covert influence and information extraction. They exploit one of the oldest vulnerabilities in human nature, emotional trust, now weaponized through digital means and strategic intent.
What is Emotional Trust and how is it weaponized?
Emotional trust is a foundational construct in the psychology of interpersonal relationships, referring to the expectation that another person will respond to one’s emotional vulnerabilities with care, empathy, and consistency, and will not exploit those vulnerabilities for personal gain. It encompasses not merely the belief that the other is reliable or competent, but that they are emotionally attuned and ethically motivated to preserve one’s psychological safety.
In psychological terms, emotional trust is affective rather than purely cognitive. While cognitive trust is based on rational judgments about a person’s reliability, expertise, or track record (“I trust her to manage this task because she’s qualified”), emotional trust arises from the felt sense that another person has goodwill, shares mutual concern, and will act with emotional integrity even in the absence of oversight or self-interest.
Emotional trust plays a critical role in regulating interpersonal risk. It allows individuals to tolerate uncertainty, manage emotional exposure, and engage in acts of self-disclosure or dependency without excessive fear of betrayal or rejection. This is particularly relevant in close relationships, including romantic and therapeutic relationships, where mutual vulnerability is intrinsic.
From a neuroscientific perspective, emotional trust activates regions in the brain associated with social cognition, empathy, and reward processing. However, this neurobiological predisposition also creates risk: the very mechanisms that facilitate bonding and attachment can be hijacked in contexts of manipulation and deception, particularly in asymmetrical relationships where one party conceals malicious intent.
Importantly, emotional trust is fragile and context-sensitive. It is easier to erode than to build, and once violated, it can result in profound psychological consequences, including shame, grief, and long-term mistrust of others. In pathological contexts, such as abusive relationships, cults, or manipulative scams, emotional trust is often manufactured, exploited, and weaponized to bypass rational defenses and induce compliance or dependency.
Here is how emotional trust is weaponized:
1. Suspension of Critical Thinking: Once emotional trust is established, the victim begins to override their own skepticism. They rationalize implausible stories, ignore red flags, and often justify the scammer's requests or inconsistencies. Emotional trust dulls analytical faculties and risk sensitivity, which is especially dangerous when the target holds a position of access or authority.
2. Incremental Disclosure and Escalation: Trust allows for a progressive, controlled release of personal and professional information. Scammers may begin by soliciting emotionally charged but seemingly harmless details (e.g., childhood memories, workplace frustrations) and then escalate to sensitive data once the victim feels a bond has formed.
3. Exploitation of Identity and Loyalty: Once emotional trust is in place, the scammer can appeal to a sense of shared destiny, emotional loyalty, or romantic obligation. Victims may feel they are part of a “team” or “shared struggle” and act out of loyalty to the fictitious relationship. This can lead to voluntary rule-breaking, unauthorized actions, or silence in the face of breaches, all of which are valuable to espionage actors.
4. Fear of Abandonment and Emotional Manipulation: Emotional trust often brings with it a fear of emotional loss. Scammers exploit this by creating scenarios in which compliance (sending money, disclosing information, granting access) is presented as a condition for preserving the relationship. Victims may become so emotionally invested that the mere suggestion of severing the relationship becomes a form of coercion.
5. Resilience Against External Intervention: Victims who have developed emotional trust are resistant to external warnings. Friends and colleagues may try to intervene, but the victim often defends the scammer, insisting they are misunderstood or misjudged. This defensive stance can shield the fraudster or operative from detection for extended periods.
6. Long-Term Behavioral Conditioning: Emotional trust enables long-term manipulation. In many espionage cases, targets have maintained years-long relationships with fictitious identities, during which they were gradually conditioned to accept increasingly risky behaviors or betray their employer or country. This is not short-term deception but long-term psychological conditioning made possible by the trust that has been cultivated.
In essence, emotional trust neutralizes defenses, aligns the victim’s values with the scammer’s goals, and facilitates acts that would otherwise be unthinkable. For risk and compliance professionals, this underscores the importance of not only focusing on technological and procedural defenses but also developing awareness programs that highlight the emotional and psychological dimensions of these threats.
Erikson’s Trust vs. Mistrust: The theory about the psychological foundation of emotional security
Erik Erikson, a psychoanalyst and developmental psychologist, proposed a theory of psychosocial development comprising eight stages across the human lifespan. Each stage is characterized by a fundamental psychological conflict that must be resolved in order to support healthy development. The first and most foundational stage, occurring from birth to approximately 18 months of age, is known as trust vs. mistrust.
During this critical early period, an infant is entirely dependent on caregivers for nourishment, comfort, protection, and emotional soothing. The central developmental task is for the infant to assess, through repeated interactions, whether the external world—and particularly the primary caregiver—is predictable, reliable, and emotionally attuned. The outcome of this stage sets the template for the individual’s future capacity to form secure relationships and experience emotional trust.
If caregivers respond consistently to the infant’s needs, feeding when hungry, soothing when distressed, maintaining physical presence, the infant develops a basic sense of trust. This trust is not merely a cognitive belief that someone will provide care, but a deeply felt sense of emotional safety, the belief that “the world is safe, people are dependable, and I am worthy of care.” It becomes internalized as part of the child’s emerging personality and is later reflected in adult attachment patterns, the capacity for intimacy, and the regulation of fear and anxiety in interpersonal relationships.
Conversely, if caregivers are inconsistent, neglectful, emotionally unavailable, or abusive, the infant begins to experience the world as unreliable and unsafe. This results in mistrust, a defensive posture toward others and an internal sense of insecurity. Individuals who resolve this stage negatively may carry persistent doubts about the motives of others, struggle with intimacy, and experience either chronic detachment or over-attachment in adult relationships. Importantly, even individuals with well-established basic trust may find their emotional foundations destabilized later in life by trauma, betrayal, or manipulative relationships.
It is sad that, as we will explain below, both ends of Erikson’s trust vs. mistrust spectrum can be vulnerable, though in different ways.
The implications of this stage, occurring from birth to approximately 18 months of age, extend far beyond childhood. Emotional trust, as formed in this earliest psychosocial conflict, becomes a core psychological structure that governs how individuals manage vulnerability. In adulthood, this structure influences how people assess the sincerity of others, how much emotional risk they are willing to take in relationships, and how they respond to inconsistency, abandonment, or emotional unavailability.
This developmental backdrop is particularly relevant to understanding why individuals are vulnerable to romance scams or emotional manipulation. Scam perpetrators, whether financially motivated or state-sponsored, often mimic the behavioral signals of secure attachment: consistency, attention, warmth, and responsiveness. They position themselves as emotionally safe figures, only to later exploit the very trust they have carefully engineered. For individuals who have an underlying need for emotional security, perhaps due to an unstable early attachment or unresolved developmental wounds, such behavioral cues can trigger a deep, unconscious yearning for connection, making them disproportionately susceptible to deception.
Furthermore, the victim may not merely be manipulated intellectually; they are often re-experiencing, on an emotional level, a reenactment of early attachment dynamics. The scammer’s feigned affection or attentiveness may create a powerful emotional bond because it temporarily repairs or fills an old psychological gap. When the manipulation is later revealed, the damage extends far beyond financial loss, it destabilizes the individual’s internal sense of self-worth and the ability to trust, sometimes retraumatizing them and reinstating the original mistrust forged in early development.
Erikson’s concept of trust vs. mistrust is not an abstract developmental theory but a living, dynamic foundation for adult emotional life. Its resolution influences one’s resilience to psychological manipulation, the capacity for secure relationships, and the instinctual ability to assess the emotional intentions of others. In contexts of emotional fraud, such as romance scams or espionage operations using romantic entrapment, the manipulation of emotional trust is most effective when it taps into unresolved or fragile trust structures originating in this first psychosocial stage.
As we said, in adulthood, both ends of Erikson’s trust vs. mistrust spectrum can be vulnerable, in different ways.
1. Those who learned to trust may be vulnerable to manipulation. Individuals who successfully developed basic trust tend to be open to emotional connection, less guarded, and willing to believe in the goodwill of others. These traits are assets in healthy relationships and contribute to emotional resilience, intimacy, and cooperation. However, when a malicious actor intentionally simulates empathy, attentiveness, and affection, these individuals may be more likely to engage and less likely to suspect manipulation, at least initially.
Their openness makes them psychologically available to deception, especially if the manipulator skillfully imitates the behaviors of a trustworthy attachment figure. This doesn’t make the capacity for trust itself a flaw, it becomes a vulnerability only in hostile or asymmetric contexts where trust is intentionally exploited.
2. Those who learned mistrust are also vulnerable, in a different way. They may desperately seek validation or belonging, making them susceptible to love bombing or intermittent reinforcement. They often struggle with boundaries, tolerating abuse or manipulation in exchange for attention. they can be hyper-independent, but fall quickly into dependence when someone “breaks through” their defenses.
In the framework of Erikson’s theory, neither trust nor mistrust makes someone invulnerable. The most resilient individuals are those who have internalized both a sense of emotional safety and an ability to critically assess others' intentions. They trust but verify. They open up, but observe.
Attachment theory and the formation of emotional trust
Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and expanded through empirical research by Mary Ainsworth, is one of the most influential frameworks in developmental psychology. It explores the profound impact of early relationships, especially with primary caregivers, on a child's emotional, cognitive, and social development. Central to this theory is the idea that human beings are biologically wired to seek proximity to attachment figures, especially in times of stress or uncertainty, and that the quality of early caregiving relationships profoundly shapes the individual’s internal sense of emotional safety and trustworthiness in others.
John Bowlby, a British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was the first to articulate the evolutionary and psychological importance of attachment. He proposed that infants are born with a biological predisposition to form attachment bonds with caregivers because such bonds increase the likelihood of survival. However, attachment is not merely about physical survival, it is also the bedrock of emotional regulation, self-concept, and relational expectation. Through repeated interactions with caregivers, the child develops what Bowlby called "internal working models," mental representations of the self, others, and relationships. These models guide how the child interprets social experiences and predicts the behavior of others.
When a caregiver is emotionally responsive, attuned to the infant’s signals, and consistent in their soothing and support, the child forms a secure attachment. This form of attachment fosters the internal belief that others are safe, dependable, and available, and that the self is worthy of love and care. Such children grow into adults who are generally able to regulate emotions effectively, trust others appropriately, and form healthy intimate relationships. Their internal working model is resilient, making them less prone to fear abandonment or misread benign behaviors as threats.
Mary Ainsworth, an American-Canadian developmental psychologist and Bowlby's collaborator, operationalized attachment theory through empirical study, most notably in her "Strange Situation" experiments. This structured observational study revealed three primary types of attachment in children (secure, anxious-ambivalent, and avoidant,) later expanded by other researchers to include disorganized attachment. Ainsworth demonstrated that securely attached infants use their caregiver as a "secure base" from which to explore the world and to which they return when distressed. The reliability of this secure base conditions the child’s expectations about emotional availability and trustworthiness in future relationships.
Critically, attachment styles formed in early life tend to persist into adulthood, influencing not only romantic and interpersonal relationships but also an individual's susceptibility to emotional manipulation.
Adults with a secure attachment style tend to seek mutuality, are capable of setting healthy boundaries, and are less likely to idealize or over-invest in emotionally ambiguous partners. Conversely, those with insecure attachment styles, especially anxious-preoccupied or disorganized types, may be intensely driven to seek validation, fear abandonment, or struggle with relational boundaries. These individuals are more likely to tolerate inconsistency or even mistreatment, provided they receive intermittent reinforcement of affection or attention.
This psychological framework has direct relevance to the dynamics of romance scams and emotional exploitation, especially in cases involving social engineering or espionage. Perpetrators of romance scams frequently mimic the behavioral traits of a securely attached partner: attentiveness, affection, responsiveness, and emotional connection. These cues activate the victim’s attachment system, especially if that system has been shaped by unmet emotional needs or prior loss. For those with insecure or disrupted attachment histories, the appearance of emotional availability can be irresistibly validating, creating an emotional bond that quickly bypasses rational evaluation and intensifies dependency.
Moreover, victims may interpret the scammer’s inconsistent behavior (disappearing, reappearing, creating emotional drama), not as manipulation, but as evidence of a complex emotional bond worth preserving. This mirrors patterns observed in trauma bonding, where the attachment system is destabilized and then reassured repeatedly, causing the victim to cling even more tightly to the relationship in the hope of restoring emotional equilibrium. Such psychological vulnerability is not rooted in lack of intelligence; rather, it is the predictable consequence of how human beings are emotionally conditioned to form and preserve attachment bonds, even when those bonds are unhealthy or illusory.
Understanding Manipulation.
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