How to Identify and Prevent Senior Romance Scams in 2026

Senior online dating and romance scams involve criminals creating fake identities to gain your affection and trust. Once the scammers gain your confidence, they typically ask for money for emergencies, travel expenses, or medical bills. By exploiting your emotions, they end up siphoning thousands of dollars from you before moving on to their next target. To avoid falling victim to such scams, recognize the signs of romance scams targeting older adults and follow certain fraud prevention tips.

How Romance Scams are Executed

Initial Contact

The scammer will reach out through a dating app or other social media platform. They might usually send a friendly message or a connection request to begin the process. They may pretend to be genuinely interested in you and will wish to establish regular communication.

Build a Trusting Relationship

The scammer has frequent, personalized conversations with you to create emotional closeness and gain trust. During this phase, they will pretend to listen to your fears and insecurities and even provide you with strength and concern through their words. These scammers often mirror your interests and compliment you excessively during this phase to make the connection feel genuine and personal.

Invent Crisis

Like every major scam targeted at seniors, romance scams also tend to create an artificial sense of desperation. Once the scammer has established a solid rapport with you, they are likely to introduce a fake emergency or personal problem. This could involve health-related issues, legal troubles, or travel complications. For example, they might claim that a family member urgently needs medical treatment and that they cannot afford it. These scammers will tug at your emotions and justify their request for immediate financial help.

Request Financial Aid

Once the bait has been set, scammers ask their victim to send funds under the guise of helping with their supposed crisis, claiming urgency and promising repayment.

Ghost or Prolong Exploitation

The scammer will convince you that they will be your long-term companion. Unfortunately, these are just empty promises. In reality, they will continue to extract money from you before gradually cutting off all contact.

Signs of Romance Scams to Watch Out For

Online dating after 60 has specific red flags that you should be aware of. In terms of romance scams, there are some telltale warning signs that indicate someone may be a scammer trying to exploit you.

Profile Inconsistencies

An online profile can often be fake when there are significant inconsistencies in the information it contains. For instance, if a potential scammer’s profile claims they are from England, but their English and grammar are poor, this raises a red flag. Similarly, if their profile photo seems too good to be true, it may be a stock image, which you can verify through a reverse image search.

Other signs of a potentially fake profile include vague or changing details, inconsistent professions, minimal information about their education or employment background, and a lack of genuine posts, history, or interactions.

A “Wrong Number” Text

Many romance scams begin when victims receive a text message from a wrong number. The sender falsely apologizes for the error but continues the conversation with the victim regardless. And before one realizes, a seemingly real relationship is established out of nowhere.

Instant Love Confessions

Genuine love and affection take time and effort to establish, but a scammer tries to move things along quickly and with minimal nuance.

Romance scammers tend to profess their love quickly, often after only 4 or 5 text message interactions. They will shower their target with loving comments without making any effort to get to know you personally. Scammers are likely to be in constant communication with you, and may even strike up conversations about marriage and kids within a few interactions. This should make you aware of the potential scam.

Living Abroad

One of the most useful senior fraud prevention tips is to request an in-person meeting with someone who quickly professes their love for you online. Fraudsters are often reluctant to meet face-to-face because such meetings can threaten their modus operandi. To avoid meeting you, these people often lie about living or working in another country.

Frequent Money Requests

It is normal for people in a romantic relationship to help each other out financially, but frequent requests for money are a major red flag.

How to Avoid Senior Scams

Review Details of the Profile

Scammers often use images from the Internet or copy their bios from other websites and dating profiles. A particularly effective way to identify scam profiles is to conduct an online search to cross-check the person’s name, photo, and email address.

Use the Right Software

You can set up filters in your email and make your social media profile private. Similarly, you can use your carriers or other spam-blocking programs to avoid answering unknown numbers. Such tools help detect and block spam profiles from contacting you.

Let Family Members Know About the Contact

An experienced scammer will try to isolate you from your family members and close friends. To avoid being vulnerable, let your family members and friends know about this new “love interest” in your life. They can offer valuable insights to help you avoid scammers online.

Scammers often prey on an individual’s desperation and loneliness. This is why, to protect yourself from fraud, you can focus on moving away from seeking companionship online and building stronger bonds with yourself and friendships.