Romance scams after loss: how widowed people are targeted and what to do first

On this page 9 sections

What the numbers say

In 2024, people aged 60 and older filed 7,626 confidence and romance complaints with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, and those complaints carried $389,312,356 in losses. Both figures come from IC3's 2024 Internet Crime Report, published 23 April 2025, in the table of crime types reported by complainants aged 60 and over.

Romance is one line in a longer bill. The Federal Trade Commission's report Protecting Older Consumers, 2024 to 2025, published 1 December 2025, gives the whole of it: "Reported losses from people 60 and older totaled nearly $2.4 billion, up from about $1.9 billion in 2023."

Those are counts of reports. They leave out everyone who never told anybody, and they cannot tell you how likely you are to be approached. AARP's survey covers that part. AARP asked 300 adults aged 50 and older who use a dating platform, or used one in the last three years, and reported: "In our survey, 41 percent of users said they encountered a fake profile or a person trying to scam them." People who relied only on free platforms were "about 10 percent more likely" to report fake profiles or unsolicited sexually explicit messages (page updated 24 August 2026, checked 19 September 2026).

Two in five. Whatever else you take from this page, take that number, because it changes what the first fake profile means. It is an ordinary event on these sites, the way junk mail is ordinary. It says nothing about your judgement and nothing about how lonely you look from the outside.

So decide tonight, while nothing is happening, what you will do with the first one: report it, block it, and send no reply. That decision is easy to make now and hard to make at eleven at night with the message open in front of you.

The obituary pattern

Scammers often start from the death rather than from a dating profile. AARP's page on obituary scams, updated 8 September 2023 and checked 19 September 2026, describes it in one sentence: "Obit-scouring criminals pretend to be long-lost friends or relatives of the deceased, contacting surviving spouses out of the blue to commiserate and reminisce."

The same page says where it goes next: "These displays of simulated compassion can evolve into romance scams or attempts to defraud beneficiaries out of inheritance money."

Read that with your own last few months in mind. His obituary was public, it named you, and it carried the date. A stranger who reads it can open with his first name and the right amount of sympathy, and can do it in the first month, when the phone rings all day anyway and you are grateful for anybody who still remembers him. Nothing about that is careless on your part. It is the design.

Not all of it happens online, either, which is the part most safety advice misses. The same information reaches somebody who would rather knock on the door.

If his obituary is still up, read it once the way a stranger would, and note what it hands over: your name, the town, the date, and the fact that you are in the house on your own. You cannot unpublish it, and you would not want to. Knowing what it says is enough. For the next year, unexpected sympathy from somebody who knows his name is information about the stranger, not a sign of how widely he was loved.

What widowed people describe

The approach arrives through more than one door: an app somebody already had, a message from a stranger abroad, and a man on the step. The four posts below were written by widowed people, or by people dating over fifty, between November 2025 and September 2026.

Start with what the money actually was. Not the dignity, which people get back, and not the year, which was ruined anyway.

I fell victim and hard to a romance scam that wiped me out of any money I had for a safety net. It happened on Facebook dating.

r/widowers, November 2025

No dating site anybody went looking for. It happened inside an app that was already on the phone. The next one is the doorstep version, which no online safety checklist covers:

In my emotional state I told him my husband had had been in social security, but just died. He appeared shocked. He asked for a bottle of water, I closed the door and got one for him.

r/widowers, June 2026

Look for what the poster did wrong there, because there is nothing. They told him their husband had just died, then fetched a stranger a bottle of water, and they closed the door while they did it. Most people would have done all three in that week. Back online, the opening is standard enough that people recite it from memory:

I get a hello from Cartegena message along with the customary legs below the knee image with the ocean in the background. Next day I get a frantic message: I just got robbed when I went for a jog.

r/datingoverfifty, September 2026

Hello on day one, an emergency on day two. The photograph is part of the script, which is why the poster calls it customary rather than describing it.

The version built for widowed people adds one thing on top:

He's in Dubai working as a global contractor for 3 more weeks. Building a school. Widowed two years ago. So am I. Loved his wife very much. Mild love bombing. Wants to find love again! He's finally ready.

r/DatingOverSixty, December 2025

"Widowed two years ago. So am I." That match is the hook, and it is the cheapest claim anybody can make. Nobody can check it, and it buys him the one thing a stranger cannot otherwise get from you inside a week: the feeling that he already understands the thing you are tired of explaining.

Four different doors and one method: an app that was already on the phone, the front step, a hello from abroad, and a stranger claiming the same loss. Sympathy or attention arrives first. The money comes later, and not always much later.

This week, tell one person the name of anybody new who has been in touch. Not to ask permission. So that a second person is holding the story and can say "wait" while the money is still yours.

Six signs, in the order they usually appear

The two scam threads quoted above were written nine months apart, on two different subreddits, by people who had never met, and they run the same sequence. This is that order.

1. Contact out of nowhere from somebody who already knows something about your loss, or who says he shares it.
2. A matching story. Widowed two years ago, a wife he loved very much, a photograph with the sea behind it.
3. Speed. Affection arrives long before any facts do. The poster who wrote out the Dubai story calls it "mild love bombing".
4. A move off the site, to text or a messaging app.
5. A reason he cannot be in the room. A contract abroad, a build that finishes in three more weeks, a video call that never quite happens.
6. The emergency, and then the ask. In one of those threads it was a robbery during a jog, the day after hello.

None of these proves anything on its own. People really do work abroad, plenty of honest people are hopeless on video, and grief makes anybody move faster than usual. Three of them in that order, with money at the end, is reason enough to stop without giving an explanation.

The order to report in

Report even when nothing was lost, and start with the Federal Trade Commission at reportfraud.ftc.gov. Both counts at the top of this page are built out of reports that ordinary people sat down and filed: the FBI's came in through ic3.gov, and the FTC's through its own reporting site.

The order, when no money has moved:

1. The Federal Trade Commission, at reportfraud.ftc.gov. The site explains what happens next.
2. The FBI, at ic3.gov, which is the Internet Crime Complaint Center. The romance complaints counted in its 2024 report were filed there.
3. Your bank, if you gave anybody a card number, an account number, a code that arrived by text, or access to your screen. Tell them what you shared and on what date, even though no money moved.
4. The dating service or the app. Block the profile and report it.

Before any of that, save what you have. The profile name and the photographs, the messages, the dates, and anything at all about money. Screenshots, not memory, because the thread may not be there once the profile is gone. If the photographs looked professional, save those too.

Filing does not give you anybody to talk to, which is the gap in all official advice about this. The end of this page is about the person you tell.

Save tonight, file in the morning. People who try to do both at midnight tend to give up halfway through the second form.

One sentence that ends it

There is no research on what to say to somebody who is running a script at you, and we went looking for it. So this one is ours, written to be copied and sent exactly once:

I do not send money or share account details with anyone I have not met in person. I am ending this conversation now.

Send it, then stop writing. Something will come back, and it may be hurt, or angry, or an apology so complete that you feel unkind. All three are the same conversation carrying on, and the conversation is the thing you are ending.

For the door or the telephone, the same rule in fewer words: "I don't discuss anything to do with accounts. Put it in writing and post it to me."

You will want to explain yourself, particularly if there is a chance you have this wrong. That wish is exactly what is being farmed. A man who is who he says he is will still be around in a month, and will not have needed the explanation.

If money already went

Call your bank before anything else, then file at ic3.gov, then at reportfraud.ftc.gov. The two agencies publish annual counts months after the fact, IC3's 2024 report on 23 April 2025 and the FTC's on 1 December 2025, so neither is a switchboard. Your bank is the only one of the three you can have on the telephone this afternoon.

Give the bank the amount, the dates, where it went, and whether you authorized it yourself. Ask what can still be stopped, and what they want from you in writing. Then ask the same question about the accounts you did not touch, because the details you handed over may fit more than one of them.

We are not going to promise you the money comes back. Sometimes part of it does. Often it does not, and the reserve that was meant to carry you through this year is gone in the same year you lost him.

Our advice: be wary of anyone who offers to recover the money for a fee.

Then there is the conversation with your children, which is the reason people wait months before telling anybody. You are going to be handing your son or daughter two pieces of news at once: that somebody got to you, and that you were lonely enough for it to work. Say the second part yourself, before they arrive at it on their own.

Call the bank today, and file the two reports tomorrow. Before the weekend, tell one person out loud, and say the amount.

If you are going back online: one option

SeniorMatch is the one dating service we read from the inside. Elena, who writes this site, works there. This site is hers, not the company's, and we earn a commission when you register through the button below, at the same price to you.

Inside the account, read on 16 September 2026, registering is free. Free members can search by country and state and reply to messages, but cannot start a conversation. The Widowed filter, which narrows the search to other widowed members, sits on the Premium tier at $33.99 a month.

Skip it if you are not going back online this year. Skip it too if what you want first is company rather than a date: Soaring Spirits International runs Camp Widow, the Widowed Village forum and a Widowed Pen Pal Program, and nobody there is being matched to anybody.

Sources

• FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2024 Internet Crime Report, published 23 April 2025; complaint counts and losses for complainants aged 60 and over. Checked 19 September 2026.
• Federal Trade Commission, Protecting Older Consumers, 2024 to 2025, published 1 December 2025. Checked 19 September 2026.
• AARP, The Best Dating Sites for Seniors Compared, survey of 300 adults aged 50 and older who use or recently used a dating platform; page updated 24 August 2026. Checked 19 September 2026.
• AARP, Obituary Scams, updated 8 September 2023. Checked 19 September 2026.
• Soaring Spirits International, Our Mission and Vision, Camp Widow, the Widowed Village forum and the Widowed Pen Pal Program. Checked 19 September 2026.
• SeniorMatch: the free search and messaging rules, the Widowed filter and its tier, and the monthly price, read inside a SeniorMatch account on 16 September 2026.
• r/widowers, r/datingoverfifty and r/DatingOverSixty, threads from November 2025 to September 2026, quoted word for word and without usernames; read 19 September 2026.

Free to join. We earn a commission when you register through our links; it does not change your price. The account we read service facts in belongs to Elena, who works at SeniorMatch. Full disclosure →

Questions people ask

how much money do romance scams take from people over 60

In 2024 the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center logged 7,626 confidence and romance complaints from people aged 60 and older, carrying $389,312,356 in reported losses. That is from the 2024 Internet Crime Report, published 23 April 2025. Counting every kind of fraud rather than romance alone, the Federal Trade Commission's report on older consumers, published 1 December 2025, says that "Reported losses from people 60 and older totaled nearly $2.4 billion, up from about $1.9 billion in 2023." Both figures count reports that somebody filed, so they are a floor rather than a total.

are widows and widowers targeted by scammers

Yes, and the approach often starts with the death rather than a dating profile. AARP's page on obituary scams, updated 8 September 2023, says: "Obit-scouring criminals pretend to be long-lost friends or relatives of the deceased, contacting surviving spouses out of the blue to commiserate and reminisce." The same page says these displays of simulated compassion can evolve into romance scams or attempts to defraud beneficiaries out of inheritance money. A stranger who opens with your husband's first name and the right amount of sympathy has read something public. In the first year, treat that sympathy as information about him.

how do i report a romance scam

If no money moved, report to the Federal Trade Commission at reportfraud.ftc.gov, then to the FBI at ic3.gov, then tell your bank if you shared card or account details, then report the profile to the dating service. Block and report the profile. If money did move, call your bank first, then file at ic3.gov and reportfraud.ftc.gov. Save the profile name, the photographs, the messages, the dates and anything about payments before you report, because the thread may not survive the profile. Each site explains what happens next.

can you get money back after a romance scam

Sometimes, and it depends on how the money left and how quickly you call. The bank is the only step with a clock on it: give them the amount, the dates, where it went, and whether you authorized it yourself, then ask what can still be stopped. File at ic3.gov and reportfraud.ftc.gov in the same week; the FBI's 2024 report counted $389,312,356 in romance losses from people 60 and older, all of it from complaints somebody filed. Our advice: be wary of anyone who offers to recover the money for a fee.

how common are fake profiles on dating sites for over 50s

Common enough to plan for. AARP surveyed 300 adults aged 50 and older who use a dating platform or used one in the last three years, and reported: "In our survey, 41 percent of users said they encountered a fake profile or a person trying to scam them." The same survey found people who relied only on free platforms were about 10 percent more likely to report fake profiles or unsolicited sexually explicit messages. Two in five means the first fake profile is ordinary. Decide in advance what you will do with it: report it, block it, and do not answer.

what do i say to end contact with a romance scammer

One sentence, sent once: "I do not send money or share account details with anyone I have not met in person. I am ending this conversation now." Then stop writing. Whatever comes back, an apology included, is the same conversation carrying on. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center counted 7,626 confidence and romance complaints from people aged 60 and older in 2024, so this is an ordinary conversation to be ending. Screenshot the thread before you block, report the profile to the site, and tell one person in your life the name that was used. At the door or on the telephone the rule is shorter: nothing about accounts, and put it in writing.