“Good morning, my dear”: how romance scams find lonely people

It usually begins with something small. A friendly comment under a post in a local group. A message from a stranger who noticed your photograph of the sea, or your dog, or your late husband’s garden. He is polite. He is funny. He listens. He is a widower too, as it happens, working abroad on an oil rig, or with a peacekeeping mission, or on a building site somewhere far away.

And every morning there is a message waiting: Good morning, my dear.

Romance fraud is one of the most painful crimes of the internet age, because what it steals first is not money but trust. The money comes later, and it is often a great deal.

How big is the problem?

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission received 64,003 reports of romance scams in 2023, with reported losses of $1.14 billion. The year before, nearly 70,000 people reported a romance scam and losses reached $1.3 billion.¹²

In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, people made 9,096 reports of romance fraud to Action Fraud in 2024, with reported losses of £99.4 million.³

These are only the cases that were reported. Many victims never tell anyone, not the police, not their bank, sometimes not even their own children. Shame is the scammer’s best accomplice.

Where it starts

Dating sites are only part of the story. According to the FTC, 40% of people who lost money to a romance scam in 2022 said the contact started on social media, and among reports naming a platform, Instagram and Facebook came top.²

That matters. On a dating site, people at least expect to meet strangers. In a Facebook group about gardening, grief or a seaside town, nobody is on their guard.

The stories they tell

Scammers rarely invent a new life for every victim. They use a small number of stories that work, again and again. The FTC lists the favourites:²

• a soldier on a faraway military base;
• a worker on an offshore oil rig;
• someone who is suddenly ill, injured or in trouble with the law and needs help;
• a successful investor who offers to teach you about cryptocurrency;
• a valuable parcel that has been sent to you but is stuck at “customs” until a fee is paid.

Each story has the same useful features. It explains why he can never quite meet you, why video calls keep failing, and why, one day, he will need money urgently, through no fault of his own.

Who is really writing

The man in the photographs does not exist, or rather, he is usually a real person whose pictures have been stolen. The messages are written by someone else, and increasingly by a team.

In 2023 the UN Human Rights Office reported that at least 120,000 people in Myanmar and about 100,000 in Cambodia were being held in criminal compounds and forced to carry out online scams, including romance and investment fraud.⁴ Many of them had answered what looked like ordinary job advertisements. They work in shifts, from scripts, with quotas to meet, and some are beaten if they fail.

It is one of the strangest facts of this crime: very often, there are victims on both sides of the screen.

Warning signs

Consumer group Which? lists seven signs that the person you are talking to may not be who they say:³

1. Their photos or videos look too perfect, or turn up elsewhere online under another name.
2. They want to move the conversation quickly from the site where you met to email, text or a messaging app.
3. They build a strong emotional bond very fast, often with a tragic story, and may ask you to keep the relationship secret.
4. They always have a reason not to meet in person or turn on the camera.
5. They ask for money, gifts or gift cards, usually starting small.
6. They offer an investment “opportunity” or trading tips.
7. They ask to use your bank account to move money, which can turn you into a money mule without your knowing.

Why we wrote a novel about it

Our novel Good Morning, Helen follows one such woman: a widowed school secretary from a small English seaside town who, eleven weeks after a kind stranger first writes to her on Facebook, stands at the arrivals barrier in Istanbul in her green coat, waiting for a man who does not come. It also follows the young man who has been writing to her all along, from a room where the messages are written in shifts.

We wanted to write about the people statistics leave out: the woman who is embarrassed to tell her daughter, and the boy on the other side who did not choose this job either.