FTC Said the Public Lost $1.3 Billion to Romance Scams Across Five Years, Then Social Media Became the Costliest Door
WASHINGTON — On February 10, 2022, the Federal Trade Commission put a price on a particular kind of lie. Consumers reported losing $547 million to romance scams in 2021. That was a record, up nearly 80 percent from 2020, and it brought the reported total for the five years before that press release to $1.3 billion. The median individual loss reported to the FTC was $2,400. People who paid in cryptocurrency reported $139 million of the 2021 total, with a median loss near $10,000. About a quarter of the 2021 reports said the money moved as gift cards. The FTC’s own release is still the cleanest statement of what the agency knew that winter: many victims said the relationship began on a dating site or app, and a large share said it began on social media instead.
The pitch was never a stolen card number pulled out of a database. It was a person. A name, a photograph, a schedule that explained why a meeting kept falling through, then a crisis that required a wire, a card, or a transfer the victim had to learn how to make. Consumer Sentinel, the complaint system behind the figures, is not a recovery desk. It counts what people are willing to admit they lost. Most of that money does not come home. The FTC’s advice page, ftc.gov/romancescams, has said the same practical things for years: slow down, refuse anyone who will not meet, and treat a request to pay in gift cards or crypto as the end of the conversation, not the start of a rescue.
What changed after 2021 was not the script. It was the door the script walked through. On April 27, 2026, the FTC published a Data Spotlight showing that scams starting on social media produced $2.1 billion in reported losses in 2025. That was more than any other way a scammer made first contact. The year-by-year climb, set out in the spotlight’s footnotes, runs $261 million in 2020, $789 million in 2021, $1.2 billion in 2022, $1.5 billion in 2023, $1.9 billion in 2024, and $2.1 billion in 2025. Nearly 30 percent of people who reported losing money to any scam in 2025 said it started on a social platform. The agency also noted that it did not collect reports during the 2025 government shutdown, which means the 2025 file is a floor, not a complete census.
Romance is no longer the biggest pile of money on that pile, and that fact is easy to misread. Investment scams accounted for $1.1 billion of the social-media losses in 2025, more than half the total. Romance scams that started on social media were a distant second at $298 million. Read only that ranking and it sounds as if the love story shrank. Read the other line in the same spotlight and it did not. Nearly 60 percent of people who reported losing money to a romance scam in 2025 said the first contact was a social platform, up from about 40 percent in the FTC’s 2022-era snapshots. The spotlight describes the handoff in plain language. Scammers tailor the approach to a profile. Then they invent a crisis that needs cash, or they casually offer investment advice and walk the target onto a fake trading site. The romance is the on-ramp. The investment screen is where the account empties. The FTC’s consumer alert on how to spot those approaches is here.
Facebook sat at the top of the platform list. WhatsApp and Instagram were a distant second and third. People reported losing more money to scams that began on Facebook alone than to scams that began by text or by email. Social media was the costliest contact method, in aggregate dollars, for every age group under 80. For people 80 and older, phone calls still ranked first and social media second. Where a loss was actually reported, social media was the most common contact method for ages 18 to 29 and for people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. The share of loss reports tied to social media ran about 40 percent for ages 18 to 29, about 32 percent through the 30s, 40s, and 50s, 29 percent for ages 60 to 69, 23 percent for ages 70 to 79, and 14 percent for 80 and over. The old picture, a lonely retiree and a dating app, is not wrong. It is incomplete. The younger target is now in the same ledger, often because a message looked like a flirtation and ended as a coin transfer.
The FBI counts the same crime on a different form, and the two totals should not be mashed into one number. The Bureau’s 2025 Internet Crime Report recorded 1,008,597 complaints and $20.877 billion in reported losses, the first year that annual file cleared $20 billion. Losses were up 26 percent from 2024. The average loss across all complaints was $20,699. Inside that book, confidence fraud and romance scams were 23,159 complaints and $929,287,469. Investment fraud was in another league, at $8.65 billion. Business email compromise was $3.05 billion. Tech-support fraud was $2.13 billion. Romance is not the largest internet crime in America. It is one of the few that requires the victim to believe, for weeks, that somebody chose them.
Comparisons drawn from the IC3 annual reports put the 2024 confidence-and-romance line at $672,009,052 across 17,910 complaints. The jump to $929 million and 23,159 complaints in 2025 is roughly a 38 percent rise in dollars and about a 29 percent rise in reports. Cryptocurrency showed up inside 5,925 of the 2025 romance complaints, worth $394,787,515, a bit over 40 percent of that category. That matches what FBI agents have been saying on the record for several years. Special Agent Joe Holzman, in a February 13, 2026 public service announcement from the Chicago field office, described the move off the dating app and onto an encrypted chat, the meeting that never quite happens, and the sudden need for money tied to an “investment opportunity” or a medical emergency. In 2024, he said, more than 7,000 people over 60 reported nearly $400 million in romance-scam losses to IC3. His instruction was the one every honest advisory ends on. Never send money to someone you have not met in person. Stop contact the moment the story asks for cash.
The two databases disagree because they are not the same mailbox. Consumer Sentinel draws on a wide set of complaint channels. IC3 takes what people file with the FBI. A study the FTC cites, from economist Keith B. Anderson, found that only about 4.8 percent of people hit by a mass-market consumer fraud complained to a Better Business Bureau or a government office. Shame does extra work when the story is a relationship. The $547 million of 2021, the $1.3 billion across five years, the $298 million in social-media romance losses for 2025, and the FBI’s $929 million are reported losses. They are not audits.
The script itself has barely moved. A profile is built from someone else’s photographs. The chat leaves the dating app for WhatsApp, Telegram, or a similar thread, where a friend is less likely to stumble in. Meetings slip. A crisis arrives on schedule: a customs fee, a hospital bill, a trading account that shows fake profits until a “tax” is required to withdraw them. Gift cards were the 2021 tell, hard to reverse and easy to resell. Crypto became the larger tell because the same love story can coach a person to open a wallet and send coins into it. People will do that for someone they think chose them. They will not do it for a pop-up.
Platforms are not innocent bystanders in a $2.1 billion contact method, and they are not the only ones holding the bag. They sell the attention, rank the stranger’s message next to a friend’s, and move on when the report comes in. Banks and crypto exchanges see the wire or the coin leave. Police in the victim’s town rarely have a suspect inside their jurisdiction, because the person on the other end of the chat is often in another country, working from a script written for a hundred targets at once. The AEGIS Alliance has watched the neighboring racks fill with the same architecture. The $21 million grandparent-scam indictment used fear of a relative in jail. The phantom-hacker bank drain used fear of a hacked account and a fake federal agent. A South Wales grandmother who thought she was texting Robert De Niro about a fan card met the celebrity version of the same con. Romance is the version that takes longer, because trust is the product.
The February 2022 headline, $1.3 billion across five years, was meant to sound enormous. It was. Four years later the social-media contact method alone clears that figure in a single year, and the romance story has been braided into the investment story so tightly that a victim can lose the relationship and the savings in the same week. The FTC still cannot make the platforms slower than the script. It can publish the count. The count keeps going up.
More from The AEGIS Alliance: Crime News, U.S. News, and the reporting linked above on grandparent scams, phantom hackers, and the De Niro fan-card con.
