A scoping review of online romance scams: Conceptual construction and comparative analysis

Abstract

This scoping review synthesizes findings from 62 empirical studies to develop a typology of online romance scams, distinguishing between advance fee romance scams (AFRS) and investment-based romance scams (InvRS). The analysis reveals that while both rely on early-stage emotional manipulation and trust building, they diverge markedly in operational mechanisms and technological sophistication. AFRS typically use fabricated crises and prolonged emotional grooming to elicit repeated payments, whereas InvRS, including pig-butchering schemes, employ fraudulent investment platforms, often centered on cryptocurrency, to induce escalating financial commitments. By systematically reviewing studies published between January 2024 and October 2025 across both English and Chinese language sources, this work provides the most comprehensive comparative synthesis to date. The inclusion of 62 studies allows for cross regional and cross linguistic insights into offender networks, victim vulnerabilities, and prevention strategies, addressing a critical gap in prior literature that has treated romance scams as a single homogeneous phenomenon. The findings reveal the industrialization and diversification of offender tactics and underscore the need for future research on guardianship, victim psychology, and cross border policy collaboration to inform more targeted prevention and intervention frameworks.

Introduction

The proliferation of the Internet has fundamentally transformed communication, connectivity, and access to information. In particular, the digitalization of social media and the widespread adoption of online payment systems have significantly facilitated interpersonal interactions and financial transactions. However, this expansion has also fostered an environment conducive to various forms of cybercrime, with online romance scams standing out as a significant subset of online fraud. Online romance scams refer to deceptive schemes in which offenders create fictitious online identities and cultivate emotional or romantic relationships with victims in order to exploit them for financial gain (Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2024; Whitty, 2015). Offenders typically employ tactics such as prolonged grooming, emotional manipulation, and false promises of love or partnership, before fabricating emergencies or investment opportunities that pressure victims into sending money. These scams often combine the psychological dynamics of trust and intimacy with the logistical convenience of digital communication and payment systems, making them both persuasive and difficult to detect (e.g. Anesa, 2020; Carter; 2021; Whitty, 2013). According to the Nasdaq 2024 Global Financial Crime Report, global losses attributable to online romance scams amounted to US$3.8 billion in 2023 (Nasdaq, Inc.; Verafin, 2024). In the United States alone, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) documented 17,823 individual complaints related to this form of fraud in 2023 (IC3, 2024). Similarly, in the United Kingdom, the number of reported victims rose by 22% in 2023 compared to the previous year, as reported by Lloyds Bank (Lloyds Banking Group, 2024). This placed online romance scams among the top ten most reported cybercrimes, within a broader spectrum of 26 distinct categories of online offenses (Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2024).

Given the significant economic and psychological impact of online romance scams (Aborisade et al., 2024; Cole, 2024a), scholars have increasingly turned their attention to this transgression. Since approximately 2009, criminologists from various regions, including Asia, Europe, North America, Australia, and Africa, have engaged in research exploring diverse paradigms and issues related to online romance scams (e.g. Offei et al., 2022; Rege, 2009; Wang, 2024; Wang, 2025a, 2025b; Wang and Topalli, 2024a, 2024b; Whitty and Buchanan, 2012). This body of work has offered potential practical strategies for governmentkal agencies in combating these crimes while also informing public education efforts to mitigate victimization. As a result, the academic value of research on online romance scams holds significant academic value by supporting the development of actionable strategies for governments and the public, while also enhancing public understanding of this evolving crime and advancing criminological knowledge.

To provide a clearer overview of the state of research on online romance scams, six major reviews have been published in recent years, each building on the last. Coluccia et al. (2020) offered one of the earliest scoping reviews, foregrounding the relational and psychological dimensions of victimization and identifying the ‘double trauma’ of financial loss and emotional betrayal. Lazarus et al. (2023) followed with the first systematic review of empirical studies (2000–2021), drawing attention to geographic and methodological imbalances and calling for stronger theoretical grounding. In the same year, Bilz et al. (2023) synthesized 53 studies, grouping findings into scam profiling, influencing factors, and countermeasures, while stressing persistent challenges such as underreporting and the emergence of pig-butchering scams. In addition, Kassem and Carter (2024) mapped two decades of scholarship into ten thematic strands, reframing romance fraud as not only financial exploitation but also as a form of coercive control and psychological abuse. Expanding regional scope, Jais et al. (2024) produced a Malaysia-centered review applying the Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice model, illustrating the growing diversification of perspectives and methods. Most recently, Schokkenbroek and Snaphaan (2025) combined a scoping review with crime script analysis to propose a nine-scene, non-linear model of scams that emphasized their adaptive and cyclical character, highlighting how technologies such as AI and deepfakes are reshaping offender strategies and intervention opportunities. Collectively, these works chart the field’s progression from early concerns with victim psychology and relationship dynamics toward broader theoretical, regional, and technological perspectives.

Yet, important gaps remain. Earlier reviews largely limited their scope to studies published before 2024, leaving the most recent developments underexplored. Although Schokkenbroek and Snaphaan (2025) incorporated more recent work, several limitations were identified across the aforementioned reviews. They have treated romance scams as a single, homogeneous phenomenon, a framing that underscores broad similarities but obscures critical distinctions across scam types. And nearly all reviews have relied exclusively on English-language scholarship, overlooking contributions from non-English contexts. This omission is increasingly significant given the growing body of Chinese-language research on investment-based romance scams (InvRS), which has become especially salient in Southeast Asian settings.

As a result, this study undertakes a scoping review that not only extends the temporal scope of prior syntheses by systematically including publications from January 2024 to October 2025 but also incorporates a broader linguistic and cultural range through the inclusion of Chinese-language scholarship, thereby addressing a major gap in earlier work. Unlike prior reviews, it provides a comprehensive comparative table of included studies to enhance transparency and reproducibility. By distinguishing between advance fee romance scams (AFRS) and InvRS, the review highlights their divergent offender strategies, victim vulnerabilities, and systemic implications. Moreover, the findings demonstrate how varying scam types emerge from the convergence of motivated offenders, vulnerable targets, and insufficient guardianship in both traditional and technologically advanced contexts.

Study significance

The conceptualization of AFRS and InvRS can be situated within the broader criminological distinction between cyber-enabled and cyber-dependent crimes, which points to the varying degrees of technological reliance in different forms of online fraud. First articulated by David Wall in his 2015 analysis of organized cybercrime, the concepts of cyber-enabled and cyber-dependent crime have since been refined by both scholars and law enforcement agencies (e.g. Maimon and Louderback, 2019). Wall (2015) defines cyber dependent crimes as those that exist only because of networked technologies, such as hacking or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. ¹ In contrast, cyber-enabled crimes are traditional offenses such as fraud that are amplified by digital tools, extending their reach and impact. Wall further distinguishes crimes against the machine (e.g. hacking), crimes using the machine (e.g. fraud), and crimes in the machine (e.g. hate speech), thereby highlighting the importance of differentiating these categories by the level of technological involvement and the specific victim groups targeted.

Building on this framework, scholars have long sought to categorize online fraud into distinct subtypes such as phishing, identity theft, and investment fraud as a means of advancing both theoretical understanding and practical interventions (e.g. Beals et al., 2015; Onwubiko, 2020; Zingerle, 2014). Online romance scams, which have diversified significantly over the past decade, likewise require clear conceptual distinction. While research has acknowledged variations in the financial strategies underpinning these scams (e.g. Wang and Zhou, 2022; Whitty, 2015), no typology has been systematically developed to differentiate their evolving forms.

The emergence of AFRS and InvRS reflects this need for typological clarity. An AFRS, akin to cyber-enabled crimes, employs the Internet primarily as a medium to extend long-standing scam tactics. Offenders fabricate urgent crises such as medical emergencies, immigration problems, or business setbacks using relatively simple communication tools to elicit repeated financial transfers from victims. Here, the Internet functions mainly as a vehicle for reach and speed rather than as a source of technological sophistication. In contrast, an InvRS more closely aligns with cyber dependent crimes, as they rely heavily on advanced digital infrastructures. Offenders exploit romantic trust to lure victims into fraudulent investment schemes, often centered on cryptocurrency or other speculative assets, supported by fabricated trading platforms, staged dashboards, and increasingly, technologies such as artificial intelligence and deepfakes. In these cases, manipulation is both emotional and technological, with scams embedded in complex digital ecosystems that reinforce their credibility.

This distinction between AFRS and InvRS highlights the growing complexity of online romance scams and underscores the importance of situating them within criminological frameworks that account for both emotional manipulation and technological sophistication. By advancing such a typology, this study provides a clearer analytical lens for understanding offender tactics, victim vulnerabilities, and the systemic conditions that enable these crimes, thereby offering a foundation for more targeted prevention and intervention strategies.

Method

Article collection

A central strength of the scoping review methodology lies in its capacity to map the breadth of existing scholarship without limiting inclusion on the basis of study design (Arksey and O’Malley, 2005). Following this principle, the current review systematically incorporates both empirical studies and conceptual or theoretical contributions that address online romance fraud in its varied forms. Particular attention is given to two categories of scams: the more traditional AFRS, which are well-documented in criminological and victimology literature, and the more recent and rapidly evolving InvRS. The latter represent an innovative and progressive extension of romance fraud schemes, blending emotional manipulation with financial technologies such as cryptocurrency platforms and fraudulent investment interfaces. By examining both established and emerging forms, this review aims to provide a comprehensive foundation for understanding the shifting landscape of romance fraud. The following section outlines the procedures undertaken to identify, select, and organize the relevant body of literature for analysis.

Information sources

The articles included in this scoping review were identified in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guideline (Moher et al., 2009). To ensure comprehensive coverage, literature relating to both traditional AFRS and InvRS was gathered from a broad range of electronic sources. These included multidisciplinary and discipline-specific research databases (e.g. Academic Search Complete, PsycINFO, ASSIA, Criminal Justice Abstracts, PubMed, ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore, Web of Science, and JSTOR), as well as specialized repositories such as the Criminal Justice Database and Criminology Open. Recognizing the importance of cross-cultural perspectives, additional searches were conducted using the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) to capture Chinese-language publications. Gray literature sources, including Google Scholar and the Social Sciences Research Network, were also incorporated to broaden the scope beyond peer-reviewed outlets (see details in Table 1). Collectively, these searches yielded a substantial body of material published between January 2024 and October 2025, forming the foundation for subsequent screening and analysis.

Table 1.

Search results.

Search source	Number of items
Academic Search Complete	28
APA PsycINFO	18
ASSIA	28
Criminal Justice Abstracts	32
IEEE Xplore	11
JSTOR	3
Criminal Justice Database	125
PubMed	7
ScienceDirect	139
Web of Science	91
CNKI	268
Social Sciences Research Network	100
Criminology Open	18
Total	868

Search strategy

Within the databases described above, the following search terms were used: online, Internet, computer, and app. In addition, these terms were searched using the Boolean AND alongside the terms dating, romance, catfish, and pig-butchering. Fraud was also searched using the Boolean AND alongside the terms scam, pig-butchering scam, and swindle. All terms were searched in both Chinese and English, with word variants and wildcards applied to expand coverage. The search was conducted up to October 2025, and only studies published prior to this date and after January 2024 were included in the review.

Selection process

Before identifying and selecting studies, clear inclusion and exclusion criteria were established in accordance with the objectives of this review and the PRISMA framework (Figure 1; Levac et al., 2010). Studies were included if they (1) were empirical in nature, (2) examined online romance scams as the primary focus, and (3) were published between January 2024 and October 2025 in English or Chinese. Studies were excluded if they (1) were non-empirical works such as commentaries, book chapters, or theses; (2) addressed broader categories of online fraud without a specific focus on romance scams; or (3) were published in languages other than English or Chinese. While these parameters ensured analytical focus and methodological rigor, it is acknowledged that excluding studies in other languages may have limited the inclusion of potentially valuable cross-cultural insights.

Figure 1.

PRISMA flow diagram for identifying relevant online romance scams literature from January 2024 to October 2025.

Using these criteria, an initial pool of 868 records was identified across academic and gray literature sources. Following the removal of 122 duplicate records, 746 unique items were screened by title and abstract. At this stage, studies were excluded if they were not directly concerned with online fraud or online romance scams, or if they were published before 2024, leaving 279 reports for further retrieval. Of these, additional exclusions were made for reasons such as being commentary or news articles, general fraud studies, review papers, dissertations, or non-English/Chinese texts (see Figure 1).

After applying these exclusions, 41 studies were initially retained for in-depth review. Cross-checking through Google Scholar and supplementary retrievals yielded an additional 21 items, bringing the total number of studies included in this scoping review to 62. Among these, 55 were published in English-language outlets and 7 were drawn from Chinese-language sources. The final set of studies was then categorized into two primary groups based on existing conceptual distinctions: AFRS, representing more traditional forms of romance fraud, and InvRS, reflecting their innovative and rapidly evolving financial-technical dimensions.

Finally, it is important to note that this review was conducted by a single author; therefore, intercoder reliability testing was not applicable. Both stages of coding, the initial open coding and the subsequent thematic consolidation, were performed by the same researcher. To enhance rigor and minimize potential bias, coding was carried out through an iterative and reflexive process. Specifically, preliminary codes were first generated inductively from the extracted data, followed by multiple rounds of comparison and refinement to ensure consistency and conceptual coherence. Any discrepancies or ambiguities identified between coding iterations were resolved through analytic memoing, re-examining the relevant text segments, and verifying alignment with the overall thematic framework. This systematic self-audit process served to maintain reliability and transparency despite single-coder authorship.

Data collection and synthesis

Each article was read at least twice by the primary author to ensure accuracy and consistency in interpretation, and the key information was systematically extracted and organized in a comparative table. This process enabled a structured synthesis across the selected studies. Table 2 in the Appendix reports the authors, year of publication, country of study, research design, methodology, sample, and results for each article, allowing for clear comparison across the body of literature.

Of the articles that were selected, the largest proportion were qualitative studies (n = 45). A smaller number were quantitative (n = 11), and a few employed mixed methods (n = 6). The process for examining and synthesizing these articles followed a systematic charting approach, where each article was read multiple times and key information was extracted and organized for comparison. In terms of geographic distribution, the majority of studies were conducted in the United States (n = 21), followed by China (n = 11), the United Kingdom (n = 7), and Australia (n = 6). Other contributions came from Ghana (n = 5), Nigeria (n = 2), Iran (n = 2), Malaysia (n = 2), and single studies from Spain, Japan, South Korea, South Africa, India, and Indonesia. This spread highlights both the dominance of US and Chinese scholarship in this area and the growing recognition of the topic in diverse international contexts. Substantively, 36 of the studies examined advance-fee romance scams, whereas 26 focused on InvRS. Only one study (Yoshida, 2025) addressed both types, highlighting a general divide in the literature between these two dominant forms of online romance fraud. Finally, it is notable that much of the recent scholarly effort in both AFRS and InvRS has focused on the intersections between offenders and victims, highlighting how their interactions shape the dynamics of online romance scams. This line of inquiry emphasizes not only the strategies offenders use to manipulate and control but also how victims’ vulnerabilities, responses, and coping mechanisms influence the progression and outcomes of these scams.

Results of analysis

Prevalence in AFRS and InvRS

Both AFRS and InvRS are globally prevalent forms of cyber-enabled fraud, but their prevalence differs in scope, mechanisms, and impacts. A key similarity lies in their persistence and adaptability across regions: AFRS remains deeply entrenched in traditional forms of catfishing and fee extraction, while InvRS has surged more recently, often blending romance with cryptocurrency or trading investments. Both exploit emotional intimacy and trust, leading to severe financial and psychological harm, yet each type displays unique prevalence patterns.

AFRS continues to dominate in specific regions such as Nigeria, where case file analysis shows that 80% of 100 EFCC convictions between 2021–2023 involved romance scams, typically leveraging impersonation of Western professionals and payment channels like Bitcoin, gift cards, and bank transfers (Soares et al., 2025). In the United States, AFRS remains among the costliest cybercrimes, with FBI IC3 reporting losses of US$956 million in 2021 and US$736 million in 2022 (Herrera and Hastings, 2024). Survey evidence also indicates high levels of exposure: 44% of US adults reported being catfished in the last five years, with many cases escalating into AFRS (Snyder and Golladay, 2024). Beyond financial harms, AFRS prevalence also encompasses sexual exploitation, such as the ‘body scam’ documented in Iran, where coerced sexting, sextortion, and sexual violence were widespread (Amirkhani et al., 2024; Amirkhani et al., 2025). Furthermore, Wang and Topalli (2024b) demonstrate how AFRS has been industrialized into corporatized ‘Intimacy Manipulated Fraud Industrialization’ (IMFI), showing its expansion into large-scale, systemic exploitation.

In contrast, InvRS has rapidly emerged as one of the most financially devastating forms of fraud. US IC3 reports show that investment fraud losses escalated from US$336 million in 2020 to US$3.3 billion in 2022, much of this attributable to InvRS (Maras and Ives, 2024). Case analyses confirm extreme losses, with victims losing amounts ranging from US$22,000 to US$9.6 million (Maras and Ives, 2024). Dulisse et al. (2025) add further weight to this picture through an exploratory analysis of 291 scam tracker complaints from California and Wisconsin, finding that pig-butchering scams accounted for 27% of cases but caused the largest average losses (US$336,719 per victim). Multiple victimization was common (61.5% of victims) and strongly predicted higher losses, with repeat victims losing an average of US$238,126 compared to US$77,819 for single incidents. These findings underscore how InvRS prevalence is tied not only to scale but also to its ability to repeatedly ensnare victims.

Similar dynamics are observed cross-nationally. In the United Kingdom, pig-butchering dominated cryptocurrency fraud complaints, with male victims suffering higher median losses (US$92,000) than women (US$35,000), though female-presenting scammers often extracted higher sums overall (Ordekian et al., 2024). In Japan, narrative interviews revealed how InvRS resonated with women seeking intimacy and empowerment, with fraudsters creating ‘therapeutic but toxic’ spaces that tied scams to gender inequality and neoliberal pressures (Yoshida, 2025). In Asia, large-scale industrialization is evident: Chinese cases documented ‘7 day scripts’ and livestream-based frauds run like media companies (Zhang and Dou, 2025), while in Indonesia, perpetrators tied to Southeast Asian organized crime deployed fake apps, voice cloning, and blockchain spoofing to target victims, leading to multimillion-rupiah losses and severe psychosocial consequences (Aissyach et al., 2025).

Despite these differences, similarities remain striking. Both AFRS and InvRS exploit loneliness, trust, and sociocultural vulnerabilities. Both rely on systemic weaknesses: AFRS thrives under patriarchal norms, stigma, and lenient sentencing (Mkhize and Wepener, 2025; Thumboo and Mukherjee, 2024), while InvRS flourishes amid regulatory gaps, weak enforcement, and transnational organized crime (Aissyach et al., 2025). Both forms are increasingly industrialized, showing a shift from isolated scams to large-scale fraud industries. However, the most salient difference is in scale of losses: while AFRS causes widespread victimization, including sexual and emotional exploitation, InvRS generates disproportionately higher financial damages, with repeat victimization compounding losses. In this sense, AFRS represents longevity and diversity in scam forms, while InvRS represents acceleration, industrialization, and intensification of financial harm.

Offenders’ profiles in AFRS and InvRS

Offender profiles in AFRS and InvRS share certain structural and psychological features, yet they diverge in demographic composition, organizational scale, and the primary narratives used to manipulate victims. Both types of scams are rooted in socioeconomic marginality. In AFRS, fraudsters are typically young men between eighteen and twenty-six, some pursuing higher education but constrained by unemployment and limited opportunities (Soares and Lazarus, 2024). Similarly, fraudsters in InvRS operations recruit low-educated men from rural areas, often through acquaintances or fraudulent job advertisements promising ‘simple work and high pay’ (Franceschini et al., 2024; Luong, 2025; Yan, 2024). These recruitment pathways reveal how structural inequalities funnel disadvantaged populations into cyber-fraud.

In both cases, offenders operate within peer or organizationally embedded networks that normalize and professionalize fraud. AFRS is often viewed as strategic game rather than a crime and cultivated in ‘hustle kingdoms’ or ‘cybercrime academies’, where groups of 20 to 30 individuals live together, share techniques, and treat fraud as a legitimate occupational pathway (Abubakari and Oseh-Ovarah, 2025; Lazarus et al., 2025a, 2025b). Such environments are reinforced by local cultures of conspicuous consumption in Ghana, where flaunting wealth serves as a marker of respect and status, incentivizing fraud as a pathway to social recognition (Barnor, 2024). InvRS, by contrast, are organized on a far larger scale, run by Chinese-led syndicates with hierarchies of bosses, recruiters, and frontline ‘soldiers’ who interact directly with victims (Luong, 2025; Yang et al., 2024). In both contexts, offenders rely heavily on scripted communication and social engineering. AFRS scammers use love bombing, religious appeals, and staged identity performances to build intimacy (Faber, 2025; Lee et al., 2024), while InvRS offenders craft conversations around staged affluence and perform financial credibility through social media and fake trading platforms (Chen, 2024; Zhuang and Feng, 2025). Moreover, both types of scams transcend national boundaries and exploit weak enforcement. AFRS scammers often relocate to Ghana to escape oversight from the EFCC and biometric verification systems (Lazarus et al., 2025a), while InvRS syndicates base their operations in northern Myanmar and Cambodian casinos repurposed after gambling bans (Han and Button, 2025; Yang et al., 2024).

Despite these shared characteristics, the differences between these two forms of romance scams are more pronounced. AFRS scams exhibit a gender-diverse offender profile, especially in Ghana, where women engage in gender-swapping schemes or provide behind-the-scenes support, motivated by job discrimination and family responsibilities while protected by the anonymity of digital platforms (Abubakari, 2024a, 2024b). InvRS scammers, however, are overwhelmingly male dominated at the labor level, and many of these men are coerced into scam work under threats of violence, surveillance, and debt bondage (Luong, 2025; Wang, 2024). This distinction underscores how the former often rely on voluntary participation, whereas the latter are entangled with human trafficking.

The deception strategies also diverge sharply. AFRS are grounded in emotional grooming: offenders cultivate relationships through narratives of friendship, soulmateship, and eventual marriage, reinforced by appeals to religious duty and moral integrity (Abubakari and Oseh-Ovarah, 2025; Dickinson and Wang, 2024; Wang and Dickinson, 2025). Victim testimonies show that scammers in these schemes deploy multiple social engineering tactics across five recurrent scenarios, with victim attitudes evolving through five stages of engagement, reflecting a reciprocal offender–victim dynamic rooted in impression management, interpersonal deception, and social engineering theories (Wang and Topalli, 2024a). InvRS, by contrast, are centered on investment fraud. Offenders present themselves as affluent financial mentors, luring victims into fake cryptocurrency platforms and fabricated dashboards that display steady profits and staged withdrawals to encourage escalating investments (Dove, 2024; Han and Button, 2025; Yang and Sha, 2025). While both strategies rely on trust-building, the former manipulates emotional dependency, while the latter exploits victims’ aspirations for financial prosperity.

Organizational structures also distinguish the two. AFRS, although structured, resemble peer-influenced academies and rely heavily on shared consumer culture and voluntary recruitment (Barnor, 2024; Soares and Lazarus, 2024). InvRS, by contrast, function as industrialized criminal enterprises with highly stratified hierarchies, surveillance mechanisms, and coercive controls that prevent exit (Luo and Zhao, 2025; Luong, 2025). Rationalizations further reinforce these differences. AFRS offenders often justify their crimes as morally legitimate, invoking religion, colonial reparations, or critiques of corruption to position themselves as reclaiming wealth from the West (Abubakari, 2025; Abubakari and Oseh-Ovarah, 2025; Lazarus et al., 2025a). InvRS offenders instead normalize their actions as routine business, reinforced through social bonding rituals and the strategic use of incriminating evidence to ensure loyalty (Luo and Zhao, 2025).

Finally, offender–victim interaction and payoff trajectories differ. AFRS evolve gradually, beginning with staged intimacy and small requests before escalating to larger financial transfers (Choi et al., 2024). Theoretical work applying Lifestyle Routine Activity Theory (LRAT) further demonstrates how offenders exploit long-term grooming strategies in romance scams, with older adults’ reliance on heuristics and cognitive impairments heightening susceptibility, and capable guardianship through education and alerts playing a vital preventive role (Shapiro, 2025). InvRS unfold as a structured ‘trust game’, beginning with casual introductions, escalating to test investments that yield fake profits, and culminating in large-scale financial losses when the scheme collapses (Zhuang and Feng, 2025). Whereas AFRS prioritize sustained extraction through emotional bonds, InvRS are designed to escalate toward lump-sum financial commitments before exit.

Taken together, the comparison shows that AFRS and InvRS are both shaped by structural inequalities, organizational contexts, and adaptive strategies, yet they diverge sharply in gendered participation, the role of coercion, the framing of deception, and the structures of victim interaction. These differences highlight that online romance scams operate on a continuum, ranging from emotionally centered fraud rooted in voluntary participation to industrialized investment-driven schemes that merge fraud with coercive transnational infrastructures.

Victims’ profiles in AFRS and InvRS

AFRS and InvRS reveal overlapping patterns in the types of victims they ensnare, while also diverging in important demographic and psychological dimensions. A clear similarity is that both groups are marked by social and psychological vulnerabilities that heighten susceptibility to deception. Loneliness, depression, and social isolation are recurrent themes across AFRS and InvRS studies (Anderson et al., 2024; Lin, 2025; Purwaningrum et al., 2024; Xie and Duan, 2025). In both contexts, relational needs rooted in the desire for emotional companionship or the search for financial hope, provide the foundation upon which scammers build trust. Victims of AFRS often fall prey when unmet relational needs coincide with persuasive narratives of romance and security (Herrera, 2025; Wang and Topalli, 2024a), while InvRS victims are similarly manipulated through staged intimacy that evolves into financial exploitation, typically masked as legitimate investment opportunities (Zhuang and Feng, 2025). In both cases, the emotional toll is severe: shame, self-blame, and depression frequently surface, with some victims reporting suicidal ideation (Herrera, 2025; Shi et al., 2025). Structural barriers such as limited digital literacy, delayed fact-checking, and underreporting further sustain vulnerability in both scam types (Herrera, 2025; Shapiro, 2025; Xie and Duan, 2025).

At the same time, notable differences distinguish AFRS and InvRS victim profiles. Demographically, AFRS disproportionately affects older women in Western contexts, with survey evidence showing that 85% of victims were aged 55 and above, the majority female, widowed, or divorced, and often with modest socioeconomic resources (Herrera, 2025). These patterns are compounded by age-related cognitive, neurological, and health-related vulnerabilities such as reliance on heuristics, reduced executive functioning, sensory impairments, and medication fatigue, which impede judgment and increase risk (Shapiro, 2025). Financial vulnerability also escalates with age: Cole (2024a, 2024b) found that financial losses among AFRS victims increased significantly in older cohorts, indicating that chronological age itself compounds exposure and damage. Comparative data further complicates stereotypes about seniors’ susceptibility. Cross and Holt (2025), analyzing more than 2,600 Scamwatch complaints in Australia, found that seniors (65+) were no more likely than younger victims to surrender financial details or suffer monetary loss, though they were less frequently targeted through social media and less likely to lose personal information. By contrast, InvRS does not show such a pronounced age skew; instead, victims are often defined more by situational drivers such as financial aspirations and interest in cryptocurrency markets than by chronological age. Many InvRS victims pursue financial independence, debt relief, or speculative gains, making them receptive to staged ‘proofs’ of legitimacy, professional-looking platforms, and incremental returns designed to build trust (Anderson et al., 2024; Zhuang and Feng, 2025).

Geographically, AFRS victimization patterns are widespread but uneven, with the United States dominating case samples (56%) while smaller shares appear across Brazil, Poland, Canada, New Zealand, the Philippines, and joint US–India cases (Soares and Lazarus, 2024). InvRS, however, often flourishes within globalized digital markets, where contact commonly begins on dating apps or social platforms but rapidly shifts into investment narratives that transcend national boundaries (Anderson et al., 2024). Gendered dynamics also diverge: AFRS cases show offenders disproportionately target women (about 70%), often exploiting personas such as Caucasian American men, military officers, or professional figures (Soares and Lazarus, 2024), whereas InvRS scammers leverage hyperpersonal digital communication and portray themselves as romantic partners or crypto ‘ experts’, appealing to both genders but with emphasis on shared-risk and aspirational financial narratives (Anderson et al., 2024; Zhuang and Feng, 2025).

Overall, AFRS and InvRS victim profiles converge on psychosocial vulnerabilities, yet differ in demographic composition, motivational triggers, and scam dynamics. AFRS disproportionately targets older women coping with relational and cognitive vulnerabilities, while InvRS captures a more heterogeneous population drawn in by financial ambitions and carefully staged relational manipulation. These distinctions highlight the importance of tailoring prevention and intervention strategies to the specific vulnerabilities and life circumstances that different scam types of exploits.

Aftermaths of AFRS and InvRS

Consequences

Both AFRS and InvRS produce consequences that go well beyond financial loss, intertwining economic devastation with profound psychological harm. Victims of both scams frequently describe feelings of shame, humiliation, and mistrust, with emotional distress often reported as more debilitating than material losses (Cole, 2024a; Drew and Webster, 2024a; Oak and Shafiq, 2025). These harms manifest in symptoms such as anxiety, depression, insomnia, appetite changes, and social withdrawal, with some victims even incurring medical debt due to stress-induced illnesses (Drew and Webster, 2024). In both contexts, stigma silences victims: many avoid reporting or seeking formal assistance because of embarrassment, fear of being judged, or distrust of institutions (Aissyach et al., 2025; Herrera, 2025). This social isolation is compounded by scammers themselves, who deliberately discourage external relationships to maintain control (Aborisade et al., 2024).

Institutional shortcomings further connect AFRS and InvRS experiences. Law enforcement is frequently perceived as dismissive or powerless, with victims often reporting being ignored, discouraged from filing complaints, or even blamed for their own victimization (Cole, 2024a; Herrera, 2025). This leaves survivors without meaningful restitution or justice. Revictimization is another shared pattern: AFRS victims may be subjected to ongoing manipulation through emotional blackmail or coerced intimacy (Aborisade et al., 2024), while InvRS victims are often re-targeted by encore scams, such as fraudulent ‘recovery fees’ or impostors posing as investigators (Oak and Shafiq, 2025). In both scam types, media and public attention can briefly counter stigma and stimulate reporting—Grant and Buil-Gil (2025) found that docuseries like Dirty John and Love Fraud spurred short-lived reporting spikes of up to 24%—yet underreporting remains pervasive (Herrera, 2025). Together, these patterns reveal how victims of both AFRS and InvRS often endure disenfranchised victimization, abandoned not only by offenders but also by social networks and institutional systems meant to protect them (Meikle and Cross, 2024).

Despite these overlaps, AFRS and InvRS diverge in the scope, mechanism, and systemic dimensions of harm. AFRS consequences are often broader and more intimate in character, blending financial losses with coercive emotional manipulation and, in some cases, sexual exploitation. Victims in AFRS contexts describe harms that mirror coercive control and intimate partner violence, producing long-term psychological scars that persist even after financial exploitation ends (Aborisade et al., 2024; Herrera, 2025). Financial losses in AFRS span a wide spectrum, from small sums transferred through gift cards or mobile payment apps to catastrophic cases involving bankruptcies and foreclosures (Drew and Webster, 2024). Yet what often distinguishes AFRS is the relational betrayal—the perception that love and trust were exploited—which intensifies shame and fuels the stigma victims encounter from family and friends (Meikle and Cross, 2024).

In contrast, InvRS consequences are more concentrated on catastrophic economic fallout. Victims frequently lose life savings, mortgage homes, or accumulate massive debts, with average losses significantly higher than in AFRS (Ordekian et al., 2024). The structured lifecycle of InvRS scams—months of grooming, staged ‘profits’, escalating investments, and eventual collapse—creates a trajectory of betrayal that leaves victims not only bankrupt but also deeply disillusioned with digital finance and online relationships (Botha et al., 2025). InvRS also pose unique systemic challenges: the cryptocurrency-driven, transnational infrastructure of these schemes makes them exceptionally difficult to prosecute, enabling offenders to operate with near impunity (Aissyach et al., 2025). Adding to the burden, the stigmatizing label of ‘pig-butchering’ discourages many victims from disclosure, compounding silence and isolation (Oak and Shafiq, 2025).

Prevention

The prevention of AFRS and InvRS reveals both commonalities and divergences in strategy, reflecting the different mechanisms through which these scams operate. At a fundamental level, both types of scams require responses that combine educational, systemic, and judicial interventions. In both contexts, judicial consistency emerges as an important deterrent: Wang (2024, 2025a; 2025b) analyses of US and Chinese sentencing practices show that when courts rely on offense-related legal factors such as offender culpability, scale of financial loss, or role within the scheme rather than demographic biases, sentencing frameworks provide predictability and send strong preventive signals to potential offenders. Similarly, both AFRS and InvRS highlight the need for international collaboration, given the transnational scale of operations, and for reforms that strengthen institutional guardianship across borders (Wang and Kelsay, 2025). Victim-centered approaches also cut across the two contexts: Bleiman et al.’s (2025) empathy-driven training and Oak and Shafiq’s (2025) analysis of pig-butchering scam lifecycles both stress that prevention must include strategies that empower victims and prospective guardians to respond with sensitivity, support, and timely intervention (Wang and Kelsay, 2025).

Despite these shared principles, AFRS and InvRS diverge sharply in the specific tools and institutional priorities they demand. AFRS prevention strategies emphasize educational outreach and social guardianship, particularly for older adults who may be disproportionately targeted. Initiatives such as experiential learning competitions (Bleiman et al., 2025) and digital literacy programs promoting self-advocacy among seniors (Shapiro, 2025) illustrate a model grounded in human skills, empathy, and awareness building (e.g. Abubakari and Oseh-Ovarah, 2025; Wang and Kelsay, 2025). However, education alone is insufficient. As Wang and Kelsay’s five-stage victim script shows, successful prevention also depends on platform-level and institutional supports such as in-app identity verification, automated alerts before high-risk transfers, and cross-sector collaboration between law enforcement, banks, and victim service organizations. These systemic safeguards are critical to complement user awareness and to ensure that early detection, reporting, and recovery are possible (Abubakari and Oseh-Ovarah, 2025). By contrast, InvRS prevention remains more oriented toward technological and regulatory innovation, exemplified by Aliyev et al.’s (2024) blockchain forensics and Krause’s (2025) call for harmonized financial oversight and real-time intervention tools. While AFRS prevention stresses empathetic education and community resilience, its effectiveness ultimately relies on a shared responsibility between informed users, responsive platforms, and coordinated institutions.

Taken together, these strategies indicate that AFRS prevention relies primarily on human-centered guardianship and community-based resilience, supported by educational outreach, empathy-driven awareness, and social support networks. Yet, its success ultimately depends on the integration of platform and institutional safeguards that enhance detection, reporting, and recovery. In contrast, InvRS prevention depends more heavily on technological monitoring, regulatory coordination, and financial system accountability to address complex transnational infrastructures. Despite these differences, both approaches converge on the understanding that effective prevention requires a synergistic blend of deterrence, systemic guardianship, and victim empowerment, tailored to the specific mechanisms through which scammers manipulate trust and opportunity in each scam type.

Discussion and conclusion

Online romance scams perpetuate profound financial, psychological, and emotional harms, leaving victims vulnerable to long-term exploitation and institutional neglect. These scams affect victims’ financial stability, mental health, interpersonal relationships, and ability to seek redress through legal and social systems. This study therefore set out to examine the research gaps in prior reviews of online romance scams, to distinguish between AFRS and InvRS, and to incorporate emerging non-English scholarship, particularly recent Chinese studies, to provide a more comprehensive global synthesis.

The literature reviewed revealed that romance scams are a troubling and widespread phenomenon, but AFRS and InvRS follow distinct trajectories. AFRS has demonstrated persistence through crisis-driven narratives and fee-extraction tactics, relying on traditional forms of catfishing and emotionally driven grooming. InvRS, in contrast, reflects a newer, industrialized model of fraud, characterized by its entanglement with cryptocurrency, fraudulent investment platforms, and transnational infrastructures. These findings highlight four central aspects of romance scams: divergent prevalence patterns across scam types, differentiated offender profiles shaped by structural inequalities, distinct victim vulnerabilities, and varied prevention and intervention needs.

Among criminological and victimological perspectives noted earlier in this article, Routine Activity Theory (RAT) and theories of structural inequality appear to offer the most comprehensive frameworks for understanding these findings. AFRS perpetrators are often young men in disadvantaged areas navigating unemployment and restricted opportunity, contexts in which fraud is normalized through peer-based ‘cybercrime academies’. InvRS perpetrators, by contrast, are frequently situated within coercive and hierarchical syndicates in Southeast Asia, with some recruited under deceptive pretenses or even trafficked into scam compounds. This distinction emphasizes the role of inequality and coercion in shaping offender participation. While AFRS involvement is often voluntary, reflecting rational responses to marginalization, InvRS participation may blur the line between offender and victim.

The victim side of the literature similarly reveals differentiated pathways of susceptibility. AFRS disproportionately affects older women in Western contexts, where scammers exploit loneliness, age-related vulnerabilities, and relational dependence. InvRS victims, however, represent more diverse demographics, united not by loneliness but by financial aspirations and speculative trust in digital markets. This accords with RAT’s focus on the convergence of motivated offenders and suitable targets within poorly regulated environments. AFRS victims are groomed into dependency, while InvRS victims are drawn into aspirational investment narratives that legitimize escalating financial losses.

The aftermath of AFRS and InvRS illustrates distinct yet overlapping harms. AFRS victims often report experiences resembling coercive control and intimate partner violence, including manipulation and, in some cases, sexual exploitation. InvRS victims, on the other hand, are more likely to suffer catastrophic financial collapse and secondary victimization through recovery scams. Both groups face institutional barriers such as inadequate law enforcement response, social stigma that discourages disclosure, and limited access to restitution. These outcomes reflect systemic failures to address romance fraud as both a cyber-enabled crime and a form of emotional exploitation.

In terms of prevention, the reviewed literature points to divergent strategies. AFRS prevention appears most effective through human-centered approaches, including educational outreach, stigma reduction, and digital literacy programs targeting vulnerable populations. InvRS prevention, however, depends on systemic reforms, such as the development of blockchain forensics, harmonized international regulations, and enhanced oversight of digital financial markets. This continuum suggests that while AFRS reflects persistence and adaptability in emotionally driven scams, InvRS epitomizes the industrialization and intensification of financial harm.

In addition to extending earlier reviews, this study expands the literature in three critical ways. First, it systematically includes research published from 2024 through October 2025, capturing recent developments often excluded from earlier syntheses. Second, it provides a detailed comparative table of included works, enhancing transparency, accessibility, and reproducibility. Third, it integrates the most recent Chinese-language scholarship on InvRS, offering novel insights into Southeast Asian scam operations where such schemes are especially prevalent. Collectively, these contributions provide a more differentiated and globally inclusive understanding of online romance scams, clarifying the distinct yet interconnected dynamics of AFRS and InvRS.

Limitations

While this review has many strengths and important implications, it also has limitations that warrant consideration. Despite a comprehensive search strategy across multiple databases and the inclusion of both English- and Chinese-language publications, it is possible that relevant studies in other languages or gray literature were not captured. Because reference harvesting was used as a supplementary strategy, citation bias may also be present, as highly cited works are more likely to appear in the review. In addition, the review period was restricted to studies published between January 2024 and September 2025, which provides a timely synthesis but may exclude earlier or forthcoming contributions.

Furthermore, the distribution of included studies may introduce a regional bias: for instance, majority IvRS studies originated from Chinese contexts, whereas most AFRS studies were conducted in Western settings. This imbalance may influence thematic emphasis and limit the generalizability of cross-cultural comparisons. In addition, while thematic analysis allowed for nuanced synthesis across diverse data sources, it also carries an inherent risk of subjectivity. As this review was conducted by a single author, formal intercoder reliability testing was not applicable; however, coding consistency was strengthened through iterative code refinement, memoing, and systematic cross-checking of themes against extracted data. Finally, although this review distinguishes between AFRS and IvRS, this categorization remains a simplification, and some overlap between these scam types may not be fully represented.

Implications for future research

Despite the progress that has been made in research on online romance scams, significant gaps remain those that present opportunities for future inquiry. One critical gap lies in the development of valid and reliable instruments to identify and measure victim vulnerabilities and offender strategies across different scam types. While stage-based models of scam progression have been proposed, there has been little progress in producing tools that can be systematically applied to detect, compare, and intervene in AFRS and InvRS. This remains an important need, as standardized instruments could aid in early identification of victims and in guiding targeted prevention strategies.

Furthermore, there is a notable absence of intervention studies that empirically test prevention or recovery practices. Much of the current scholarship remains descriptive or explanatory, focusing on offender tactics or victim experiences without translating this knowledge into intervention design. Yet intervention is critical, particularly for InvRS victims who face catastrophic financial losses and secondary victimization through recovery scams, and for AFRS victims whose experiences often parallel patterns of coercive control and intimate partner violence. Future research should prioritize designing, testing, and evaluating interventions that address these distinct harms. For example, community-based digital literacy programs could be tailored for groups vulnerable to AFRS, while systemic reforms such as blockchain-based monitoring could be examined as preventive tools against InvRS.

Another area that requires greater attention is the voices and perspectives of victims themselves. Similar to the call for trauma survivors to be central in research on trauma bonding, victims of romance scams should play a meaningful role in shaping the design of prevention and support initiatives. Studies that gather comprehensive, contextualized accounts of how victims recognize scams, cope with their aftermath, or rebuild trust could provide vital insights for developing effective interventions. Comparative studies that examine differences across demographic groups, such as age, gender, socioeconomic status, and cultural background, would further enhance the specificity and inclusivity of prevention efforts.

There is also a pressing need for theoretical advancement. While Routine Activity Theory (RAT) and structural inequality perspectives have provided valuable insights into offender and victim dynamics, future research should move beyond reliance on a narrow set of frameworks and more deliberately situate studies within a broader range of theories. Perspectives such as social learning theory, strain theory, psychological models of persuasion and attachment, and critical approaches to globalization and transnational crime could all enrich understanding of the complex processes underlying romance scams. Structuring future studies explicitly within these diverse theoretical lenses would not only deepen explanations of offender motivations and victim vulnerabilities but also generate testable propositions that can guide the design of interventions. Moreover, exploring how different theoretical perspectives converge or diverge in explaining hybrid and evolving scam forms, such as those that blur boundaries between AFRS and InvRS, would advance a more integrated and dynamic criminological framework for studying romance fraud.

Finally, diversity and cultural specificity remain underexplored. While this review incorporated recent Chinese-language scholarship to capture insights into InvRS in Southeast Asia, there remains a lack of studies addressing romance scams in other linguistic, cultural, and regional contexts. Future research should explicitly examine how sociocultural categories—such as gender norms, economic pressures, and cultural attitudes toward intimacy and finance—shape both victim susceptibility and offender strategies. Such research would not only deepen theoretical understanding but also ensure that interventions are culturally responsive and globally relevant.

Implications for practice

In addition to directions for future research, the findings of this scoping review provide implications for practice and policy in addressing online romance scams. Law enforcement agencies require specialized training to recognize that victims often appear complicit in their own exploitation, with AFRS victims sending money out of emotional dependency and InvRS victims making repeated ‘investments’ under the belief that they are legitimate. Training curricula for police and financial investigators should therefore include modules on victim psychology, scam typologies, and strategies for distinguishing between intentional complicity and deception-driven victimization, alongside practical guidelines to ensure that victims are met with sensitivity rather than blame. Practitioners such as financial counselors, social workers, and mental health professionals also need resources tailored to the layered harms of romance scams, including trauma-informed counseling for AFRS victims whose experiences resemble coercive control, and financial recovery services for InvRS victims that incorporate legal advice on restitution and safeguards against secondary recovery scams. Partnerships between victim service organizations and financial institutions should be supported to allow early detection of suspicious transfers and timely interventions before losses escalate.

From an interdisciplinary perspective, future interventions should also account for how gender, age, and intersectional identities shape both vulnerability and institutional responses. For instance, gendered social expectations around trust, romance, and financial decision-making may render women disproportionately targeted in AFRS, whereas men may be more susceptible to InvRS schemes that exploit investment-oriented social scripts. Moreover, marginalized populations such as older adults, immigrants, or LGBTQ+ individuals often face compounding vulnerabilities, including stigma and reduced access to support services. Recognizing these structural and psychosocial dimensions can help practitioners and policymakers develop more inclusive prevention strategies and equitable victim support mechanisms that transcend a one-size-fits-all approach.

Finally, policy frameworks must prioritize international collaboration, particularly in Southeast Asia where InvRS compounds operate with high levels of organization, through measures such as extradition agreements, harmonized penalties for operating scam compounds, and coordinated efforts to dismantle transnational money laundering networks. Collectively, these measures underscore the need to tailor interventions to the distinct operational logics of AFRS and InvRS rather than treating romance scams as a single, uniform phenomenon.

Conclusion

Online romance scams are a growing global problem that continues to cause profound financial, psychological, and social harm to victims. Distinguishing between AFRS and InvRS is critical, as these forms of fraud operate through divergent mechanisms, target different victim groups, and produce distinct consequences. This current review has identified key differences in prevalence patterns, offender and victim profiles, harms, and prevention strategies, while also incorporating recent international scholarship that broadens the scope of existing knowledge. These findings will inform the development of more targeted interventions and policies that better protect victims, disrupt offender networks, and strengthen systemic responses to this evolving form of cyber-enabled crime.