How Much Money Romance Scams Actually Cost

A romance scam costs the typical victim who reports it about $2,000, and the average victim about $40,000. The distance between those two numbers tells you more than either one does alone.

You'll run into both figures when you search after a scare, or when your sister forwards a headline about billions lost to fake boyfriends. They point to different conclusions. One says this is an expensive nuisance. The other says it can take a retirement account. Which number you believe shapes how careful you decide to be, so it's worth knowing where each one comes from.

Every figure here is self-reported. A woman realizes what happened, files a complaint, and types in what she sent. Nobody audits it. That number goes into a government total.

The FTC's latest consumer alert on imposter scams puts the median reported romance scam loss at $2,020. It also reports that total romance losses rose 22% year over year. The median is the middle complaint: half of victims lost less and half lost more.

The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report counts 23,159 confidence fraud and romance complaints with $929,287,469 in reported losses. Losses were up 38% from $672 million in 2024, and complaint volume was up 29%. Divide the losses by the complaints and you get about $40,126 each. That is a mean, and a few very large losses pull it upward.

A hypothetical shows how. Say nine women each lose $2,000 and a tenth loses $400,000. The median is $2,000 and the mean is $41,800. Both are accurate. Neither one describes the tenth woman's year.

Both totals are also floors. Only about 4.8% of fraud victims report to any authority, a figure cited alongside the IC3 data. One statistics roundup uses that rate to estimate true annual losses near $29.6 billion. Treat that as an estimate built on an estimate. What you can say with confidence is that the filed figures are the smallest the real number could be.

The best case for calm deserves a fair hearing. If most victims lose a couple of thousand dollars, the big headlines may scare women off dating for nothing. The median supports that view. But the same roundup breaks median losses down by payment method, and the split is sharp. Gift cards had a median of $700 and payment apps like Zelle, Venmo and Cash App had $650. Bank wires had $10,000 and cryptocurrency had $10,079. Crypto appeared in 5,925 IC3 romance complaints totaling $394,787,515, which is 42% of the category's losses. The roundup puts the recovery rate for crypto at under 1%. A small loss stays small until the money moves into a wire or a wallet.

By age. The IC3 groups victims by decade of age, not by sex, so there is no figure for women over 40 specifically. The 40 to 49 bracket is the closest available. Dividing each bracket's losses by its complaints gives these per-complaint averages:

• 30 to 39: $42.5 million across 2,501 complaints, roughly $17,000 each
• 40 to 49: $74.6 million across 3,010 complaints, roughly $24,800 each
• 50 to 59: $131.4 million across 3,745 complaints, roughly $35,100 each
• 60 and over: $584,032,745 across 10,188 complaints, roughly $57,300 each

The 60-plus group filed 44% of the complaints and accounted for 63% of the losses. At 40 to 49, you're in the middle of that range, and each decade older loses more per complaint than the one before. The same group also lost $540,505,980 across 2,529 complaints to "recovery" scams, where fake law firms promise to get stolen money back. That's why the first 48 hours matter if this has already happened to you.

By where it starts. The FTC's Data Spotlight attributes $298 million in 2025 romance losses to scams that began on social media. Nearly 60% of romance victims said the contact started there.

On the apps. A Joint Economic Committee staff report released today, covered by La Voce di New York, found roughly 1.5 million suspicious or malicious accounts active on Tinder and Hinge in the third quarter of 2025. It also found about 500,000 cases of users exchanging contact details with fraudulent accounts. Match Group says new screening has cut users' exposure to inauthentic profiles by 60%. That figure is the company's own and has not been independently checked.

Several larger figures circulate in the same articles and get read as the cost of romance scams. Most are not.

These figures don't argue for staying off the apps. They argue for watching one specific moment. Across both datasets, the losses that wreck people come through wires and crypto, usually after weeks of trust-building. The FTC describes that pivot directly:

"Romance scammers play the long game. They build a relationship over time, then one day, the conversation turns to money, and they offer to help you invest yours."

That offer is the point where a $650 loss becomes a $10,000 one. A match who hasn't met you and steers you toward a trading app is the pattern behind most of the crypto losses, and a match pushing crypto is one you can rule out on sight. The useful question isn't how much people lose on average. It's whether anyone you haven't met has asked you to move money anywhere.