Spotting a Military Romance Scam on Dating Apps

A military romance scam is a con in which a stranger borrows a real service member's face and uniform to explain why he can't meet you, and then why you should send him money.

The deployed soldier is the most useful character a scammer can play. He's admirable, he's lonely, and he's far away, and that distance excuses everything that would otherwise look odd. If a match tells you within days of matching that he's stationed overseas, this is the story you're being asked to believe. Whether you believe it decides whether you ever send a dollar.

The story is built from the same four parts almost every time, and they arrive in the same order.

First, the face. The photos are real, and that's why they work. The FTC's alert on military romance scams says scammers steal photos of actual military personnel without their knowledge. You aren't looking at an invented man. You're looking at a real one who has no idea you exist.

Second, the distance. The deployment comes up almost immediately after the match, often with a named conflict zone attached. Identity-protection company Aura notes the claimed deployments often run two years or more, which conveniently puts any meeting a long way off. Then comes a request to move the conversation off the app to WhatsApp or Telegram, where the app's moderators can't see it.

Third, the missing video. He can text for hours but can never get on camera. The excuse is "security reasons" or a bad connection in theater.

Fourth, the money. It's framed as something only you can fix: a fee to request leave so he can visit, food or medical costs while deployed, transport home. The Army's Criminal Investigation Division adds deployment costs and marriage-processing fees to the list. The FTC's answer to all of them is flat: "Servicemembers never have to pay to get packages, food, medical treatment, or to take leave."

The payment route gives it away as well. Gift cards, wire transfers, payment apps and cryptocurrency are what scammers ask for, and they're hard to reverse. The FTC reported that romance scam losses rose 22% to $1.48 billion in 2025, with an average loss of $2,020 per victim. A leave fee sounds small. That average tells you what small requests become.

The borrowed sailor. The Military Officers Association of America profiled Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Mike Sency, whose photos have been used in scam profiles since 2014 and have fueled thousands of fake accounts on Facebook alone. At one point he was getting about four messages a week from people who'd found fakes using his face. Retired Army Col. Bryan Denny has had his likeness stolen thousands of times since 2016. If your match's photos look like a recruiting poster, they may have done that job for a lot of other women first.

The soldier with a wife. Army Sgt. 1st Class Caesar Camacho has had roughly 50 fake accounts built from his photos. One woman, told by the fake Camacho that he was "abandoning" his wife, ended up on FaceTime with his real wife. The moment a real face appeared on a live call, the story fell apart.

The Ukraine deployment. A newer variant has scammers claiming to be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine and asking for money or "care packages," sometimes through official-looking military websites. The FTC flags this one specifically because there is no U.S. troop presence there. A posting in a place the U.S. military isn't is a tell all by itself.

This scam gets confused with something real: a service member who is dating while he's posted somewhere awkward. Those men exist, and treating every one of them as a fraud would be both unkind and wrong.

The fairest argument for giving a deployed match more time goes like this. Real deployments are disruptive, connections can be poor, and a man who can't video call this week isn't necessarily lying. That's a reasonable thing to think, and it's why the missing video alone shouldn't end things in the first few days.

What separates the two is money, and the FTC doesn't hedge on it: "If an online love interest asks you for money, that's a scam. Period." A real service member with bad Wi-Fi is inconvenient. A man who needs you to pay his leave fee is asking you to fund something the military doesn't charge for.

Ask for a live video call, and ask early, before you're attached to him. It doesn't need to be long. Five minutes of his face, moving and talking, settles most of this.

Scammers dodge it for a plain reason: the face belongs to someone else. Every excuse that follows (security, signal, his commanding officer) exists to protect that one fact. If the call keeps not happening while the messages keep coming, you have your answer.

Two honest caveats. A phone call isn't the same test, because an FBI special agent told KSL that scammers "can also use AI to replicate voices." And faked video is now a real problem too, which is why the wider red flag checklist covers how to spot it. Before the call, run his photos through a reverse image search, as the FTC suggests. If Sency's face turns up under five different names, you won't need the call.

If you've already sent money, it isn't a failure of intelligence. The same FBI agent called these "schemes, frankly, anyone can fall for." There are clear steps for the first 48 hours after you realize what happened.