Romance scammers create fake profiles on dating sites and apps, or contact their targets through popular social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, or Google Hangouts. The scammers strike up a relationship with their targets to build their trust, sometimes talking or chatting several times a day.

Where do most dating scams originate?

Figure 1 plots the major scam origins against their profiles presented location, as directional arrows weighted by volume of scams. The United States is the location most commonly presented in dating profiles, at 63% of the SOURCE dataset, followed by the UK (11%), Germany (3%) and Canada (2%).