How to Spot Sextortion and Romance Scams Before You Pay

Two different crimes get filed under the same heading, and telling them apart decides what you should do in the next ten minutes.

Sextortion is fast. Someone obtains an intimate image — sent willingly, captured on a video call, or simply claimed to exist — and demands money to keep it private. The pressure is immediate and the deadline is artificial.

Romance fraud is slow. Someone builds a relationship over weeks or months, then produces a crisis or an investment opportunity. There is no threat; there is trust that has been manufactured on purpose.

Both are large. Both have hard numbers behind them. Neither works on a person who knows the script.

What the complaint data actually shows

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center publishes a sextortion breakdown by age in its annual report. The 2025 figures:

Two things fall out of that table that no headline reports.

First, complaint volume and money loss point in opposite directions. The under-30s file more than half of all sextortion complaints in this table but account for a small share of the losses. Dividing losses by complaints — including the many complaints where nothing was paid — the reported loss per complaint runs from roughly $115 in the under-20 group to roughly $2,433 in the 60-plus group. That is more than a twenty-fold difference. Younger targets are contacted constantly and mostly do not pay. Older targets are contacted less and, when it lands, it lands hard.

Second, this table is not the whole picture. Those six rows sum to 64,283 complaints and $44.2 million. IC3 age tables exclude complaints where no age was given, so the real complaint count is higher than the sum of the rows — we are quoting the table as published rather than presenting its total as the national figure. Separately, IC3's 2025 top-five tables put confidence and romance fraud losses at $929,287,469 and extortion complaints at 89,129, both far larger than the sextortion slice above.

Every one of these numbers is a floor, not a measurement. The FTC, publishing its own April 2026 analysis of social-media scams, cites research finding that only about 4.8% of people who experience mass-market consumer fraud complain to a government body or the Better Business Bureau. It also notes that reports were not collected during the 2025 government shutdown. Roughly one in twenty victims shows up in these tables at all.

Where it starts, and why that matters

The FTC's figures are unambiguous about the entry point. In 2025, nearly 30% of people who reported losing money to a scam said it started on social media, with $2.1 billion in reported losses through that channel — about eight times the 2020 figure of $261 million. For romance scams specifically, nearly 60% of people who lost money said it began on a social media platform, accounting for $298 million in reported losses.

The practical read: the risk concentrates where profiles are public, contact is unsolicited, and there is no payment relationship to trace. A stranger opening a conversation in a social app inbox is in a materially riskier category than an interaction inside a platform where both parties have accounts and the platform has a stake.

The sextortion script, in order

It runs the same way nearly every time.

• Fast contact, faster escalation. A new profile opens a conversation and moves it to intimate territory within a single session. Genuine connections are rarely on a clock.
• Migration off-platform. They push to move to a messaging app immediately, because the original platform can ban them and preserve evidence.
• The exchange. They send an image first — usually stolen — to make the request reciprocal and to make you feel you are the one being trusted.
• The turn. The tone changes within minutes. A list of your contacts, employer or family appears, sometimes genuinely scraped from your public profiles.
• The deadline. A short window, and a payment method that cannot be reversed: gift cards, cryptocurrency, a wire, or a peer-to-peer payment app.

The tell that outranks all others is the payment method. Every irreversible rail — gift card codes, crypto transfers, wires, cash-app style payments to a stranger — exists on this list for one reason. No legitimate demand is settled in gift card codes.

The romance-fraud script, in order

• A profile too complete to check. Employed somewhere unverifiable — offshore work, foreign military posting, private contracting.
• Speed of attachment. Intense affection within days, and a fluency that does not match the awkwardness of a new relationship.
• Every video call fails. Broken camera, bad connection, security policy at work. This is the single most reliable tell in romance fraud, because it is the one thing they cannot fake indefinitely.
• The pivot. Either a crisis — medical bill, customs fee, stranded travel — or an investment tip on a platform that shows lovely returns and cannot be withdrawn from.
• The second scam. After a loss, someone appears offering to recover the money for a fee. The FTC records this explicitly: people who lost money this way report secondary losses to scammers who said they could trace and recover lost money for a fee. Recovery services that contact you are part of the same industry.

What to do in the first hour

If you are being sextorted, the order matters.

• Stop responding. Not a refusal, not a negotiation — silence. Any reply confirms a live target and raises your value.
• Do not pay. Payment marks you as someone who pays, and the demand returns. This is the consistent finding across law enforcement advisories, and it is the hardest advice to follow at the moment it applies.
• Screenshot everything before blocking. Profile URL, username, message thread, payment address or wallet. Blocking first often destroys your own evidence.
• Report to the platform, then to law enforcement. In the US that is the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. Elsewhere, your national cybercrime or fraud reporting body.
• Lock down the surface they are threatening. Set contact lists and follower lists to private. Most threats to "send this to everyone you know" depend on a public follower list.
• If the person targeted is under 18, treat it as a child-exploitation case immediately. It is not a private embarrassment and it is not to be handled alone. Report it to law enforcement without delay.

If it is romance fraud, add one step: tell one other person before you send money. Fraud of this kind is sustained by secrecy the scammer requests as intimacy. Saying it out loud to a friend breaks more of these than any checklist.

Reducing the surface in the first place

• Keep adult-platform identities separate from the account carrying your real name and contact list. Threats to expose you rely on those being joinable.
• Never move a new contact off-platform quickly. The push to migrate is a stage of the script, not a preference.
• Treat any unsolicited investment tip from a romantic contact as fraud by default. The FTC describes precisely this pattern — a tailored approach based on your profile, then investment advice drawing you onto a fake platform.
• Assume public follower lists are already scraped. If they would be the leverage, make them private now rather than during an incident.

The dating-side versions of the same playbook are in how to spot dating scams and red flags in online dating, with the practical precautions in online dating safety tips. Most of what makes sextortion possible is information you handed over earlier, which is why protecting your privacy on dating apps and protecting your privacy on adult sites are prevention rather than paranoia. If a site itself looks wrong, how to spot a legit adult site.

Being targeted is not evidence of carelessness — these operations run at industrial scale against everyone. Paying is what converts an attempt into a loss, and that is the one part of the sequence that is entirely yours to control. For the account-level hardening that makes you a smaller target in the first place, see our privacy guide for adult sites.