Answer first: Romance fraud is not rare and it is not aimed at the gullible. In 2025 the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre recorded $63.3 million lost to relationship fraud, and American figures show people aged 50 and over accounting for roughly three quarters of reported romance-scam losses. The most useful habit is a boring one: get to a live voice or video conversation early, and treat any request for money as the end of the conversation. The numbers, and what they actually measure Start with Canada, because Canadian figures are the ones that apply to you and they are harder to find than you would expect. The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre reported 1,093 reports of relationship fraud in 2025, from 933 victims, totalling $63.3 million. It was the third highest fraud type by dollar loss in the country. Hold that against the population of Canada and it looks small. That impression is wrong. The Centre is clear that only a fraction of fraud is ever reported to it, so every figure here is a floor rather than a measurement. Shame is widely thought to be part of the reason people stay quiet about this particular crime, though the Centre does not attribute the gap to any single cause. The American data is more detailed because the FBI publishes a breakdown by age. In its 2025 report, romance and confidence fraud cost victims $929 million across 23,159 complaints. Victims aged 60 and over accounted for $584 million of that. Adding the 50 to 59 band brings the 50-plus total to roughly $715 million, which is our own arithmetic from the report's published age bands rather than a figure the FBI prints. One line in that report deserves its own sentence. Losses among victims aged 60 and over rose from $389 million in 2024 to $584 million in 2025. A fifty percent increase in a single year. Why this age group, and why it is not about being naive There is a comfortable story that says older people fall for scams because they do not understand technology. The evidence does not support it, and believing it makes you less safe rather than more. Consider what a criminal is looking for. Someone with assets, which tends to mean someone who has been working for thirty years. Someone with privacy, which tends to mean someone who lives alone. Someone whose adult children are not looking over their shoulder at a phone screen. And someone genuinely open to a new relationship, because the whole method depends on real feeling doing the work. That profile describes a successful, independent adult. It does not describe a naive one. Research from the Pew Research Center found that 47% of online daters aged 50 and over said they had encountered someone they thought was trying to scam them. Read that carefully, because it is not a fraud rate. It is a measure of how much of the experience is spent on guard. Nearly half of older daters have had that moment of suspicion, which tells you the attempts are constant even when they fail. Seven checks that actually work Most safety advice is a list of warning signs, which helps only if you happen to remember the list at the exact moment you are being charmed. These are ordered differently. They are things you do, not things you watch for. 1. Get to a live voice or video conversation within the first week A useful early check, and the one most people skip. Text can be written by anyone, anywhere, in any number of simultaneous conversations. A live call is harder to fake convincingly, particularly if it is unscheduled. Someone genuinely interested will find a way to talk to you. Someone who produces a broken camera, a difficult work schedule and a poor connection, in that order, over three weeks, is telling you something. 2. Treat any request for money as the end, not a question to weigh up There is no version of this that ends well. Not a customs fee. Not a medical emergency. Not a business deal that will pay you back with interest. Not a cryptocurrency opportunity they want to share because they care about your future. The request will always arrive with a good reason and an emotional context that makes refusing feel cruel. That is the design. You do not have to be rude about it, and you do not have to prove anything. You can simply stop. 3. Notice the speed Real affection between adults who have lived a while tends to build unevenly. It stalls, it restarts, it gets awkward. Fraud moves in a straight line and it moves fast, because the criminal is running a business and time is their main cost. If someone is talking about a future together before you have heard their voice, the pace itself is the warning. 4. Search their photographs A reverse image search takes about a minute. Save the picture, upload it to an image search, and see where else it appears. Stolen photographs are often taken from military personnel, doctors, and models, because those images are plentiful and flattering. This catches the laziest attempts, which is still a useful number of them. 5. Watch for the move off the platform An early push to continue on a private messaging app is worth understanding. A dating platform can detect patterns, act on reports, and remove accounts. A private chat has none of that. Once you leave, you are on your own. There are innocent reasons to move a conversation. There is no innocent reason to insist on it within a day. 6. Tell one person Pick someone. A sibling, a friend, an adult child. Tell them you are seeing someone new and give them the name. Isolation is the mechanism through which this crime works. Criminals frequently encourage secrecy early, often by framing the relationship as something precious that others would not understand or would spoil. One person on the outside breaks that, and it costs you nothing. 7. Report it, even when you got away If you spot an attempt and walk away, report it anyway. Report it to the platform, and to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre at 1-888-495-8501. Every figure above is built from reports, so what goes unreported stays invisible to the people whose job it is to act on it. If it has already happened Read this part even if it has not, because you may one day need to say it to someone else. You were not stupid. You were targeted by someone running a practised method against a normal human response. The feelings were real on your side, and that is not a failure of judgment. It is what being open to another person looks like. Practically: stop all contact immediately, do not respond to anything further, and keep everything. Messages, emails, transfer records, profile screenshots. Contact your bank straight away, because speed genuinely matters for recovery. Report to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre and to your local police. And be ready for one more thing. Recovery scams target people who have already lost money, by offering to get it back for a fee. The list of past victims is itself a commodity. Treat anyone who contacts you unexpectedly and promises recovery for an upfront fee as another potential scam. Where a platform can help, and where it cannot We should be precise here, because vague safety promises are part of the problem. On DateSteady, members must verify a phone number before they can send messages, apart from a small number of internal accounts used to operate the service. Profile and gallery photos are screened before they appear. Members can add a selfie check, which confirms a submitted selfie is consistent with at least one photograph already on their profile. Video introductions and voice greetings are free, so you can hear someone and see them before you agree to meet. We do not create profiles to pad out what you see. The only accounts we make ourselves are internal test accounts, and they are kept out of discovery, search and suggestions so a real member never meets one. We do not use AI personas, and no dating conversation here is started by an automated account, although the service does send you operational notices, such as a reminder when a conversation has gone quiet. Now the limits, stated plainly. A verified badge means a submitted selfie was consistent with at least one profile photograph. It does not establish when that photograph was taken, it does not verify real-world identity, it does not prevent every form of misrepresentation, and we do not run criminal background checks. These are safeguards, not guarantees. What a platform can genuinely do is raise the cost of the attempt. Requiring a verified phone number makes the cheapest version of this crime more expensive, because that version depends on creating accounts in bulk. It does not stop a determined individual who is willing to verify one phone and work patiently, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. The rest is the seven checks above. They work on any platform, including ours. Sources: Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, 2025 figures. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2025 Internet Crime Report. Pew Research Center, "Dating at 50 and up", July 2023. The 50-plus share of romance-fraud losses is our own arithmetic from the FBI report's published age bands.