Romance scams: how to unmask the scammer and get your money back
If you have sent money to someone you met online, and you are now starting to doubt that they are who they said they were, you are dealing with a romance scam. It is a crime, it is not your fault, and you have more options than most of the advice out there suggests. The standard guidance stops at reporting the matter to Action Fraud and asking your bank for a refund. Both steps matter, and we cover them below. But they leave the scammer untouched, free to move on to the next person. Our work starts where that advice stops: we find out who was really behind the profile, and then we pursue them, for your money, for an apology, and where needed for a court order that shuts the operation down.
This article explains how romance scams work legally, what you can realistically recover, how we identify the person behind a fake profile, and what it looks like to sue a romance scammer in England and Wales. It also covers the step almost nobody takes in time: checking a person out before you commit your heart or your savings.
Romance scam or romance fraud, what is the difference?
There is no legal difference, they are two names for the same crime. "Romance fraud" is the label the police and the banks use; "romance scam" is what victims type into Google. Either way, the conduct is fraud by false representation under section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006: the person dishonestly presented themselves as someone they are not, intending to gain money from you. It carries a maximum sentence of ten years' imprisonment. The same conduct also gives you civil claims of your own, which do not depend on the police doing anything at all. That distinction matters, because in our experience the criminal route on its own rarely gets a victim their money back.
Romance scams overlap heavily with catfishing, where someone builds a relationship using a fake identity. Not every catfish asks for money, and we have acted in catfishing cases where the harm was emotional rather than financial. If that is closer to your situation, our guide on whether catfishing is illegal in the UK covers it, and the two claims can be pursued together where money changed hands too.
Romance fraud is not always about money
The criminal law of fraud is framed around money and property, but in our experience the harm a romance fraudster does goes wider than the payments, and the law reaches wider too. A fraudster who builds a relationship on an invented identity is obtaining things by deception that no truthful approach would have won: your trust, your time, your private life, and sometimes an intimate relationship itself.
That last one matters legally. Where a person enters into intimacy on the strength of a deliberately false identity, the consent they gave was consent to someone who did not exist, and the courts have accepted, in some circumstances, that deception of this kind can undermine consent for the purposes of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. Whether a particular deception crosses that line depends on its nature, and this is an area where the law is still developing, but the point for victims is plain: intimacy procured by an invented identity is not simply a sad story, it can be the subject of criminal complaint and civil claim in its own right.
The same is true of your private information. Everything you shared in confidence with the person you believed you were in a relationship with, your history, your family, your finances, your photographs, was disclosed under false pretences. Obtaining and using personal information by deception can be unlawful under data protection law, and using or holding private information gained that way can amount to misuse of private information. Both are civil wrongs, which means the fraudster can be held to account for them in court, quite apart from any money that changed hands.
And sometimes the loss is time itself. In the Sweet Bobby case, which we acted in, the deception ran for the best part of a decade, and the deepest harm was years of our client's life spent on a relationship that was never going to materialise. A claim does not need a bank transfer to be worth bringing.
How do you know if you are being romance scammed?
The clearest sign is a person who has a reason never to meet you, combined with a reason to need your money. In the cases we see, the pattern repeats with remarkable consistency: the relationship moves fast and feels intense; they move you off the dating app onto WhatsApp or Telegram quickly; video calls never quite happen, or happen briefly with excuses about poor connections; and the first request for money arrives wrapped in an emergency, a medical bill, a customs charge, a plane ticket to finally come and see you.
The excuse for never meeting is nearly always work. They travel constantly, they are on a contract abroad, a rig, a base, a project that keeps them here, there and nowhere you can actually visit. Treat that pattern with suspicion, and treat even a video call with care: face filters and AI tools can now sustain a convincing live video, so a call only settles the question if you are satisfied it is authentic.
The money, when it comes, rarely starts big. In the cases we see, the first request is a small one, and it is doing three jobs at once: it lures you across the line, it tests and builds your trust, and it teaches the fraudster more about you, because a bank transfer or a PayPal payment carries your real name and account details with it. Once you have paid once, a barrier has been crossed. It is human nature to want to believe the relationship is genuine, and many people keep paying for some time after the doubt has set in, because admitting the doubt feels like losing the person. There is no shame in any of that; it is how the scheme is designed to work.
If you think you are being catfished, trust the doubt that brought you to this sentence. Reverse image search their photos. Ask for a live video call at a time you choose. Notice whether everything you know about them came from them, with nothing independent to confirm it. And before you send anything more, our fixed-fee romance scam check settles the question one way or the other, discreetly and without the other person ever knowing.
A romance scammer relies on two things, your silence and their anonymity. Take away either one and the scheme starts to collapse.
What to do first if you have sent money
Contact your bank before you do anything else, including before you confront the scammer. Call 159, the safe route through to your bank's fraud team, tell them what happened and ask them to attempt recall of the payments. Speed genuinely changes outcomes here: money that has just landed in a UK account can sometimes be frozen; money that has moved on through the laundering chain is much harder to trace, though not always impossible.
Then preserve everything. Keep the chat history, the profile, the photographs, the payment references, the account details you paid into, and any voice notes. Do not delete the relationship in a moment of shame, the evidence is the raw material for everything that follows. Report the matter to Action Fraud, because the report number matters for your bank claim even if no investigation follows. And be very cautious of anyone who contacts you offering to recover your losses for an upfront fee. Fraud-recovery firms that approach victims are, in a sad number of cases, the same criminals coming back for a second round.
One thing we would gently say: do not spend weeks confronting or negotiating with the scammer yourself. It alerts them, it burns the evidence trail, and it prolongs the manipulation. Bring the situation to someone whose job is to end it.
Can you get your money back after a romance scam?
Sometimes, and the answer depends far more on how you paid than on how much you lost. If you paid by bank transfer from a UK account, rules that came into force in October 2024 require banks to reimburse victims of authorised push payment fraud in many cases, up to a cap of £85,000 per claim. Banks do refuse, and the refusals can be challenged through the Financial Ombudsman. If you paid by card, chargeback and section 75 routes may apply. If you paid in cryptocurrency or gift cards, the reimbursement scheme does not help, which is exactly why scammers push victims towards those methods.
The bank route is where most advisers stop, and for smaller losses it may well be the sensible end of the road. But the bank route has a ceiling, it does nothing about money sent in crypto, and it leaves the scammer entirely alone. The other route, the one we handle, is civil action against the scammer personally: a claim in deceit, unjust enrichment and, where the facts support it, harassment or misuse of private information. Where the money or the scammer can be located, the court can order repayment, freeze assets under section 37 of the Senior Courts Act 1981 before they dissipate, and award damages for the distress the deception caused. The two routes are not either-or; we regularly advise on both together.
Can you find out who the scammer really is?
Yes, in a good number of cases, and this is the part of the work we are best known for. Scammers assume their fake profile protects them. It does not. Our in-house OSINT investigators work from what the scammer left behind, photographs, usernames, phone numbers, payment accounts, writing habits, and follow the traces across the open internet. Where open-source work alone does not close the identification, the English court can compel the platforms and the banks to help: a Norwich Pharmacal Order requires an innocent third party mixed up in the wrongdoing, a dating app, a social network, a bank that received your money, to hand over the account holder's details. Our guide on how to unmask someone behind anonymous online accounts explains the tools in more detail.
This is not theory. In the Sasha Davies catfishing case, which concluded at the High Court in July 2026, our client had been deceived for years by someone hiding behind fake profiles. We identified the woman responsible, and the case ended with a Tomlin Order, an apology and a payment to our client, with a statement read in open court and the perpetrator named publicly. The identification work behind that result, first on national television and then in court, is the same work we carry out for romance-scam clients. In the Sweet Bobby case, possibly the longest catfishing deception ever recorded, the person responsible was also unmasked and pursued through the civil courts.
Can you sue a romance scammer?
You can, once we know who they are, and the claim is stronger than victims tend to expect. The deception that defines a romance scam is, in legal terms, a goldmine: every payment you made was induced by a false representation, which grounds a claim in the tort of deceit; every pound they took is money the law treats them as having no right to keep, which grounds unjust enrichment; and a campaign of sustained deception can amount to harassment under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, with damages for distress on top of the money. Where intimate images changed hands, misuse of private information and, if threats follow, dating blackmail claims are added to the same action.
Two practical points from the cases we have handled. First, you can usually pursue the claim without your name being made public; the court can grant anonymity to protect a claimant whose private life is at the heart of the case, and most of our clients in this area are anonymised. Second, many of these cases do not end in a contested trial. Once a scammer is identified and confronted with the evidence, a negotiated settlement, sometimes under a Tomlin Order with agreed payments and confidentiality, becomes a realistic outcome, as it was in the Sasha Davies case. Where the scammer is overseas, cross-border tools exist, and our international clients pages explain how we work across jurisdictions.
It is not your fault, and why holding them to account matters
Almost every romance fraud client we have acted for has said some version of the same thing: I feel so stupid. The anger lands on themselves rather than on the person who deceived them. So let us say it plainly: you were not stupid, you were defrauded. These schemes are built by people who do this for a living, they are engineered to defeat sensible, careful adults, and the shame that keeps victims silent is part of the design.
That is also why holding the fraudster to account is about more than money. For many of our clients the turning point is the moment the person behind the profile has a real name, because a deception only keeps its power while its author stays anonymous. Identification, a public apology, a statement read in open court, damages paid: these are forms of vindication, personal and public, and in our experience they are what allows a victim to close the chapter and move on. That is what the conclusion of the Sasha Davies case gave our client, and it is what the civil courts can offer in a way that a crime reference number never will.
Check before you commit: our romance scam check
The strongest legal remedy is the one you never need. If you are in an online relationship and something feels off, or you are about to send money, meet in person, or make a life decision for someone you have never independently verified, we offer a discreet romance scam check: a fixed-fee verification of the person you are talking to, carried out by our OSINT investigators and reviewed by a solicitor.
We work from lawful sources: public records and the open internet, material you provide from the relationship, and consent-based checks where the person is willing to verify themselves, which genuine partners generally are. You receive a plain-English report setting out what we could verify, what we could not, and the risk signals we found, with our assessment marked clearly as an assessment rather than an accusation. Some reports come back reassuring. The ones that do not have saved clients from losses many times the cost of the check. Nobody is told the check took place.
What it costs and how long it takes
We are straightforward about money, because victims of romance fraud have usually lost enough already. No two of these cases are alike: depending on what happened, the right strategy might be bank recovery, identification of the fraudster, a civil claim, a criminal complaint, or a combination of them, and the possible outcomes range from a refund to a public apology and damages. That is why the most important first step is advice, before anything else is spent or decided.
We offer a fixed-fee consultation with a specialist solicitor. In it we assess what happened, what is realistically recoverable, which routes fit your situation and whether the identification work is likely to succeed, and we tell you plainly if we do not think proceeding is justified. From there any work is staged, with each stage quoted in advance, so you always know the position before committing further. To arrange the consultation, use our contact page or call us free on 0800 612 7211. As a guide to timescales, an identification and letter-before-action stage is typically measured in weeks; a contested court claim in months.
Frequently asked questions
How do I know if I am being romance scammed?
The strongest indicators are refusal to video call or meet, a relationship that escalated unusually fast, and any request for money, cryptocurrency or gift cards from someone you have never met in person. If you recognise the pattern, stop sending money and get the situation checked before you engage further.
Is romance fraud a crime in the UK?
Yes. Romance fraud is fraud by false representation under section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006, carrying up to ten years' imprisonment. It can also involve other offences, and it gives the victim separate civil claims that do not depend on a prosecution.
Can I get my money back after a romance scam?
Sometimes. Bank transfers may be reimbursable under the rules introduced in October 2024, up to £85,000, and card payments have their own protection routes. Beyond the banks, money can be recovered from the scammer personally through a civil claim, particularly where we can identify them and locate assets quickly enough to freeze them.
Can I sue a romance scammer?
Yes, once they are identified. Claims in deceit, unjust enrichment and harassment can recover what you paid plus damages for distress, and the court can freeze the scammer's assets while the case proceeds. Many cases settle once the scammer is unmasked and confronted with the evidence.
Can you really find out who was behind the profile?
In a good proportion of cases, yes. We combine in-house OSINT investigation with court orders that compel platforms and banks to disclose account-holder details. It is the same identification work that concluded the Sasha Davies catfishing case at the High Court.
What if the scammer is in another country?
Identification is still possible, because the platforms and payment routes they used are usually within reach of an English court order even when the scammer is not. Once identified, we advise realistically on which country's courts and which remedies give you the best practical prospect of recovery.
Will the police get my money back if I report it?
Reporting to Action Fraud is important and we recommend it, but you should not expect the report alone to lead to a prosecution or to recovery. The volume of romance fraud means most reports are never allocated to an investigator. The civil route exists precisely so that victims do not have to wait for the criminal system.
Can I keep my name out of it?
Usually, yes. Courts in this area regularly grant anonymity orders protecting the claimant's identity, and settlements can include confidentiality both ways. Embarrassment stops many victims from acting; it should not, and the process is built to protect your privacy.
