If you were scammed on a dating app, the first hours are the worst hours in which to make decisions, so do the practical things in order. Stop all contact, send nothing further, take screenshots before you block, and tell one person in real life today. Leave the argument with yourself about how you missed it until later.
If money has already gone, contact your bank or the payment provider immediately and ask about a recall, a dispute or a reversal. Speed is the only thing that improves the chance. Do not spend today on shame, and do not trust anyone who promises to recover the money for a fee.
The first hours, in order
Stop all contact. Do not reply, do not explain, and do not tell them that you know why. A person running this fraud will switch immediately to whatever keeps you talking, and the reason they want you talking is that talking is what keeps the money moving.
Send nothing further. Not a test amount, not the fee that releases the larger sum, not the tax or the customs charge. Every request after the first payment rests on the same idea: a person who has already paid will pay again to protect what they have already paid.
Do not delete the conversation, and do not block yet. Take screenshots first, then block. Once you block, the profile and the messages can vanish from your view within minutes, and a bank that asks you to show what was said will have nothing to look at.
Then tell one person in real life today. One is enough: a friend, a sister, an adult child. Saying it out loud to somebody who knows you breaks the isolation, and the isolation was built on purpose.
If money has already gone
Contact your bank or the payment provider immediately and ask about a recall, a dispute or a reversal. Use the word recall. Ask what the deadline is, and write down the name of the person you spoke to.
The route the money took changes what is possible. A bank transfer can sometimes be pulled back if it has not fully settled. A gift card can sometimes be frozen if it has not been spent and you still have the number and the receipt. A transfer made in cryptocurrency is generally not reversible, though the exchange that sent it may act on an account if it is told immediately. Speed is the only thing that improves any of those chances.
The honest position is that recovery is often not possible. Anyone who tells you otherwise with confidence, before they have looked at anything, is selling something rather than helping you.
Reporting it, to the FBI, the FTC and the app
If money was involved, file a complaint with the FBI through its Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov. The form asks for names, accounts, dates and amounts, and the more you can supply, the more useful the report is.
The FBI publishes a figure for this each year, and the most recent one is worth reading in full. The Bureau’s published figure for 2024 is 17,910 romance scam reports and over $672 million in reported losses. Those reports are only the ones that people chose to file.
You can also report to the Federal Trade Commission at reportfraud.ftc.gov. The FTC collects these reports and uses them in cases and in public warnings. If your bank asks for a police report before it will look at a dispute, filing one locally is part of the paperwork rather than a separate ordeal.
Then report the profile inside the dating app. This does nothing for you directly, and it is still worth doing. Apps act on patterns of reports, and the account you remove cannot be used on the next person.
Keeping the evidence intact
Keep the profile screenshots with the username, the photographs and the written description all visible in the image. Keep the messages, including the ordinary ones, because the ordinary ones establish that the relationship looked real, and that is what a bank dispute has to show.
Keep the payment receipts, the transfer confirmations, the gift card numbers, the wallet addresses, the account names and the name of the bank the money went to. If you were asked to send money to a person whose name did not match the profile, keep that too. It is often the detail that shows the fraud most clearly.
Then write one plain timeline into a single document: the date, what was said, what was paid, and what you were told the money was for. Keep it in one place and email it to yourself so that it survives losing a phone. Two months from now you will not remember the order of events, and the order is what you will be asked for.
Shame is the scammer’s most useful tool
Most people who lose money this way do not report it to anyone. The reasons are consistent: the fear of being told they should have known, the embarrassment in front of a partner or an adult child, the worry that a bank clerk will look at them a certain way. None of that is an accident.
The script is written to produce that silence. It asks you to keep the relationship quiet for a while. It explains the money as a loan, an investment or a medical bill, so the request arrives inside a story where refusing would make you the unkind one. By the time the loss is obvious, you have been a participant in that story for weeks, and it feels like something you did rather than something that was done to you.
The amount of money does not measure how serious this was. Someone who lost an amount they could replace and someone who lost a retirement both lose the same three things: money, time, and the belief that they can read people.
So, plainly: this happened to you. It is not a verdict on your judgment, and it is not a description of who you are.
The weeks afterwards
Sleep, eat, and keep the ordinary routine. Decisions made in the first fortnight after a loss are usually bad ones, so postpone anything large, including any plan to win the money back.
Do not go looking for the money through a service that charges a fee to recover funds. Be careful of anyone who contacts you after the loss offering to get it back, whether they claim to be a recovery agency, a lawyer or someone from the platform. Approaches like that are aimed at people whose names appear on published lists of victims, and they are a second scam built on the first one. The pages on paid check services describe how that pattern works.
Tell the people who need to know, and no more than that. A partner, an adult child, an accountant if the sum was large enough to change your plans. You do not owe an explanation to anyone else.
Consider talking to a counselor if the loss was large or if the relationship felt real. The financial loss and the emotional loss arrive together, and most people try to deal with only one of them. The emotional one is the one that quietly damages the next relationship.
You are not the first person this has happened to, and you are not unusual. If you want to see the pattern from the other side, the fraud pages set out how these approaches begin, which is usually weeks before any money is mentioned.