Four consequences that money totals miss
Interpretation. For organizations receiving fraud reports or planning support, the research separates several needs that can overlap. A payment total describes money lost; it does not describe grief, continuing fear, or effects on the people around the victim (Cazanis et al., 2025; Cross & Lee, 2022; Whitty & Buchanan, 2015).
| Focus | What the studies show | What remains uncertain |
|---|---|---|
| Financial aftermath Study of people's cyberscam experiences | Romance-scam victims and family members in one study described selling major assets to manage lasting financial consequences (Cazanis et al., 2025). | Interpretation. These accounts show how severe the aftermath can be, not what proportion of all romance-scam victims must sell assets (Cazanis et al., 2025). |
| Emotional distress Statistical comparison of people's reported distress | People who lost money reported greater emotional impact, but some who lost no money also reported substantial distress (Buchanan & Whitty, 2013). | The measure captured general distress rather than distinguishing the different emotional reactions that victims might experience (Buchanan & Whitty, 2013). |
| Continuing fear Review of written fraud reports for recurring themes | Complainants described fears for personal and family safety, as well as concerns about future identity misuse and reputational damage (Cross & Lee, 2022). | Interpretation. Selection favored reports expressing intense fear, so the findings cannot establish how common fear is among everyone targeted (Cross & Lee, 2022). |
| Effects on family and friends Study of victims' experiences and effects on family and friends | Friends and family members also described financial impacts and emotional distress, often while their loved one continued engaging with the scam (Cazanis et al., 2025). | Interpretation. These accounts identify consequences for supporters, but do not provide a population estimate of their frequency or financial cost (Cazanis et al., 2025). |
The financial damage can outlast the transfers
Financial harm may accumulate through repeated requests rather than one payment. A 2025 analysis of court judgments found that more than 60% of the cases involved at least three transfers. That describes the analyzed cases, not the proportion of all romance scams involving repeated payments (Lee & Boo, 2025).
A 2025 qualitative study examined cyberscam experiences among victims and their social support networks. Across the scam types studied, reported losses ranged from 20 Australian dollars (AUD) to AUD 1 million, and money was typically not recovered. This range covers several scam types, not romance scams alone (Cazanis et al., 2025).
Within that study, romance-scam victims reported losses of AUD 50,000 to AUD 1 million. In each romance-scam case in that study, the victim, family members, or both sold major assets, such as homes or cars, to manage the consequences. This illustrates disruption to household resources, not simply a reduction in a bank balance (Cazanis et al., 2025).
Losing no money does not mean escaping unharmed
Buchanan and Whitty’s 2013 study compared reported emotional impact among people who did and did not lose money. People who lost money reported significantly greater impact; 40% said they had been very distressed over a long period. Some people who lost no money nevertheless reported substantial emotional effects (Buchanan & Whitty, 2013).
In an analysis involving 232 victims, the same study found that larger financial losses were associated with greater emotional impact. That association does not separate the effects of losing money from other experiences within the fraud. The authors also cautioned that their general distress measure could miss more nuanced reactions (Buchanan & Whitty, 2013).
In a separate small qualitative study published in 2015, Whitty and Buchanan found that most participants, including those who lost no money, described relationship loss as devastating; some found it more upsetting than financial loss. Most felt depressed, and a few considered attempting suicide. These participant accounts are not clinical diagnoses or population estimates of suicide risk (Whitty & Buchanan, 2015).
Discovery may replace trust with fear
Recognizing the deception does not necessarily make someone feel safe. Cross and Lee examined 3,259 romance-fraud reports submitted to Australia’s Scamwatch portal between July 2018 and July 2019, inclusive. They selected 104 reports that stated or suggested fear and examined them for recurring themes (Cross & Lee, 2022).
The fears extended beyond another request for money. Complainants worried about their own physical safety, their families, possible identity misuse, and their reputations. Fear often followed direct, explicit threats from offenders, while concerns about possible future harm reflected people’s assessments of their continuing vulnerability (Cross & Lee, 2022).
The 104 selected reports are not a reliable estimate of how many targets feel afraid. The selection criteria favored reports expressing intense fear and likely excluded less extreme cases. The researchers recommended asking people directly about fear to obtain a more accurate estimate (Cross & Lee, 2022).
Other people’s responses can become part of the harm
Participants in the 2025 cyberscam study described feeling distressed and ashamed and finding it harder to trust others after financial losses, negative responses from supporters, or both. A separate paper describes how emotional betrayal can leave victims afraid to open up to new people (Cazanis et al., 2025; Nakhma'ussolikhah et al., 2025).
Family responses intended to protect victims can also restrict their lives. Research on older romance-fraud victims describes family members removing victims’ autonomy—their ability to make their own choices—and isolating them for their safety (Cross & Holt, 2025).
Help-seeking can also introduce difficulties. Research on online fraud more broadly found that attempts to report fraud sometimes added trauma or worsened existing harm. This evidence is not romance-scam-only, but it cautions against assuming that submitting a report is itself a reassuring or restorative experience (Cross, 2019).
What reporting and support teams can change
Interpretation. These findings support a broader description of need than financial loss alone. The following are implications for service design, not evidence that a particular support approach improves recovery. Their purpose is to avoid overlooking harms that victims and supporters have described (Buchanan & Whitty, 2013; Cazanis et al., 2025; Cross & Lee, 2022).
Do not make money lost the only entry question
Allow people to describe relationship loss, distress, and damaged trust even when they report no payment. Keep financial and emotional consequences separate in records so that a zero-dollar loss is not treated as evidence that the person experienced no harm (Buchanan & Whitty, 2013; Whitty & Buchanan, 2015).
Ask about continuing fears rather than inferring their absence
Give people a clear opportunity to describe threats, concerns about family safety, identity misuse, or reputational damage. Silence in a free-text report should not be read as reassurance: the complaint study’s selection process likely missed less explicitly expressed fear (Cross & Lee, 2022).
Include household consequences without taking away control
Make room for victims to describe effects on family finances and relationships, and for supporters to describe their own needs. Do not assume that restricting a victim’s choices is a harmless response; research also describes families removing older victims’ autonomy and isolating them for safety (Cazanis et al., 2025; Cross & Holt, 2025).
Would your service recognize harm without a payment?
If someone lost no money but describes grief, shame, or fear of exposure, would your reporting or support process recognize their needs? Review what the process records and what it leaves invisible. Financial loss is one useful measure, but the evidence does not support using it as a complete measure of harm (Buchanan & Whitty, 2013; Cross & Lee, 2022; Whitty & Buchanan, 2015).
About the evidence
This explanation draws on selected sources from RSRC’s full synthesis. The full research record, its source list and version history remain available below.
Explore this topic’s methods and groups studied · Follow topic updates
Scope, preparation and limitations
Codex edited and reviewed this explanation from synthesis version 102. Changed passages were checked against preserved source excerpts; passing source checks were reused for unchanged passages. The editorial judgments are recorded as Codex review, not a new API grading run. They assess communication, not reader-test results or scientific certainty. No human or expert content review of this explanation is recorded.
The full synthesis preserves 43 publication records and 194 evidence statements. These counts do not establish the number of independent studies or the strength of a finding. Practical implications are editorial interpretations, with limitations explained alongside the evidence.
RSRC methodologySources cited in this explanation (8)
Links open the publication record or original work. Journal access may vary.
- Buchanan, T., & Whitty, M. T. (2013). The online dating romance scam: causes and consequences of victimhood. Psychology, Crime & Law, 20(3), 261–283. https://doi.org/10.1080/1068316x.2013.772180
- Cazanis, A., Carminati, J.-Y., Chew, K., Cross, C., Ponsford, J., & Gould, K. R. (2025). “Falling into a Black Hole”: A Qualitative Exploration of the Lived Experiences of Cyberscam Victim-Survivors and Their Social Support Networks. Victims & Offenders, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/15564886.2025.2481267
- Cross, C. (2019). ‘Oh we can’t actually do anything about that’: The problematic nature of jurisdiction for online fraud victims. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 20(3), 358–375. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895819835910
- Cross, C., & Holt, T. J. (2025). Does age matter? Examining seniors’ experiences of romance fraud. Security Journal, 38(1). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41284-025-00486-0
- Cross, C., & Lee, M. (2022). Exploring Fear of Crime for Those Targeted by Romance Fraud. Victims & Offenders, 17(5), 735–755. https://doi.org/10.1080/15564886.2021.2018080
- Lee, H., & Boo, M. (2025). Analyzing the Evolving Modus Operandi of Romance Scams via Court Judgments: Crime Script and Policy Implications. KOREAN CRIMINOLOGICAL REVIEW, 36(4), 131–166. https://doi.org/10.36889/kcr.2025.12.31.4.131
- Nakhma'ussolikhah, Subasman, I., & Marliani, L. (2025). Reality Counseling Approach to Increasing Career Woman Awareness (Case Study Love Scam). International Journal of Education and Humanities, 5(2), 356–365. https://doi.org/10.58557/(ijeh).v5i2.313
- Whitty, M. T., & Buchanan, T. (2015). The online dating romance scam: The psychological impact on victims – both financial and non-financial. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 16(2), 176–194. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895815603773
Full synthesis and revision history
Download the full synthesis PDF
Across the reviewed evidence, relationship-based online fraud (including romance scams and pig-butchering) causes substantial financial and nonfinancial harms that often co-occur. Multiple sources report very large per-victim monetary losses and repeated extraction of funds from the same victim; reported averages and means vary by study and fraud type (for example, reported averages greater than USD 10,430 in one source and a mean pig-butchering loss of $336,719 in another), and some studies report individual losses ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. These figures are sample-specific, not estimates of typical losses across all victims. Financial victims reported greater emotional impact than nonfinancial victims in one study; 40% of financial victims reported being very distressed over a long period. Reported emotional effects include depression, anxiety, anger, guilt, reduced self-esteem, and trauma-like responses. Research on online fraud more broadly also describes suicidal thoughts or attempts among a small number of participants. Case series and qualitative reports describe downstream harms beyond direct monetary loss, including deterioration in health and well-being, relationship breakdown, difficulties returning to ordinary daily life, unemployment risk, housing jeopardy or homelessness, and prolonged disruption to daily functioning. Fear-related consequences included acute concern for physical safety, fears about identity misuse and reputational harm, and affective and cognitive fear responses, with affective fear often following direct threats. The corpus is heterogeneous and dominated by qualitative interviews, complaint narratives, case traces, and administrative reports, which provide detailed experiential evidence but limit population-level prevalence estimates and causal inference. Authors also identify evidence gaps, including limited study of people targeted who did not incur financial loss and a need for deeper psychological research and direct measurement of fear. Underreporting by embarrassed victims makes total financial losses difficult to estimate (Aborisade et al., 2023; Annadorai et al., 2020; Buchanan & Whitty, 2013; Cross, 2018; Cross & Holt, 2023; Cross & Kelly, 2016; Cross & Lee, 2022; Dreijers & Rudziša, 2020; Dulisse et al., 2025; Herrera & Hastings, 2024; Kassem & Carter, 2023; Kim & Seo, 2019; Soares & Lazarus, 2024; Toma, 2016; C. Wang, 2022; F. Wang, 2023).
Patterns and magnitude of financial harms
The reviewed sources document that victims can incur very large and repeated monetary losses, including loss of their entire savings. One victim study reported individual losses ranging from US$45,000 to US$187,000, and a court-judgment analysis found that more than 40% of analyzed victimization cases involved losses of at least 100 million won. For relationship-based investment fraud, another source reported nationwide losses in China of CNY 3.88 billion from January through August 2021. These individual and aggregate figures describe different populations and measures and should not be treated as interchangeable. A study of fifty convicted online romance-fraud offender cases reported a cumulative financial loss of $31,488 and 128 fake profiles and emails used by the offenders. That financial figure is a total for the sampled cases, not an individual loss estimate; the offender-case count and the profile-and-email count do not provide a victim denominator for calculating average losses. This selected sample therefore does not contradict other reports documenting much larger individual losses elsewhere (Aborisade et al., 2023; Annadorai et al., 2020; Kim & Seo, 2019; Lee & Boo, 2025; Soares & Lazarus, 2024; F. Wang, 2023).
One analysis of U.S. IC3 data reports continuously increasing romance-scam victim counts and losses from 2011 to 2021. Separately, a review notes that embarrassed victims tend to underreport romance scams, making total losses difficult to estimate. Reported administrative counts and aggregate losses therefore should not be treated as complete population totals or as estimates of typical individual losses (Herrera & Hastings, 2024; Toma, 2016).
Analyses linking blockchain data and reported complaints show modality-specific heterogeneity in monetary flows. The study examined both victim-reported individual losses and combined totals received by wallet-address clusters. Direct deposit was identified in 46.7% of cases, with 40.2% involving direct deposits into cryptocurrency wallets; direct deposits to cryptocurrency wallets were significantly associated with lower individual and cluster-level monetary losses. Bitcoin and Ethereum were each significantly associated with increased individual and cluster-level monetary losses. Use of mixers (Tornado Cash) was significantly associated with higher individual-level monetary loss but not with cluster-level loss. A greater number of cryptocurrency swaps was significantly associated with lower cluster-level monetary loss. MetaMask use was positively associated with cluster-level monetary loss (Lim & Choi, 2025).
Case-series and qualitative samples also show the financial cascade effects for some victims: exhausted savings, forced asset liquidation, borrowing from friends or family, and long recovery trajectories; several reports note victims do not recover funds directly from scammers and instead rely on insurance, bank reversal, or other partial remedies (Aborisade et al., 2023; Anderson et al., 2024; Cazanis et al., 2025; Shapiro, 2022; Yosiandra & Sakariah, 2024).
Psychological and emotional harms
Across qualitative interviews, narrative case studies, and narrative reviews, victims commonly report severe emotional reactions on discovery: shock, humiliation and shame, guilt, lowered self‑esteem, anger, social withdrawal, anxiety, insomnia, and sustained depressive or trauma‑like symptoms. Several qualitative studies and mixed-case series explicitly describe grief-like reactions to losing a perceived intimate relationship that can rival or exceed distress over monetary loss (Anderson et al., 2024; Buchanan & Whitty, 2013; Cross, 2018; Notté et al., 2021; Whitty, 2013a; Whitty & Buchanan, 2015).
A subset of reports document severe psychiatric outcomes in some victims, including persistent post‑traumatic stress symptoms and suicidal ideation or attempts. These severe outcomes are described across case studies and victim-sample interviews but are reported in a minority of participants and arise in contexts of extreme loss, coercion, or pre‑existing vulnerabilities (Cross, 2018; Niman et al., 2023; Yosiandra & Sakariah, 2024).
Quantitative cross‑sectional findings in the corpus indicate that greater reported financial loss is associated with larger self‑reported emotional impact in some samples, but non‑financial victims may also report substantial distress; observed associations are correlational and authors explicitly note these studies do not establish causation (Buchanan & Whitty, 2013; C. Wang, 2022).
Several studies and reviews emphasize that for many victims the emotional impact of losing a perceived relationship ('the double hit' of relationship loss plus financial loss) can be a central driver of distress and may shape help-seeking and recovery needs distinct from purely financial harms documented in complaint statistics (Cazanis et al., 2025; Cross, Dragiewicz, & Richards, 2018; Cross & Holt, 2025; Kassem & Carter, 2023; Knafo, 2021).
Social, functional, stigma-related, and downstream harms
Victims frequently report social and functional downstream harms: strained or broken family relationships, loss of trust and intimacy, social isolation, stigma, and reputational concerns that can impede help‑seeking. Peer‑support and qualitative studies illustrate how victim‑blaming — in public discourse, among family members, and sometimes in institutional responses — intensifies shame and delays reporting (Aborisade, 2022; Adnan, 2025; Malik & Hapsoro, 2025; Nakhma'ussolikhah et al., 2025).
Case reports and qualitative series document material downstream harms linked to financial loss: asset liquidation, borrowing from friends or family, mortgage or loan increases, unemployment risk, housing jeopardy, and prolonged financial recovery. Several studies note these secondary financial pressures can cascade to victims’ close networks when victims request or receive emergency funds (Aborisade et al., 2023; Anderson et al., 2024; Cazanis et al., 2025; Shapiro, 2022; Yosiandra & Sakariah, 2024).
Fear of subsequent victimization — including fears about identity theft, reputational exposure, and physical safety — is described in thematic analyses of large complaint datasets. Authors emphasize that these qualitative-identified fear profiles cannot be generalized to prevalence estimates because the fear‑subsamples were self‑selected and relatively small (Cross & Lee, 2022).
Victims experienced additional trauma from jurisdictional complexity and inaccurate agency referrals when attempting to report fraud. In one study, most victims reported financial impact (16 of 19) and nearly all reported psychological or emotional consequences (18 of 19), with six describing particularly severe effects. The authors also identify impacts that appear specific to online crime: large-scale visibility of victimhood, persistent victimization, the interweaving of online and offline harms, and victim blaming (Cross, 2019; Notté et al., 2021).
Sexualized coercion, trafficking-linked harms, and physical danger
Some romance‑scam contexts involve sexualized coercion, sextortion, or image‑based blackmail: victims coerced into webcam sexual activity have reported humiliation, later extortion, and severe emotional distress. Administrative case analyses and qualitative interview data document the use of intimate images or recordings as leverage for further financial or reputational exploitation (Amirkhani et al., 2024; Cross, Holt, & Holt, 2023; Whitty, 2013a).
A distinct subset of work connects romance‑initiated fraud to trafficking and forced‑labour contexts: survivor interviews and political‑economy analyses describe scam compounds where coerced workers are forced to run scams under violence, deprivation, and surveillance; these operations produce severe physical and psychological harms for coerced workers and may amplify harms to financial targets when coercion escalates to threats or forced travel (Anderson et al., 2024; Dulisse et al., 2025; Franceschini et al., 2023, 2024; Sarkar & Shukla, 2024).
Qualitative case reports document physical assaults and confiscation of identity documents in some contexts where offline contact or coerced travel occurred, and survivor-focused analyses describe severe physical and psychological harms among coerced workers and escapees. These occurrences are empirically recorded in multiple case and survivor accounts (Grace Carvalho Fernandes et al., 2023; Nomleni, 2023; F. Wang, 2024).
The evidence base contains descriptive reports of extreme outcomes (kidnapping, forced labour, organ-removal allegations) in some settings; the studies that document these events are primarily case-based, survivor-interview, or political‑economy analyses and therefore establish that such harms have occurred rather than permitting a population-level frequency estimation (Anderson et al., 2024; Dulisse et al., 2025; Franceschini et al., 2023; Grace Carvalho Fernandes et al., 2023).
Methodological patterns, limitations, evidence gaps, and research priorities
The corpus is methodologically heterogeneous. Much of the evidence derives from qualitative interviews, purposive or help‑seeking samples, complaint narratives, single‑case forensic traces, court‑judgment coding, and mixed administrative reviews. These approaches provide detailed, consistent accounts of mechanisms and harms but commonly rely on self‑report, non‑probability sampling, or unverified complaint data, limiting representativeness and the ability to produce population‑level prevalence or causal claims (Annadorai et al., 2020; Dreijers & Rudziša, 2020; Kassem & Carter, 2023; Knafo, 2021; Nomleni, 2023; Whitty, 2013a, 2013b).
Authors explicitly note measurement limitations within individual studies: emotional-impact measurement is often a single or blunt index in some work and self-reported or unverified financial-loss reporting is common. These documented limitations affect the precision of estimates for both financial magnitude and psychological sequelae and are repeatedly raised as constraints on generalization (Buchanan & Whitty, 2013; Dreijers & Rudziša, 2020; Lim & Choi, 2025; Whitty, 2013a).
Evidence gaps identified across reviews and primary studies include limited research on people targeted who did not incur financial loss, a need to measure fear-of-crime experiences directly, and insufficient in-depth research on psychological impacts. Directly asking targets about fear could improve prevalence estimates beyond those derived from selected complaint narratives. One review also cautions that it cannot determine whether monetary loss or relationship breakdown has the greater negative impact on victims (Cross & Holt, 2023; Cross & Lee, 2022; C. Wang, 2022).
Policy-relevant research should account for underreporting and examine the prevalence and impact of fear, including concerns about identity misuse and reputational harm. Complaint narratives reveal these experiences, but strict selection of acutely expressed fear limits generalization; directly asking people targeted by romance fraud about these harms could produce more informative prevalence estimates (Cross & Lee, 2022; Toma, 2016).
References
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- Aborisade, R. A., Ocheja, A., & Okuneye, B. A. (2023). Emotional and financial costs of online dating scam: A phenomenological narrative of the experiences of victims of Nigerian romance fraudsters. Journal of Economic Criminology, 3, 100044. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeconc.2023.100044 Publication record
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- Cazanis, A., Carminati, J.-Y., Chew, K., Cross, C., Ponsford, J., & Gould, K. R. (2025). “Falling into a Black Hole”: A Qualitative Exploration of the Lived Experiences of Cyberscam Victim-Survivors and Their Social Support Networks. Victims & Offenders, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/15564886.2025.2481267 Publication record
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- Sarkar, G., & Shukla, S. K. (2024). Bi-Directional Exploitation of Human Trafficking Victims: Both Targets and Perpetrators in Cybercrime. Journal of Human Trafficking, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/23322705.2024.2353015 Publication record
- Shapiro, L. R. (2022). Online Romance Scammers. Cyberpredators and Their Prey, 17–41. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003092292-2 Publication record
- Soares, A. B., & Lazarus, S. (2024). Examining fifty cases of convicted online romance fraud offenders. Criminal Justice Studies, 37(4), 328–351. https://doi.org/10.1080/1478601x.2024.2429088 Publication record
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- Wang, C. (2022). Online Dating Scam Victims Psychological Impact Analysis. Journal of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences, 4, 149–154. https://doi.org/10.54097/ehss.v4i.2740 Publication record
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- Wang, F. (2024). Victim-offender overlap: the identity transformations experienced by trafficked Chinese workers escaping from pig-butchering scam syndicate. Trends in Organized Crime. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12117-024-09525-5 Publication record
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This AI-assisted synthesis is based on reviewed evidence records. It may contain errors or omissions. Follow the publication and DOI links, consult the original works, and make your own judgment about the evidence.
Revision history
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Version 102
Current public versionIncremental evidence update. Codex corrected 1 source-bound passage(s); preserved all other findings. No API calls.
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Version 101
Incremental evidence update. A small synthesis update is warranted. Remove the withdrawn citations and reassess the aggregate-trend and undercounting claims against retained evidence. The added convicted-case study supplies a sample-specific cumulative loss, not a per-victim estimate or a contradiction of severe losses in other samples. The corrected Korean excerpts support large, repeated losses and psychological disruption; the Malaysian survey measures recognition of emotional harm rather tha...
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Version 100
Incremental evidence update. A small synthesis update is warranted. Remove the withdrawn citations and reassess the aggregate-trend and undercounting claims against retained evidence. The added convicted-case study supplies a sample-specific cumulative loss, not a per-victim estimate or a contradiction of severe losses in other samples. The corrected Korean excerpts support large, repeated losses and psychological disruption; the Malaysian survey measures recognition of emotional harm rather tha...
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