Need to know
- Aside from investment scams, people lost more money to romance scams than any other type in 2024
- The average loss for romance scam victims in WA last year was around $87,000
- Kylee Dennis, a former police detective, has a personal stake in helping people avoid romance scams
While less people seem to be falling for scams these days, plenty of money is still being spirited away by scammers – including ones who manage to convince victims they're in the midst of a relationship with a new romantic partner.
Aside from investment scams, people lost more money to romance scams than any other type in 2024, when over $23 million was stolen from lovelorn people across Australia.
Western Australia, where victims lost nearly $5 million last year, was especially hard hit. Though the number of romance scams reported to WA Consumer Protection fell slightly compared to 2023, victims lost more money last year.
"An average loss of over $87,000 and in one case nearly $800,000 – that's the devastating reality of romance scams in 2024," says WA Consumer Protection commissioner Trish Blake. "These staggering figures represent a lifetime of savings for many and can be financially crippling."
Blake says advances in Artificial Intelligence likely have something to do with this. It's getting harder and harder to tell what's real and what's not on the internet.
These staggering figures represent a lifetime of savings for many and can be financially crippling
WA Consumer Protection commissioner Trish Blake
"Deepfake technology is allowing scammers to create highly realistic videos, impersonating fabricated love interests and exploiting the images of real people in the process," Blake says. "That's why our advice remains that unless you can meet in person, you should proceed with extreme caution, as you can't always trust what you see in video calls or hear over the phone."
Former detective sets up anti-scam service
Kylee Dennis, a former police detective who specialised in intelligence operations, has a personal stake in helping people avoid romance scams. Her mum fell prey to one a couple of years ago and lost around $10,000. The experience spurred Dennis to found a private investigative service called Two Face Investigations, which assists in vetting online suitors as well as helping people recover from romance scams.
"My mum has been single for over 20 years and when she went online dating, she did it in secret," Dennis tells CHOICE.
Her would-be romantic partner claimed to be a businessman who lived in Sydney's Darling Harbour and was working in Turkey on an energy project. At some point he started asking Dennis's mum to send money.
"Mum spent six months talking to him while he was over there, supposedly finalising this contract. I was very excited for her. I thought, 'this is great, she found herself somebody'."
But when her mum showed Dennis some photos of her new love interest, alarm bells went off. For one thing, the man looked notably younger than his claimed age of 69.
"So I went off and did a bit of digging, and I was able to identify that the photos actually belonged to a real estate agent in California. And that the real estate agent wasn't in Turkey and his name wasn't Donald and he wasn't single," Dennis says.
She gently let her mum know that the gentleman from Sydney Harbour wasn't who he said he was. "She was thinking that she was going to have this amazing life with him, because he was very persuasive. Romance scammers are very skilled in their language."
Kylee Dennis of Two Face Investigations offers a service to help prevent romance scams from happening in the first place and to help scam victims.
Telltale signs can be hard to spot
Dennis says she uses a number of technology tools in her private investigative business that can't be accessed for free, since the standard free technique of doing a reverse search of an image on Google – while always worth a try – doesn't always expose a scam. In her mum's case, she finally identified the original photos on an Instagram page.
The continuing rise of deepfake technology has only made matters worse, Dennis says.
"We've got AI-driven documentation, fake passports, fake driver's licences, fake court documents, fake identification badges, voice cloning, people reporting themselves to be in the military. We've got Chat GPT making it easier for criminals to break down language barriers. I've seen authentic-looking Aussie passports, but when you go through and break down simple things like the font and the font sizes and certain aspects of the photograph you can see that it's a fake document."
We've got AI-driven documentation, fake passports, fake driver's licences, fake court documents, fake identification badges, voice cloning, and people reporting themselves to be in the military
Founder of Two Face Investigations Kylee Dennis
Dennis applauds the efforts of Telcos such as Optus, which reports that it blocked over 25 million scam calls and over 11 million scam texts in the last three months of 2024. Telcos as a whole say they've blocked more than 2.2 billion scam calls since December 2020 and more than 788 million scam SMS texts since July 2022, the Australian Communications and Media Authority reported in November last year.
Dennis urges romance scam victims to report the experience but believes that most don't due to embarrassment and shame – two emotions that she wants to remove entirely from the picture. Any discussion of romance scams – or how to prevent one – should take place in a shame-free environment, she says.
To prevent a romance scam, her business begins by focusing on a very clear task.
"I can tell you whether the person that you are looking at is who they are reporting themselves to be," Dennis says. "In relation to the next step of handing over money, well, I would always tell people not to do that."
Tips to help you spot and avoid falling for a romance scam
WA Consumer Protection offers some sound guidance:
- Review your new romantic interest's LinkedIn or Facebook profiles, including checking friends and followers to make sure they are who they say they are.
- Reverse search their profile pictures, or photos they have shared. You can do this on Google's search page by clicking on the "search by image" icon in the search bar. If it's an image of a person with another name, discontinue communicating and report the probable scam.
- Be careful about how you share your own profile across social media channels – scammers may use personal information to target you.
- Never share personal identification documents with someone online, such as a driver's licence, passport, banking or credit card details.
- Never share explicit or intimate images with someone who might be a scammer, as scammers can find ways of using them to their advantage.
- Insist on meeting your new online love interest in person before taking the relationship further.
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Stock images: Getty, unless otherwise stated.
