How to Spot and Avoid Online Dating Scams

Connecting with people online is a great way to build relationships, but you need to be careful. Romance fraudsters use emotional manipulation to build deep trust quickly, ultimately aiming to steal your money or your identity.

Knowing their tactics is your best defense.

The Red Flags: How to Spot a Scammer

Scammers follow remarkably similar patterns. If your new online match ticks any of these boxes, step back and re-evaluate and above all be careful.

Moving Off the Platform Quickly: They immediately pressure you to stop chatting on the dating app and move to WhatsApp, text, or personal email. This is to avoid the website or app's safety filters and moderation teams.

Intense "Love Bombing": The relationship gets very serious, very quickly. They may claim they’ve "never felt this way before" or profess their love within days, long before you've met in person. To them its a numbers game and many havent got time to develop a fake relationship.

The Soap Opera Lifestyle: They often claim to work glamorous or isolated jobs that conveniently prevent them from meeting up—such as an offshore oil rig worker, military personnel stationed overseas, or an international doctor.

The Broken Camera Excuse: They will happily text or talk on the phone, but their camera is always "broken," the connection is too poor for a video call, or something always comes up at the last minute to cancel a FaceTime or Skype date.

The Trap: Money and Identity

A scammer's ultimate goal is almost always financial bit not always, some scammers are looking to steal your identity. They will rarely ask for cash directly at the start, thats too obvious. Instead, they build a crisis that forces you to choose between your money and your empathy.

Common Scenarios:

The Travel Emergency: They desperately want to visit you but their bank account is frozen or they dont have enough money, or they suddenly need cash for a plane ticket, visa, a medical emergency or customs fees to release a package.

The "Guaranteed" Investment: Commonly known as pig butchering, they slowly introduce a lucrative crypto or financial investment opportunity, encouraging you to put money into a fake app or platform that they control.

The Golden Rule of Online Dating: Never send money, cryptocurrency, bank details, or copies of your ID cards to anyone you have only met online. No matter how heartbreaking their story is, once that money is wired or a gift card is sent, it is gone forever.

Your Safety Checklist

Protect your heart—and your wallet—by practicing active digital safety.

Run a Reverse Image Search

Right-click their profile picture in Google Chrome and select "Search image with Google". If that same photo appears under multiple different names across the web, you are dealing with a fake profile.

Keep Your Profile Light

Avoid putting your full name, date of birth, home address, or specific workplace in your public profile. Scammers harvest these small details to answer security questions or attempt identity theft.

Get a Second Opinion

Talk to a trusted friend or family member about this new love interest. Because they aren't emotionally invested, they will often spot inconsistencies in the person's story that you might overlook.

Caffmos does not tolerate scamming of any sort. We are dedicated to the safety and security of our membership and those practicing in this activity will have their membership removed from the site immediately and be locked out for future use. We are one of the few (if only) gay friendship and gay dating websites that checks all profiles and profile photos before they are shown on the website.

Whilst this can prevent the majority of scammers using the website some will slip through. We urge all Caffmos members to report anyone they suspect of scamming/ spamming. All such reports are treated as confidential and we will never reveal who the report was made by. You will find report buttons on every profile and everytime you read a message or simply contact us.

See below for more information on internet scams and spams.

If any member is contacted or befriended for monetary rewards or gains, please report it us directly.

For more information on online scams see the links below

Romance Scams
Project Honeypot