A New Analysis of Romance Scam Scripts and Flows

The Script Behind the Romance: How Romance Scams Are Built, Step by Step

Key Points

• Romance scams involve planned criminal activity that begins before the first contact.
• The nine scenes describe a flexible process that criminals repeat and adjust.
• False identities and supporting documents make invented relationships appear credible.
• Criminals study personal information to create an apparently meaningful connection.
• Moving conversations away from the original platform helps scammers isolate victims.
• Grooming combines affection, routines, future promises, secrecy, and control.
• Financial demands use urgency, escalating problems, and promises of repayment.
• Scammers respond to resistance by renewing affection or increasing emotional pressure.
• Exploitation sometimes continues through blackmail, recovery scams, and renewed targeting.
• Survivors support their recovery through protective action and connections with people who understand the crime.

Author’s Note

Understanding the structure of a romance scam helps explain experiences that otherwise feel confusing and deeply personal. The affection, emergencies, repeated requests, and returns after discovery belong to a coordinated pattern of exploitation. Recognizing that pattern places responsibility on the criminals and helps survivors approach protection and recovery with a clearer understanding of what happened.

Note: The terminology is different from that used by the SCARS Institute and may be triggering for some survivors.

Overview

Many romance scam victims carry a painful question for months or even years: how did I not see it? The honest answer is that they were never meant to see it.

A romance scam is not a random act of luck or a moment of bad judgment. It is a planned crime that follows a script, much like a play follows its script from the first scene to the last. The criminals behind it rehearse their roles, prepare their props, and adjust their lines to fit each victim.

This article walks through that script one scene at a time. It is based on the research of Janneke M. Schokkenbroek and Thom Snaphaan, who reviewed 50 scientific studies of romance scams and mapped what scammers actually do. Researchers call this kind of map a crime script. Their study identified nine scenes that make up a romance scam, from the scammer’s first preparations to the long aftermath for the victim. Understanding these scenes helps survivors see the crime for what it was: a carefully engineered operation, run by professionals, designed to work on ordinary, caring people.

One important point comes first. The scenes do not always unfold in a straight line. Scammers move back and forth between them, repeating earlier steps whenever a victim hesitates or asks questions. That flexibility is part of what makes these crimes so hard to recognize from the inside.

Scene 1: Preparation (The Setup)

Long before a victim receives a single message, the scammer is already at work. Many romance scammers do not work alone. They belong to groups, and some belong to large criminal organizations that run scams like a business. Most join these groups willingly. In some parts of the world, however, the scammers themselves are victims too: people lured by fake job offers, held against their will, and forced to work in scam compounds.

Inside these groups, new scammers receive training. They learn how to choose victims, how to start conversations, how to use the tools of the trade, and how to ask for money in ways that work. Many groups hand out written scripts, often called playbooks, with ready-made lines for every stage of the relationship. Some playbooks offer a menu of greetings, such as a simple message saying the scammer saw the person’s profile and just had to say hello. What feels like a spontaneous, heartfelt message to a victim is often a line copied from a script.

Scammers also prepare fake documents to make their stories believable, including passports, certificates, and bank statements. Sometimes they steal the identity or personal papers of a real person, often an earlier victim, and use them as part of the deception.

Next, the scammer builds a persona: a fictional character with a gender, a job, a life story, and a reason to be looking for love. These choices are strategic. A widowed engineer working overseas attracts one kind of victim, and a lonely soldier on deployment attracts another. The backstory also sets up the emergencies that will later be used to ask for money. The persona is never fixed. Scammers keep reshaping it to match whatever they learn about the person they are targeting.

The final step of the setup is the profile itself. A few scammers use their own photos, but most use stolen pictures of real people, including models, ordinary social media users, and sometimes earlier victims. More and more scammers now use images created by artificial intelligence. Profiles are often recycled, reused again and again with small changes to the name or details. The profile text typically mentions faith, hobbies, the qualities the person hopes to find in a partner, and a touching reason for being single, such as the death of a spouse.

Scene 2: Target Selection (The Hunt)

With the setup complete, the scammer begins hunting. Some scammers search for specific kinds of people. They look for signs of wealth, or for people who mention on their profiles or in online groups that they are divorced or widowed, because grief and loneliness make a warm message feel especially welcome. Other scammers use what researchers call a scattergun approach: they send huge numbers of messages, or like hundreds of dating profiles in a short time, and simply wait to see who responds.

Scammers also buy and trade sucker lists. These are lists of names and contact details of people who have already been scammed, and criminals sell them to one another. Finally, some scammers return to their own past victims and target them all over again. This is one of the cruelest parts of the script, and it explains why so many survivors are approached again after the first scam ends.

Scene 3: Initial Contact (The Hook)

Once a target is chosen, the scammer makes contact. In most cases, the scammer reaches out first, although sometimes the victim sends the first message to a profile designed to attract them. Contact happens through dating apps, social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, email, websites and online forums, including forums for widows and widowers, and even online games.

While choosing and approaching a target, many scammers also carry out what researchers call reconnaissance. They study the person’s dating profile and social media accounts and search the internet for any other details they find. They learn about the person’s family, interests, losses, and dreams. Then they shape their persona and their first messages to fit. When a victim feels an instant, uncanny connection, as if this person truly understands them, it is often because the scammer studied them before saying a single word.

Scene 4: Transition to a Private Channel (The Shift)

When the first contact happens on a dating app or social media site, the scammer almost always suggests moving the conversation somewhere private, usually a messaging app such as WhatsApp, Google Chat, or Telegram, or personal email. The request sounds romantic or practical: the scammer is rarely on the dating site, or wants something more personal. The real purpose is different. Dating sites and social media platforms watch for scam accounts and let users report them. Private channels have no such protection. The move isolates the victim, removes the platform’s safety net, and makes the crime much harder to detect and report.

Scene 5: Grooming

Grooming is the heart of the script. In this scene, the scammer builds deep trust and emotional dependence, and quietly cuts the victim off from the people most likely to warn them. Grooming often lasts months, and sometimes years. Scammers use many tactics at the same time, and each one has a purpose.

The scammer keeps adding to the persona’s backstory, sharing details about children, health, work, and family. These details are not idle conversation. They plant the seeds of future emergencies. Some scammers introduce other characters, such as a relative or a lawyer, who even contact the victim directly. The scammer also highlights similarities, mirroring the victim’s values, faith, hobbies, and experiences, using the personal information the victim shares. The more the victim opens up, the more perfectly the persona seems to fit.

Gifts, or promises of gifts, help build trust. In some cases, those gifts are paid for with credit cards stolen from earlier victims. Phone calls and video calls make the relationship feel real, and some scammers use software to disguise their voices, fake their caller identity, or create convincing video. They send photos and documents to support their story. They build routines, such as a good-morning message every day and a good-night message every night, until the scammer becomes a central part of the victim’s daily life.

Then comes the language of love. The scammer expresses deep feelings and talks about a shared future: a home together, travel, retirement, sometimes even marriage. Many plan an in-person meeting that never actually happens. Some encourage the exchange of intimate photos or messages, and these are sometimes saved to use later for blackmail.

Two grooming tactics deserve special attention. The first is love bombing: a flood of intense affection, attention, and romantic words in a short time. Love bombing overwhelms the victim emotionally and leaves little room for calm, careful thinking, especially about money. The second is isolation. The scammer asks the victim to keep the relationship secret from family and friends, often claiming that others will not understand or will try to come between them. Some scammers also become controlling and possessive, demanding the victim’s time and attention and asking where they have been when they were not chatting. These are the same patterns found in abusive relationships, and they are used here for the same reason: control.

Scene 6: The Sting

When the scammer judges that enough trust and devotion are in place, the script moves to the sting: the request for money. Scammers use three main strategies, alone, together, or one after another.

The first strategy is the small request. The scammer asks for a modest amount, often for a phone, a laptop, travel costs, a passport, a plane ticket, or a fee to release a larger payment such as an inheritance. A small request feels easy to grant, and saying yes once makes it much harder to say no later. Researchers call this the foot-in-the-door technique.

The second strategy is the large request. These requests involve big sums for complicated, stacked-up problems: medical bills, legal costs, business troubles, or an investment opportunity in a company that does not exist.

The third strategy is the crisis. Scammers wrap both small and large requests inside urgent emergencies: a serious car accident, a hospital bill, a problem with customs, an arrest, or a frozen bank account. The crisis creates pressure and leaves no time to stop and think. To make the crisis more convincing, scammers often bring in other characters, such as a doctor, a lawyer, a customs officer, or a family member of the persona, who confirm the story and add urgency.

Two patterns run through the entire sting. The first is escalation: the emergencies grow more serious and the amounts grow larger over time. The second is the promise of repayment. Victims are almost always told that the money will come back to them, and in investment scams, that they will share in large profits. These promises keep victims giving, even through doubt.

Scene 7: The Financial Transaction (The Payout)

Once the victim agrees to help, the scammer directs exactly how the money is sent. The payment methods are chosen because the money moves quickly and is hard to trace or recover: bank transfers, money transfer services such as Western Union or MoneyGram, gift cards from companies such as Amazon or Apple, cryptocurrency, and sometimes a fake investment app built by the criminals themselves.

The money rarely stays in one place. Scammers move it through other accounts to hide where it came from, which is called money laundering. In some cases, scammers pull the victim into this process without the victim understanding what is happening. They ask the victim to receive money and send it on to another account, or to withdraw savings as cash or turn them into property. When this happens, the victim becomes what is called a money mule. Some victims later face legal trouble because of it, even though they were deceived from the start.

The sting and the payout repeat in a cycle. Each payment leads to a new request, often larger than the last. When a victim hesitates, questions a story, or refuses to send money, the scammer does not give up. The script sends them back to grooming. They renew their declarations of love, repair trust, and work to make the victim feel close again before asking once more. Scammers also apply emotional pressure: making the victim feel guilty (“if you really loved me, you would do this”), threatening to end the relationship, threatening to harm themselves, suddenly going silent to create fear and insecurity, and sometimes threatening violence. This loop explains why many victims feel pulled back in even after they have begun to doubt.

Scene 8: The Squeeze

Eventually, the victim refuses to pay more, or simply has nothing left to give. At this point, some scammers move to what researchers call the squeeze: an attempt to extract the last possible value from the victim before the scam ends. This scene does not happen in every scam, but when it does, it is often the most frightening part.

One tactic is sextortion, in which the scammer threatens to share intimate images unless the victim pays. Another is blackmail, in which the scammer threatens to expose the victim’s involvement in moving money, or in some cases drug smuggling the victim was tricked into. A third tactic is direct threats against the victim’s safety or the safety of their loved ones. These threats are designed to frighten the victim into paying again, and they often arrive just as the victim is trying to break free.

Scene 9: The Aftermath

Even when the victim stops paying for good, the script is not always over. Many scammers try to victimize the same person again. In one approach, the scammer admits that the relationship began as a scam but claims to have truly fallen in love along the way. This “real” relationship soon leads to new requests for money. In another approach, criminals pose as investigators, lawyers, or recovery agents who promise to get the lost money back for a fee. This is called a recovery scam, and it is one more crime, not a rescue. Scammers also place their victims’ contact details on sucker lists and sell them to other criminals, which is why survivors often receive a wave of new scam approaches after the first scam ends.

When these attempts fail, the scam finally ends. Sometimes the scammer simply disappears without a word, which researchers compare to ghosting. Other times, the victim discovers the truth, and the victim ends the relationship.

What This Means for Survivors

Seeing the whole script changes the story survivors tell themselves. Every warm message, every coincidence, every emergency, and every promise had a purpose inside a plan. The scam was prepared before the first hello, adjusted to fit the victim’s life, and repeated whenever doubt appeared. It worked on intelligent, careful, loving people because it was designed by professionals to do exactly that. Being deceived by a script this detailed is not a sign of foolishness. It is evidence of how skilled and organized these criminals are.

The script also explains several things survivors experience after discovery. It explains why the scammer sometimes returns with a confession of real love, why strangers suddenly offer to recover lost money, and why new scam messages arrive. These are planned scenes of the same crime. Survivors protect themselves by refusing all contact from the scammer and anyone offering recovery services, by changing their phone number and email address when possible, and by reporting the crime to the authorities. Healing also depends on reconnecting with the people the scammer worked so hard to push away, and on getting support from people who understand this crime, including trained counselors and fellow survivors.

Conclusion

Romance scams follow a deliberate process that begins before the first message and sometimes continues long after the victim discovers the deception. Criminals prepare identities, study potential victims, build emotional dependence, and introduce financial demands through carefully constructed stories. They adjust their approach whenever doubt appears, returning to affection, reassurance, or pressure to keep the victim involved. Recognizing that structure helps survivors understand how an apparently personal relationship served an organized criminal purpose.

The emotional bond felt real because the victim’s feelings were real. The criminal used those feelings to create trust, encourage secrecy, and make repeated payments seem necessary to protect someone the victim loved. Responsibility belongs to the criminals who planned and carried out the deception. Intelligence, kindness, and a sincere desire for companionship do not make a person responsible for another person’s calculated exploitation.

Protection after discovery requires attention to the later stages of the script. Confessions of genuine love, offers to recover stolen money for a fee, and unexpected approaches from strangers represent further attempts to exploit the same loss. Ending contact, reporting the crime, and changing contact information where possible help interrupt those attempts.

Recovery also involves rebuilding connections that the scammer weakened or displaced. Trusted family members, trained counselors, and fellow survivors provide opportunities to speak openly and regain perspective. Understanding the script gives survivors a clearer account of what happened and a foundation for moving forward without treating the criminal’s deception as a measure of their own worth.

Article Review

• Preparation includes criminal training, written playbooks, fabricated documents, and personas designed to support later financial demands.
• Target selection combines searches for personal vulnerabilities with mass messaging that identifies people who respond.
• Reconnaissance supplies personal details that scammers use to mirror a victim’s interests, values, losses, and hopes.
• Moving communication to a private channel reduces the original platform’s opportunity to detect and interrupt the scam.
• Love bombing floods the victim with affection, while isolation separates the victim from people who question the relationship.
• The sting uses small requests, large requests, and fabricated crises to turn emotional dependence into financial payments.
• The foot-in-the-door technique uses an initial small payment to encourage agreement to later requests.
• Money laundering sometimes draws deceived victims into receiving and forwarding criminal funds as money mules.
• Repeated cycles of grooming and payment demands help explain continued involvement despite growing doubt.
• The squeeze seeks further payments through sextortion, blackmail, or threats against victims and their loved ones.
• The aftermath includes false declarations of genuine love, fee-based recovery scams, and the sale of victims’ contact information.
• Protective steps include ending contact, reporting the crime, changing contact details where possible, and reconnecting with trusted support.

Final Question

Looking back, how did the scammer use personal knowledge, affection, or urgency to influence decisions that otherwise would have felt uncomfortable?

Glossary

References & Sources

This article is based on the research of Janneke M. Schokkenbroek and Thom Snaphaan:

The original Dutch: “Liefde als lokaas: Een crime script analyse van online romance scams” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/393465492_Liefde_als_lokaas_Een_crime_script_analyse_van_online_romance_scams

In English: “Love as Bait: A Scoping Review and Crime Script Analysis of Online Romance Scams,” published in Trauma, Violence, & Abuse (2025). The full study is freely available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13578658/ and through its DOI, https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380251361046.