Maybe this has happened to you: You log into your social media account and there in your DMs is a friendly message from someone you don’t know. Maybe it’s a sweet comment about how attractive you are, or perhaps it’s a seemingly innocent attempt to make a connection. It may be a truly harmless attempt at connection from an online stranger. But the odds are high it’s someone who’s not at all what they seem. You’ve probably heard the term, “cat fishing,” but if the term is new to you, it occurs when an imposter, almost always for nefarious reasons, pretends to be a love interest. They disguise their true identity – including everything from location, nationality, employment, marital status, and even gender – and over the course of what amounts to a long con, eventually start asking their unsuspecting victim for money for some urgent purpose. These “cat fishers” or romance scammers begin by learning everything they can about you from your social media profile on Facebook or Instagram, or on dating apps such as Tinder, Hinge, etc. With that knowledge in hand, they’ll woo their victims, taking days, weeks, even months to create the semblance of a relationship, with promises of a future happy life together. But then comes the manufactured crisis, and the request for money, to which their love interest all too often eagerly agrees. Cat fishers are unsurpassed in their creative use of imaginary crises: From being held hostage by a foreign government for unpaid taxes, to needing urgent help with medical care to paying off a corrupt local official of another country’s passport control office . . . the list goes on and on. Sometimes they will appeal to their target’s greed: a unique private investment guaranteed to generate extraordinary returns or a storage unit full of gold bars that just needs a little upfront money to obtain. Regardless of the ingenuous – and diabolical – pitch, the quest is always the same: to get their victim to send them money. Usually, the request is for untraceable and unrecoverable money: cryptocurrency, wire transfers, gift cards, or less frequently, to a third-party – a “mule” in law enforcement jargon – who, the victim is told, is a trusted intermediary who can get the money where it needs to go. But, sadly for the victim, it’s all a scam. The money is lost for good, and there is precious little chance for recovery. The FBI estimates that these romance scams, according to the small fraction of cases reported, represented a loss to victims of $1.14 billion in 2025. Since that’s just an estimated 3% to 7% of the actual crimes reported, the true loss is somewhere in the $4.7 to $5 billion loss per year. It’s a high price to pay for a victim who only wants connection. But in today’s high-risk online world, any request for money from an online contact should be treated with the highest suspicion.