Americans lost $1bn to Tinder-Swindler style romance cons last year, FBI says

The report found that scammers were using poetry, flowers and other gifts to charm their victims and spinning stories of tragedy to ‘manipulate and exploit’. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

Americans lost more than $1bn in 2021 alone to “romance scams” such as the one documented in the hit Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler, according to the FBI.

The majority of the victims who were cheated out of their money were women older than 40, and women who are widowed, divorced, elderly or disabled, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) said in a press statement last week.