It’s hard to pinpoint the precise number of victims — scams are notoriously underreported — but nearly 70,000 people reported a romance scam to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2022, with $1.3 billion in reported losses — up from 56,000 reports and $547 million lost in 2021. (Those figures include non-crypto losses.) And the amount stolen tends to be far higher for older adults, who tend to have more money to lose: The median individual loss from romance scams for people 70 and over was $9,000 in 2021, according to the FTC, compared with $2,400 across all age groups.
Cryptocurrency fraud also has taken a quantum leap in recent years. The FTC says that in 2022, more than 53,000 people reported losing a total of more than $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency to scams.