February is the month of love. And for fraud fighters, it’s also the month of the romance scam blog post.

Le sigh.

I’ve written some version of this piece a dozen different times. It’s always the same: Outline a hypothetical scenario where a scammer-Casanova seduces an earnest victim, describe the economic, emotional, and psychological impact suffered by the victim when their catfishing lover disappears, and then end with some “best practices” for the rest of us to not befall the same fate.

It's all so tired.

This isn’t going to be that blog. Let’s very much not do that this time. Instead, let’s get in front of that piece and talk about the Dark Economy that powers those romance scams and how you – as an instrument protecting both consumers and the industry – can be the solution.

The dark web: Where scammers get postdocs in fraud

The Dark Economy includes every illegal or unreported sale of a good or service. Plenty of this illicit industry occurs offline, on messaging apps, over the phone, email, etc., but much of it also transpires on the dark web, which we’ll define as a web address not immediately accessible for regular users, using consumer-grade software.

There is a lot of really gross stuff on the dark web. This is where clandestine shops exist, selling non-public personal information, drugs, guns, humans, assassins for hire, and other illicit products and services.

So, buckle up, grab a fresh install of TOR, and let’s start our “research” on how to be a modern cyber-criminal – if you can hang.  

Let’s say we want to be an impersonation, romance, or a crypto-investment scammer. First, we need to start acquiring details about our prospective victims.

You know all those emails we get informing us our sensitive information has been exposed in a data breach? The ones assuring us how dedicated the breached company du jour is to protecting the trust we placed in them, how they’re strengthening their controls to prevent similar events in the future, blah blah blah? Well, it’s breaches like those that allow scammers to build out their dossiers of us, making their scams more believable.

But how is this so polished and effective in its execution? Let’s talk about the scale of scams in 2025.

Romance scams, Inc.

See the picture below? It’s the compound of a scam center that specializes in the modern blend of romance and crypto scams:

Nearly all those random text messages we get originate inside massive scam factories like this one on the Thai/Myanmar border, often from attractive but errant new friends whose English has evolved from comically cute in its flaws to near flawless.

Our new long-distance admirers might have similarly attractive investment schemes. And the familiar narrative outlined at the beginning of this piece transpires exactly as you’d expect, but the thing to point out here is the industrialization of these attacks. Romance scams have evolved into a massive global industry, bringing in $3.8 billion a year. The compound shown above is one of many.

Disruption

Right, so we’re up against this: The Dark Economy and its consolidated compromises and massive scam industrial complexes. We’re seemingly powerless to protect our charges.

Our fiduciary responsibility has ballooned from what it was just a few years back, and now we’re tempted to throw up our hands in fatigue. The bulk compromises referenced earlier, packaged up for these contact centers (and more like them, both large and small, in Asia and in Florida and everywhere else you might imagine), are just the scam hierarchy of this age.

So, the question is (say it with me in a thick Dallas twang): “Do what, now”?

Well, you can take the optics approach and launch a bunch of awareness campaigns for your customers, suggesting they follow your “best practices,” knowing full well these are often insufficient to resist the increasingly convincing social engineering of today’s scammers.

Or you can take a risk, dive into the deep end of the pool, take a stand, fight back against the compound with its compromised data, and start doing what many fraud fighters have been doing since the old days. No one else will do it for you. We know we can resolve much of this risk, protect your business, and its customers.

By now, you should be a firm believer in the approach of do something or something will be done for you. Follow this credo and you can’t miss. Gravity will always win. Scams are fixable and there are countries that have started to bend the trajectory and fix the problem.

So, in this month of love, let’s break this cycle, recognize our role, begin to create the business case, and elevate both your institution’s brand and its virtuous efforts to protect your customers.

The compromises, the Dark Economy that monetizes them, the scam compounds that fuel the consumption: We can disrupt this cycle, if we do love our mission. So, stay tuned to this channel, and we will go on this journey together, and walk through how to be a disruptor of the Dark Economy.