Online Dating After 55: Staying Safe Without Staying Home

Updated for 2026. This article was originally published in 2015. The figures have changed, and so has one of the checks it recommended.

Online dating is now how most people meet, at every age, and the practical advice for doing it safely is short.

What has changed since this article was first written is that one of the standard verification steps — a video call — no longer proves what it used to.

What the numbers look like now

The FBI recorded $20.9 billion in reported internet crime losses in 2025. People aged 60 and over accounted for $352 million of the AI-assisted portion alone.

The figures are worth knowing and worth keeping in proportion. Most people on dating sites are people on dating sites. The purpose of the checks below is not to treat everyone as a suspect — it is to make the small number of professional operations easy to spot early, before any money is involved.

The advice that still holds

Do not give out identifying details before you have met. Full name, address, workplace, or anything that lets someone locate you offline. A first name and the app's messaging is enough for the first few conversations.

Meet in public, and tell someone where you are going. Send the plan to a friend or family member — where, when, and who with. This remains the single most useful thing on the list.

Arrange your own transport, both ways.

Meet reasonably early. Coffee in the afternoon rather than dinner far from home.

Trust the feeling if something is off, and leave. You owe a stranger nothing.

Do not drink more than you would with anyone else you had just met.

The check that stopped working

Previously, the standard advice was to insist on a video call before meeting, on the reasoning that a fraudster using stolen photographs would refuse.

Real-time deepfake software now allows a criminal to appear on a video call as a romantic interest, and it runs on a standard laptop.

A video call is still worth requesting, and it now needs to be a live, unscripted one rather than a scheduled appearance:

• Ask them to turn their head fully to the side
• Ask them to pass a hand slowly across their face
• Ask them to hold up an everyday object close to the camera

The technology still struggles with all three. Refusal, repeated technical failures, or a camera that never quite works is itself the answer.

Also search their photographs. Right-click and search the image, or use the reverse image search on your phone. Stolen photographs are the norm in these operations and frequently turn up under a different name.

Telling a disappointing date from an operation

An ordinary bad match and a professional fraud look completely different once you know the shape.

Romance fraud is a long, patient operation run by teams, not an individual improvising. The pattern is consistent:

• Strong feeling very early — terms of endearment within days
• A reason they cannot meet: working overseas, deployed, on a rig, a doctor abroad
• Daily messages for weeks or months, building a real relationship
• Then a crisis. Medical, legal, customs, a frozen account. Urgent and solvable with money
• Then another crisis
• In many versions, an introduction to an investment platform

The bright line: never send money to someone you have not met in person. No amount, no reason, however long you have been talking.

And never receive or forward money or packages for someone. That is money laundering, and people have been prosecuted for it while believing they were helping a partner.

We have written this up in full: romance fraud: how it is built.

Practical account safety

A separate email address for dating accounts, not the one attached to your bank.

A strong unique password, and two-factor authentication where offered. See two-factor authentication.

Check what your photographs reveal — a house number, a street sign, a workplace lanyard.

Turn off precise location sharing in the app if it offers approximate distance instead.

Never move to another messaging app at their request early on. Moving off-platform removes the reporting and blocking tools, and it is the first thing an operation asks for.

If it goes wrong

Report the profile to the platform. They act on this, and it protects the next person.

Report the fraud at reportfraud.ftc.gov and ic3.gov. The National Elder Fraud Hotline is the AARP Fraud Watch Network.

Save everything first — messages, photographs, profile, transfer records. Accounts vanish quickly once an operation realises.

Expect the recovery approach. $540 million was stolen in 2025 from people who had already been defrauded, by criminals posing as recovery services or agencies offering to get the money back. Anyone contacting you offering to recover funds is the second half of the same operation.

Talk to someone. The financial loss is frequently not the worst part. The relationship was real to you, whatever it was to them.

The proportionate summary

Meet in public, tell someone where you are, arrange your own transport, and never send money to someone you have not met.

Four habits. They cover almost everything, and they do not require treating every new person as a suspect — which would defeat the point of being there.

Substantially rewritten in 2026. The original, published in 2015, cited complaint figures from that year and recommended a video call as a verification step, which real-time face replacement has since undermined.

For additional public information on everyday cybersecurity, see Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.