There is an accountholder standing at your counter right now – or on the other end of your phone line – who is completely certain they are in love. They have spent weeks, sometimes months, exchanging messages with someone who feels more real to them than most people in their physical life. That person has listened, remembered details, shared vulnerabilities, and built a bond that feels unshakeable. And now that person needs help. Without hesitation, your accountholder is ready to send money.
What Are the Most Common Romance Scam Tactics?
Romance scammers operate from scripts – refined over years and now turbocharged by artificial intelligence. Today’s bad actors use AI to generate personalized messages, anticipate objections, and even coach their victims on exactly what to say to their financial institution and how to move money around detection systems. And they rely on proven psychological triggers like:
If your accountholder describes any of these scenarios, paired with someone they have never met in person, it’s valid to have concerns. But how do you help the person see it without alienating them?
Can AI Help Identify Romance Scams?
One of the most powerful tools available to you right now costs nothing: Suggest that your accountholder use an AI assistant. Invite them to open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any widely available AI app and describe their situation. Ask them to paste in the messages and pictures they have received. These tools will identify the hallmarks of romance fraud clearly and without judgment – in plain language, from a source your accountholder may be more willing to trust than your frontline employee or even a concerned family member.
When an accountholder hears the same concerns from an AI that they may have been dismissing from their family and their banker, the wall often comes down. It reframes the conversation entirely: This is not one person’s opinion. This is a recognized, documented pattern.
How Technology Detects Romance Scam Activity
While your frontline staff works to achieve the right outcome with accountholders one conversation at a time, the fraud landscape demands a second layer of defense. Scammers are adapting constantly, using AI to evolve their tactics faster than static rule systems can track. The Jack Henry Financial Crimes Defender™ platform uses machine learning and behavioral analytics to detect the patterns associated with romance scam transactions. Flagging unusual transfer behavior, coaching cues, and destination anomalies that human review alone would miss.
Because sometimes, no matter how hard you try, an accountholder still walks out determined to send the money. And in those moments, having the right system in place is the last line of defense between an accountholder and a devastating loss.
How Defender Protects Against Romance Scam Losses
Your frontline staff can only be in one place at a time. But the fraud happening across your institution never stops – and neither do the tactics behind it. While your team is practicing caution at the counter, Defender is watching every transaction – some in real time, flagging the patterns that static rules and routine reports will never catch.
Think about what that means in practice: an accountholder coached by a scammer to say all the right things at your branch may pass every manual check – but their transaction behavior, the timing, the destination, the deviation from their own history, tells a different story. Defender adapts to that story continuously, using AI to score transactions when they present characteristics of confirmed fraud. The models continuously refine themselves, adapting to new fraud patterns in real time.
Here is something most people don’t realize – scammers talk to each other. When they find a way to move money that goes undetected, that information gets passed around. What worked once gets used again, and again, until your systems catch up. By then, the losses have already happened.
Defender gives your fraud team that edge – alerting your staff to transactions that would otherwise slip through, so the conversation your financial institution has today doesn’t end in a loss tomorrow.
Need help combatting scammers in the real-time digital world? Learn more about Defender.
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