Why this registry exists

Romance scams take more money from more ordinary people than almost any other fraud category on earth — and the reporting system built around them has a strange hole in its center. The FTC collects reports. The FBI’s IC3 collects reports. Platforms collect reports. And almost none of it becomes searchable by the next target — the person mid-conversation with a charming stranger, holding a phone number and a feeling that something is off.

Romance Scam Directory exists to close that hole. Every moderated community report here becomes public, searchable armor: the phone number checked before the money moves, the username found before the heart commits, the wallet flagged before the "investment."

The architecture decision that defines us

We index artifacts — phone numbers, usernames, emails, wallet addresses — and never faces or full legal names. This is not squeamishness; it is the entire point. Romance scammers operate behind photographs stolen from innocent people, which means "scammer exposure" galleries end up pinning crimes on the victims of photo theft. The infrastructure is what scammers actually own, actually reuse, and cannot claim was stolen from them. So the infrastructure is what we index.

Who we are

We are part of the TrueOne family — the team building TrueOne, a dating platform where every member passes identity verification before any profile goes live. We publish this registry free because the same conviction drives both projects: romance fraud is an anonymity problem. The registry treats the symptom; verified dating removes the disease. We disclose the relationship plainly because a scam-fighting site you can’t trust about its own motives would be a poor scam-fighting site.

What a listing means — and doesn’t

A published report means a member of the public described their experience and it passed our moderation review for coherence, artifact-focus, and policy compliance. It is not a legal finding, a criminal accusation against an identifiable person, or a guarantee. And the reverse matters more: absence from this registry never means a contact is safe. Every scam artifact was unreported once.

Contact: reports@romancescamdirectory.com