Is She Real? A Field Guide to the Romance Scam

A beautiful stranger commented on my business post, friended me within the hour, and started telling me about her travel plans. I never sent her a dime, a phone number, or an address. What I sent her was attention — the professional kind. I have spent nearly thirty years reading people for a living, and within one afternoon I had taken her whole operation apart, bolt by bolt, using nothing but what the platform itself showed me. This 5-page field guide is the teardown: the eight tells, in the order they usually fire — the recycled account, the manufactured face, the identity drift, the platform migration (WhatsApp yesterday, Signal today — and why), the staged ask, and the finance-profession plant. Plus the rules that kept me clean, what to do if you're already in one, and the case that proves it isn't about being smart: my own brother, front row. By Rob Greves, author of Itch Less.