With her two mobile phones—one white and one black—Kylee Dennis leads a double life.
She sits at her desk in her home on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, and scrolls through messages on her black “undercover” mobile. There are conversations with doctors, pilots, engineers—all professing their devotion for Samantha, Dennis’s online persona.
One of her love interests is Laurice Smith, a 65-year-old lumberjack from the United States, whom she met on Facebook. He has soft curls and a salt-and-pepper beard, and he smiles in his photos, flexing his muscles beside a shiny mountain bike.
Smith is in trouble. His child is in boarding school and he’s struggling to find work. He needs Samantha to wire him money immediately.
But Smith doesn’t exist. He’s really a 15-year-old Nigerian boy called Marcus, who goes to school during the day and scams lonely hearts by night.
Dennis, 55, a former police officer turned private investigator, has made it her mission to foil these romance scammers.
In 2022, Dennis’s mother was nearly swindled by “Donald” who worked on gas pipelines in Turkey and could conveniently never meet. Dennis intervened before her mother lost money, although she says the incident “broke her heart”.
In 2023, Dennis launched Two Face Investigations to help others in a similar position to her mother. Now, Dennis hunts grifters who prey on one of life’s most powerful emotions: love.
There is a global rise in romance-related fraud. The international success of the 2022 Netflix documentary, The Tinder Swindler, propelled the issue into the spotlight—but scams have only become more widespread. In 2024, Australians lost more than $15.5 million to these scams, according to Scamwatch, a Web site run by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
In the UK, Barclays reported a 20 percent rise in romance scams this year compared with 2024. Twelve percent of British adults have been targeted, or know someone who has been—with baby boomers the most susceptible generation. Those over the age of 61 often have greater financial stability but may also be more lonely and have lower digital literacy.
Suspect your loved one might be a victim? Dennis is the woman to call. First, she creates a customized investigation plan to uncover the person posing behind the online profile. This information is used to help to extract the victim from the scam and report the scammer.
She is guarded in revealing her exact methods but so far she has reported several people to the police and Scamwatch.
Over the years, Dennis has concocted the persona of “Samantha”, who fits the profile of someone likely to be scammed. “She’s anywhere between 62 and 65,” Dennis explains. “She’s a widow. She has two kids. She’s semi-retired, and her husband died of cancer”. Dennis says scammers prey on victims who spend nights alone, when they can message back and forth without interruption, building trust.
Dennis uses AI-generated images of herself in a variety of staged settings—relaxing on a cruise ship, in a garden surrounded by dogs. She tailors each backstory in real time, letting the scammer take the lead and adapting her responses based on their cues.
“The romance scammer’s currency of choice is Apple gift cards,” Dennis says. They’re untraceable, and pave the way for scammers to buy more equipment such as phones and computers to perpetuate more scams.
One of her clients was Graham Guy, 64, a retired internet technician from Queensland. In 2022 he started buying gift cards for women he met on dating sites and LinkedIn—typically blonde, young and beautiful. They lived abroad, claiming to work as flight attendants or in the military.
He initially spent a few thousand dollars but his addiction spiralled into spending $57,000 on Apple gift cards.
“He would go to the airport dressed up to the nines to meet the girls, and they never turned up,” says Belinda Guy, his ex-wife. “He flipped a switch—everyone knew they were scammers but to him they were real,” she says.
Undeterred, Guy kept sending money. First, his fortnightly pension. Then, he took out a reverse mortgage on his house. Finally, he gave the scammers access to his bank accounts.
Belinda Guy referred him to Two Face Investigations in the last year of his life, after years of being sucked into fake online girlfriends. By the time Guy died from liver disease in June, his family estimated he had lost $500,000.
After his death, Dennis took possession of his phone to stay in touch with his scammers. She is trying to glean enough information to refer the case to the Australian police. She has sympathy for people who fall victim. “I can see how they drag you into this vortex,” Dennis says. “They use language as a tool of persuasion.”
One client was a woman in her late sixties who worked in the banking sector. After a scam involving fake airline tickets, she sold her car and gave the scammer the proceeds, losing $80,000. In another case, an 85-year-old man met a woman on Facebook who manipulated him into sending her $250,000.
The more information revealed on your profile, the more scammers mirror your desires, Dennis explains. They say they are lonely empty-nesters, or their wife died of cancer, too.
When Dennis confronted “Laurice Smith”, he admitted he was a teenager from Nigeria. He said all of his friends scam on the side. Then he asked Dennis for money for a new mobile.
Dennis doesn’t advise ordinary people to bait scammers, but as a professional investigator she can refer to extreme cases, like Graham Guy’s, to the police. She also uses her insights to educate people globally on the warning signs when meeting love interests online. There is, however, little the police can do to prosecute when the scammers are abroad.
In recent years, romance scammers have started using ChatGPT, she says. From editing their love poems, to describing details about their fake jobs, AI is making them sound more believable.
Kate Gould, a clinical neuropsychologist from Monash University in Melbourne, says romance scammers can take turns to work in shifts to “love bomb” lonely victims with messages day and night. This manipulation, coupled with the lack of sleep, makes it harder to engage “high-level thinking skills”, she explains.
“I’ve spoken to people where they said part of them realized that this might not be real, but that was a soft, smaller voice. Then there are people that are entirely, utterly convinced,” Gould says.
Dennis agrees that scammers are masters of manipulation. “It’s really that mental manipulation. Your brain goes out the window and your heart takes over,” she says. “It’s evil at its core”.
Frankie Adkins is a New South Wales, Australia–based writer
