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14 Crime Sci. 1 (2025)

handle is hein.journals/crimsci14 and id is 1 raw text is: Grant and Buil-Gil Crime Science (2025) 14:1 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40163-025-00244-y Crime Science The effect of true crime docuseries on romance fraud reporting to the police Stephany Grant' and David Buil-Gil1 Abstract Romance fraud occurs when an individual is deceived for financial gain by someone with whom the victim believes to be in a romantic relationship. Despite its widespread impact on victims, romance fraud remains significantly underreported, limiting the data available for developing effective prevention strategies. This study examines the relationship between the release of TV portrayals of romance fraud and the number of reported cases in the United Kingdom from 2014 to 2024. Our findings show a significant positive relationship between these TV portrayals and the monthly number of reported cases, though this effect diminishes over time. The results suggest that TV portrayals may raise public awareness of romance fraud, shape attitudes that encourage reporting, and lead to a temporary increase in reported cases. However, the impact of such portrayals is short-lived, with reporting declining in the months following the release of each series. These findings provide valuable insights into how media platforms can raise awareness of sensitive crime issues to promote reporting and ultimately enhance prevention efforts. Keywords Dating scam, Help-seeking, Netflix,Tinder, Fraudster Introduction This study examines the relationship between TV por- trayals of romance fraud and the reporting of romance fraud to the police over time, while controlling for potential moderating effects of news articles and Google searches related to this type of crime. In simple terms, romance fraud occurs when an individual is deceived for financial gain by someone with whom the victim believes to be in a romantic relationship (Buchanan & Whitty, 2013; Cross et al., 2018). According to the UK Home Office Counting Rules for Recorded Crime, dating fraud occurs when the intended victim is befriended on the internet and eventually convinced to assist their new love *Correspondence: David Buil-Gil david.builgil@manchester.ac.uk 'Department of Criminology, The University of Manchester, 176 Oxford Rd, Manchester M13 9QQ, UK BMC financially by sending them money for a variety of emo- tive reasons (Home Office, 2023: 19). Romance fraud, also referred to as 'dating fraud' in some legal texts, is pri- marily committed in online environments such as dating apps, websites, social media, and email. The shift toward online dating has enabled the criminal exploitation of victims seeking romantic connections within digital con- texts. Using fake profiles, fraudsters intentionally create emotional dependencies with their victims before mak- ing monetary requests (Whitty, 2013). While romance fraud shares its financial component and the abuse of trust, deception, or misrepresentation with other types of cyber-enabled fraud (Doig et al., 2025), it is distinct in that it involves a strong emotional connection between the offender and the victim, which can sometimes take weeks or months to develop. The prevalence of reported romance fraud has increased in recent years, with research indicating a rapid increase in cases during the COVID-19 pandemic © The Author(s) 2025. Open Access This artide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International cense, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this artide or parts of it.The images or other third party material in this article are incduded in the artide's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not inauded in the artide's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directlyfrom the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creati vecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. RESEARCH Open Access

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