In the 1980s prisoners within the Louisiana State Penitentiary in unincorporated West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, United States operated an advance fee fraud scheme. Advertisements, mostly of men seeking men, appeared in newspapers in Canada and the USA. In each case, the scammer sent the mark an image of an attractive person and gave a pressing reason to send money. If the mark complies, the scammer asks for more money. Kirksey McCord Nix used the scheme to raise enough money to attempt to buy a corrupt pardon from the Governor of Louisiana.

Scammers post profiles on dating websites to fish for victims. Upon finding victims scammers lure them to more private means of communication to allow for fraud to occur.

Many scammers favor religious dating websites such as Christian sites, because the users are more complacent. Religious site users tend to assume that because they are on the religious site, their fellow users will have high moral values.

Rhonda McGregor, an online moderator for the ROMANCE SCAMS Yahoo! group, stated that many romance scammers avoid answering personal questions and ask their victims many questions.

Narratives used to extract money from the victims of romantic scams include the following:

Looking for romance over the web has become very popular over the years.   Online dating is nearly a billion dollar industry and scammers are cashing in on the trend, taking advantage of vulnerable users both male and female.   Every day, scammers target hundreds of online daters, and many have fallen as prey to scam that cost online daters, their valuables or giving them heartbreak and maybe getting them into some extra troubles.   They do it by posing as men or women overseas or in the same area and send you a massage through an online dating service. They pretend to be interested in you and provide you their “IM or email address" so that you can continue communicating with them both online and on phone.   Online dating scammers use IM or email to try and build a relationship with you and they eventually confess their love for you, when you click with them, the scam kicks into a high gear. making you committed not knowing its a romance scam.

The scammer's main tool is affection, devotion, and eventually love, which he displays to victims in a series of daily letters. The level of affection grows with each letter, and people who are lonely or unhappy soon find themselves dependent on these letters, which they think are addressed exclusively to them, but in reality are templates with their names inserted in appropriate places.

Dispersed amongst the paragraphs describing how the sender is rapidly falling in love with the victim, there is usually a light description of a business venture as if the sender is describing intimate details of his business activities so the victim feels that her role is to support and advise him. This gives some mobility to what would otherwise be fairly abnormal love talk from a stranger. It also diverts the victim's attention from the unnaturalness of the rapid falling in love. At the same time the degree of apparent confidentiality shown by the scammer makes subsequent questioning regarding his business by the victim seem impolite. Subsequently the 'business venture' so developed is linked in chats to the enormous wealth and influence the scammer claims to have.

Scammers use chats primarily to determine if the victim's financial position warrants developing them as a target. This is normally presented in a fairly casual and caring setting. For instance the scammer wants to know if he is using too much of the victim's time, or if all the victim's needs are taken care of. Frequent discussions of the victim's financial situation don't appear so suspicious after the scammer divulges his successful business career to the victim. The interest in money and numbers appears as natural traits of a businessman.

Scammers compensate for poor English with excellent psychological reading of the victim. They know how and when to evoke pity, jealousy, duty, guilt, trueness to one's word and, in the end, fear of losing this magical love which is paramount in all. The victim feels unable to do anything which will place in jeopardy this world of magical love, which she may believe can occur only once in a lifetime. In effect, the victim nurtures this love and feels extreme happiness, although nothing in her life has actually changed, because the scammer never addresses reality in the letters, but only exudes cheap phrases expressing love and care.