Grooming in online dating romance frauds and scams: A scoping review

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Online dating romance frauds and scams (ODARFS) are global, multifaceted cybercrimes with profound financial and non-financial impacts on victims. While scholars recognise that perpetrators develop trust through ”grooming”, limited knowledge exists about the mechanisms leading to ODARFS susceptibility and victimisation. This scoping review synthesises the literature on grooming and ODARFS, focusing on research contributions to understanding grooming in ODARFS. It examines individual and contextual factors, perpetrator characteristics, human needs and motivations among victims and perpetrators, and the impacts and harms of ODARFS. This pre-registered scoping review searched seven scholarly and four grey literature databases using pre-defined keywords to identify relevant studies. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis: Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR), 3454 records were screened, 154 publications were found eligible and read in full text, and 87 publications were included. Results show that grooming is seldom used or empirically investigated. The analysis identified grooming as a relational, deceptive process embedded in social, cultural, economic, and digital contexts. Perpetrators exploit cultural scripts of love and trust, and digital affordances neutralise exploitation. Victims’ basic human needs and expectations of communicative authenticity transform manipulation into perceived intimacy, hindering awareness of exploitation. Grooming constitutes an affective economy where emotions and trust are transformed into currency and exchange value. The findings link deception to emotional labour and digital intimacy structures, advancing grooming in ODARFS understandings. The review calls for more research on relational deception and how perpetrators cultivate trust, facilitating ODARFS execution and enabling financial and non-financial victim exploitation.