Dating in Houston has always required a certain amount of determination.

This is, after all, a city where someone can technically live “nearby” and still be a 45-minute drive away. Agreeing to a first date across town during rush hour is already a meaningful romantic gesture. Add summer heat, construction, I-45 doing whatever I-45 has decided to do that afternoon, and meeting somebody for one drink can require more planning than a weekend trip.

Dating after 50 brings its own complications.

Maybe you’re divorced. Maybe you’ve lost a partner. Maybe the children are finally out of the house and you’ve realized you’d quite like someone to have dinner with who isn’t asking to borrow money.

Which brings us, unfortunately, to online dating scams.

The good news is that meeting people online is completely normal now, including for people in their 50s, 60s and beyond. The bad news is that criminals know this too.

And they don’t necessarily look like criminals.

The Expensive Part Should Be Dinner

Romance fraud works because the opening rarely looks like fraud.

The FBI describes a familiar pattern: someone creates a false identity, establishes an emotional connection and gradually builds trust. Eventually, the conversation turns to money.

The emergency varies.

A medical problem. A business deal that has temporarily gone wrong. A relative in trouble. A flight they desperately need to book. An account they mysteriously cannot access.

If the story works, another emergency tends to follow.

Texas is hardly immune. The FBI reported that Texans lost more than $57 million to romance and confidence scams in 2024. The agency has continued warning about the problem in 2026, particularly as scammers target people looking for genuine relationships online.

And older Americans can face especially expensive consequences when fraud succeeds. According to the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Complaint Center data, people over 60 reported more than $7.7 billion in losses across internet crime categories that year. The average reported loss among older victims exceeded $38,000.

That’s a lot worse than discovering your date ordered the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu.

The Profile Is Almost Too Good

Everyone wants to make a decent first impression online. Nobody chooses the photograph where they’re halfway through a sneeze.

Still, perfection deserves a second look.

The person is attractive but not suspiciously model-like. Successful but modest about it. Widowed, perhaps. Financially comfortable. I love to travel. I love dogs. And, incredibly, appears fascinated by every hobby you’ve mentioned.

Then the messages become intense remarkably quickly.

The FBI specifically warns about people who seem too perfect or try to move a relationship forward unusually fast. It also recommends searching profile photographs and details online to see whether they’ve been used elsewhere.

A reverse-image search takes a couple of minutes.

Do it.

If “David, 59, engineer from Austin” turns out to be using photographs belonging to a dentist in Oregon, you have saved yourself a great deal of time.

Possibly money too.

Somehow, You Can Never Meet

Houston isn’t exactly short on places for a first date.

Coffee in Montrose. Dinner in the Heights. A drink downtown. A walk around Hermann Park when Houston weather decides to cooperate.

If you’ve been talking for weeks and the other person cannot manage any version of a real meeting, pay attention.

There will usually be an explanation.

They’re working overseas. They’re on an oil project. They’re travelling for business. They’ll be back in Texas soon.

Then the date gets cancelled.

Try a video call.

If that produces another collection of excuses — broken camera, poor connection, inconvenient time zone — the story is becoming more interesting than it should be.

None of these things alone proves fraud. People genuinely work overseas, and flights genuinely get cancelled.

But six coincidences in a row aren’t something you have to politely ignore.

Dating Sites Aren’t Background-Check Services

There is a tendency to assume that appearing on a dating platform means somebody has been comprehensively checked.

Don’t make that assumption.

Platforms have different verification systems, moderation policies and reporting tools. Learn what they are before you need them.

Houston Press was discussing this issue years ago when The League launched in Houston, noting that the service required prospective members to provide social profiles and photographs as part of its vetting process.

Verification tools have become considerably more sophisticated since then, but the basic principle hasn’t changed: know what the platform checks, and know what it doesn’t.

A verification badge is useful information.

It isn’t a substitute for judgment.

Never Let a Romance Become an Investment Opportunity

This one deserves its own rule.

Someone you met online should not be managing your investments.

Romance scams increasingly overlap with investment and cryptocurrency fraud. The relationship establishes trust; the “investment opportunity” gives the criminal a way to turn that trust into money.

It may begin casually.

Your new romantic interest happens to be very good at crypto. Or their relative knows a brilliant trader. They show you screenshots of impressive returns.

Perhaps they even help you make a small profit at first.

Then you’re encouraged to put in more.

The FTC has warned that older adults can suffer exceptionally large losses to fraud, with investment and romance scams among the schemes associated with some of the biggest individual losses.

A useful dating rule for 2026:

If your first kiss hasn’t happened but you’re already discussing Bitcoin, something has gone badly wrong.

What About DateMyAge?

This is where an important distinction gets lost in conversations about online dating safety.

A scammer using a dating site and the dating site itself being a scam are not the same claim.

DateMyAge, a service focused on mature singles, is a useful example. Its published safety policy tells members never to send money to another user and recommends video chats, protecting identity documents and keeping early personal information private. The company also says it operates an anti-scam system and content moderation designed to identify suspicious activity, including financial solicitations. Verified accounts can involve government-issued ID checks.

For anyone specifically researching claims around DateMyAge scam, those policies are useful context. The existence of fraudsters across the broader online-dating world doesn’t, by itself, establish that a particular dating platform is fraudulent. A more sensible test is to look at who operates the service, its terms and pricing, what verification it uses, how complaints are handled and what happens when suspicious users are reported.

DateMyAge says, for example, that accounts found requesting money or expensive gifts can be permanently banned and that, under specified conditions involving verified members, credits spent communicating with offending accounts may be reimbursed.

Those are positive protections. They still don’t mean users should switch off their common sense.

No legitimate dating service can guarantee that every stranger you meet will be honest.

Keep the Conversation Where You Can Report It

A scammer may want to move quickly from the dating service to text, WhatsApp, Telegram or email.

Sometimes genuine people do too. Nobody wants to spend the rest of a relationship communicating through a dating app.

The timing matters.

If someone you’ve known for ten minutes urgently wants to move somewhere private, ask why.

Keeping early conversations on the platform gives you access to its reporting and moderation systems. DateMyAge, for instance, explicitly notes that its ability to help with potentially fraudulent communications is strongest when those conversations remain on-platform.

Once you’re comfortable that somebody is who they say they are, exchanging numbers is normal.

There just isn’t a prize for doing it fastest.

Your Friends Are an Underrated Anti-Scam Tool

One of the best ways to spot a questionable romance requires no technology whatsoever.

Tell somebody about it.

Scammers sometimes benefit from isolation because an outsider sees the story without the emotional investment.

Your friend doesn’t know how sweet “Michael” is every morning. She hears something simpler:

You’ve never met Michael.

Michael cannot video call.

Michael is supposedly wealthy.

Michael needs $4,000.

Suddenly the situation sounds rather different.

If a person you’ve met online asks for money, discuss it with someone you trust before sending anything.

Better still, don’t send it.

The FBI’s advice is wonderfully uncomplicated: never send money to somebody you’ve only communicated with online or by phone.

First Dates Should Be Public and Slightly Boring

Eventually, online dating has to become actual dating.

Pick somewhere public.

Drive yourself or arrange your own ride. Tell somebody where you’re going. Don’t give a stranger your home address because picking you up seems romantic.

And don’t over-plan.

Coffee is underrated.

If you like each other, one coffee can become lunch, dinner or another date. If the person is rude, weird or bears only a passing resemblance to the photograph from 2018 they’ve been using as a profile picture, you can leave.

Houston is full of better things to do with the rest of your afternoon.

Being Careful Isn’t the Same as Being Cynical

Reading about romance fraud can make online dating sound like an activity best attempted with an attorney, a private investigator and your credit frozen.

It doesn’t need to be.

Most people joining dating services are there for the obvious reason: they’d like to meet somebody.

The goal isn’t to interrogate every match.

It’s to notice when words and reality stop lining up.

Someone says they’re in Houston? Eventually meet them in Houston.

They say they are who their photographs suggest? Have a video call.

They claim to be financially successful? Then they definitely don’t need $2,500 from somebody they met three weeks ago.

Dating after 50 can be awkward, exciting, frustrating and unexpectedly fun.

It may even be expensive.

Houston has some very nice restaurants.

Just make sure you’re spending the money on dinner — not wiring it to someone you’ve never met.