How do I know if they're lying?

You usually can’t tell from someone’s messages or face whether they’re lying, at any age, so don’t try to. Check what can be checked instead: whether they’ll meet on video and in person, whether their story holds steady over a few weeks, and whether it ever bends toward money. That’s how you stay safe without treating every new person as a suspect.

Is everyone on these sites lying a little?

A little, often, and mostly about small things. When researchers measured 80 online daters’ actual height, weight and age and compared them to their profiles, small fibs turned out to be common. But they were usually tiny: height rounded up by about half an inch, weight rounded down by five to ten pounds.1

In a much larger survey of 5,020 online daters, people admitted to shading the truth across seven areas, including age, weight, past relationships and relationship goals. Men were more likely to misrepresent their assets, what they were looking for, and their personal qualities.2

So when Linda, 56, meets Rob for coffee and he’s clearly closer to 60 than the 54 on his profile, she’s not wrong to notice. But she’s also looking at the most ordinary kind of profile fib there is. The useful question isn’t “did he round?” It’s “does what he says about the things that matter stay consistent?”

Why can’t you just trust your read on people?

You’ve had decades of practice reading people, and it still isn’t a reliable lie detector. There’s a specific wrinkle for older adults, too: in a University of Otago study, older adults were worse than young adults at telling when someone was lying.3 That doesn’t mean you’re gullible. It means “I’d know if he were lying” is a feeling, not a safeguard.

Online, it gets harder still. You can’t see a face at all, just carefully chosen words, and a well-practiced story can sound warmer than a real person having an off day.

Which stories are actually worth checking?

Not the half-inch. Focus on the stories that keep you from verifying anything, and the ones that lead toward money.

Romance scams cost people a lot. In 2021 alone, people reported losing $547 million to romance scams to the Federal Trade Commission, more than six times the 2017 figure, and about a quarter of reports named gift cards as the way they paid.4 Among people 60 and older, reported fraud losses of all kinds topped $3.4 billion in 2023, up about 11% from the year before.5 Those are numbers about everyone, not about the person messaging you. But they explain why some patterns deserve a closer look:

• A reason they can never video call. The camera’s broken, the signal’s bad on the rig, they’re deployed.
• A job that keeps them far away, combined with a hurry to get serious.
• A shift off the dating site to private texting early on.
• A money story, even one where they’re not asking. Yet.

Real people have far-off jobs and bad Wi-Fi too. One of these is life. Several together are a reason to slow down.

How do you verify without becoming paranoid?

Make checking a routine, not an accusation. You’d do the same with anyone, which means nobody has to feel singled out.

1. What happened: “He’s said three times he’ll video call and it keeps falling through.”
2. The reading: “He’s hiding something.”
3. The fear: “I’m being played, and I’ll look foolish to my kids.”
4. The next step: “Suggest a specific time for a short video call this week.”

Only the first is a fact, and the fourth is the one you can act on. Someone genuinely interested will usually make a five-minute call happen. Someone who can’t, week after week, has told you something without saying it.

What to do this week

• Ask for a video call, with a time attached. “How about Thursday at seven, just ten minutes?” is easier to say yes to, and harder to dodge, than “we should video chat sometime.”
• Keep the conversation on the site a little longer. There’s no rush to move to private texting.
• Search their photos and name. A reverse image search takes a minute. Do it the way you’d check a contractor’s reviews.
• Tell one person you trust about them. Not for permission, just so there’s another set of eyes. If someone asks you to keep the relationship secret from your family or friends, that request is worth noticing.
• Make one rule and keep it: no money, no gift cards, no investments for anyone you haven’t met in person. Not even a little. Not even if the story is heartbreaking.
• If money has already gone out, stop sending more, contact your bank, and report it to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov and the FBI at ic3.gov. Losing money to a scam is common and it’s not a character flaw. Embarrassment is what keeps people quiet, and staying quiet is what scammers count on.

If the worry about being fooled is keeping you up at night, or making you want to quit dating altogether, talking it through with a licensed mental-health professional can help, especially after a loss.

What doesn’t the research show?

• The profile studies were small or self-reported, and they’re about what people fudge in general, not about this person.
• The Otago findings are averages from a lab task. Plenty of older adults read people well, and plenty of young adults don’t.
• Scam figures come from reports people chose to file, so the real totals are likely different, and they include many kinds of fraud.
• None of this says the person you’re talking to is lying. It tells you what to check, and checking is fair to both of you.