Dr Shepherd said online scammers often claim to be in a location where meeting face-to-face or even a live video call are not possible. "Oil rigs is one of the common ones - in the military on base, a doctor overseas - and then typically they build up that relationship and then say'there has been an emergency, I need some money for travel'." Nikki said she sent around 17,000 in total to the scammers. Her bank and PayPal have been able to get around 7,000 of that money back, but she was persuaded by the scammers to send some of the money as personal payments - through the friends and family function on PayPal. This has not been recovered.

The dating app Tinder changed the way we date by mainstreaming the swipe: Swipe left to reject, swipe right to see if there's a spark. Now, in the age of pernicious romance scams, Tinder is going hard on another feature: The block. Tinder, which is owned by Match Group, said recently it was introducing a feature that lets users block someone's profile as soon as it's suggested by the app. Previously Tinder members could only block someone after there was a match and one party subsequently filed a report. Now, blocking can happen right away.