A real deployed soldier never asks you to pay for leave, food or a care package

Romance scammers posing as deployed U.S. troops have built a script around three specific requests: money for a “leave request,” money for food, and money to ship a care package. Nearly 70,000 people reported a romance scam of any kind to the Federal Trade Commission in 2022, with losses reaching $1.3 billion, according to the agency’s consumer alert on military-themed romance fraud. Genuine servicemembers do not generate any of those three bills.

The pattern is consistent enough that consumer educators can describe it move by move, long before a target realizes anything is wrong.

The fake ‘leave request’ fee

One version of the scam has the fake soldier claim a “leave request” — the paperwork a real servicemember files to take approved time off — requires an unusual cash payment before travel can happen, supposedly to visit the person on the other end of the conversation. The FTC’s alert lays out the ask plainly: the scammer needs cash to apply for a leave request in order to make the trip. No such fee exists in the actual military leave process, which does not route through a private citizen’s bank account or a wire transfer.

The request usually escalates once paid. A single leave-request fee often becomes a second charge for a plane ticket, then a third for a supposed customs hold, each framed as the last obstacle before an in-person meeting that never happens.

The wiring-money-for-a-care-package script

A second script swaps the destination but keeps the mechanism. The scammer claims to need a care package containing food, phone credit or other supplies, then directs the target to wire money through what the FTC describes as “an official-looking (but fake) military website” that pretends to handle shipping and customs fees for deployed personnel. There is no legitimate military shipping service that requires a civilian to prepay customs charges through a third-party site to get supplies to an active-duty account.

Both the leave-request and care-package versions share the same tell the FTC wants repeated: “Servicemembers never have to pay to get packages, food, medical treatment, or to take leave.” That single sentence, buried in a July 2023 consumer alert from FTC counsel Carol Kando-Pineda, is the fastest way to end either version of the con before money moves.

Spotting the fake account before the money moves

A separate FTC alert, published in June 2024 by consumer education specialist Cristina Miranda, focuses on the accounts themselves rather than the money asks. Scammers frequently lift a real servicemember’s photos and biographical details wholesale, running the same picture across several dating profiles and platforms at once — a pattern a reverse image search can surface before a single message is exchanged. Miranda’s alert treats any request for money, regardless of the stated reason, as disqualifying on its own, and recommends cutting off contact and reporting the account to both the platform involved and the FTC’s fraud-reporting site once a mismatch turns up.

Payment method is its own red flag independent of the story attached to it. Requests routed through gift cards, wire transfers, payment apps or cryptocurrency are treated by the FTC as scam indicators regardless of whether the stated reason is a leave request, a care package or a medical emergency, because each of those channels is difficult to trace and nearly impossible to reverse once funds clear.

A decade of the same warning from investigators

The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division has repeated versions of this warning for years as the identities of real soldiers keep getting borrowed for profiles the soldiers never created. In one CID advisory, spokesperson Chris Grey described the pattern investigators see repeatedly: targets are told to send money for “transportation costs, communication fees or marriage processing and medical fees” by someone claiming overseas deployment, and Grey noted plainly that the people behind these accounts “are definitely not American Soldiers,” even when they can discuss American culture fluently enough to sound convincing.

The FTC’s broader guidance on romance scams applies the same logic here as it does to any other version of the con: a relationship that exists only through text and phone calls, paired with any request for money before an in-person meeting takes place, is reason enough to stop sending anything and verify the story independently. Scammers also lean on a familiar excuse for never meeting in person, claiming to be stationed overseas, on an oil rig or with an international organization — a cover story broad enough to explain away video calls, holidays and any other chance to confirm someone is real.

The federal guidance stays the same whatever excuse is offered. Whether the story is a broken leave request, a stalled care package or a medical bill at a base clinic overseas, the agencies that track this fraud land on the identical answer: a real deployed servicemember does not need a civilian’s money to eat, to ship a package or to go on leave.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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