Urgent: Request for Support of S.841 – The Romance Scam Prevention Act
S.841 asks platforms to do one thing: when they ban an account for fraud, tell the people who were talking to it.
That is the whole bill. Not a content moderation regime, not a new agency, not a compliance burden that only large companies could absorb. A notification, sent to the people most likely to be in the middle of losing their savings, at the one moment the platform already knows something is wrong.
I wrote to Senator Paul in December asking him to reconsider his opposition. I am publishing that letter here because the argument in it is the same one I would make to anyone, and because victims deserve to see somebody making it on the record.
The letter
Ronnie Tokazowski
[Address Redacted for Personal Safety]
Chief Fraud Fighter, AntiScam.education
December 9, 2025
Dear Senator Paul,
I am writing to you both professionally and personally to urge your support for S.841 – The Romance Scam Prevention Act. As the Chief Fraud Fighter at AntiScam.education, I work directly with victims of online fraud every single day. I can tell you with absolute clarity: romance scams are not simple mistakes in judgment. They are industrialized psychological operations, run by organized criminal groups, that exploit the human nervous system, override conscious decision-making, and lead to devastating emotional and financial consequences.
I am asking you, respectfully but urgently, to reconsider your position on this bill.
The Reality: People Are Being Manipulated in Ways We Do Not Fully Understand
Over the past several years, I have worked with victims whose lives have been shattered by these scams. What I witness repeatedly is a form of induced emotional dependency—a process that mirrors trauma bonding, coercive control, and in many cases, dissociation. These are not simply conversations on a dating app; they are long-form psychological attacks designed to erode a person's grounding in reality.
Victims describe feeling as though their "consciousness was hijacked."
And in a very real sense, it was.
We still do not fully understand all the mechanisms behind this type of manipulation. But we know enough to say that it is trauma-based, neurologically disruptive, and intentionally crafted by criminals who study human vulnerability with chilling precision.
The Cost of Inaction: People Are Taking Their Own Lives
I do not say this lightly:
I have seen victims die because of this.
When a person realizes they have been defrauded—not just financially, but emotionally—they often experience extreme shame, collapse of identity, and a nervous-system shock comparable to acute trauma. Families are left grieving not only the financial loss but the loss of a loved one whose despair became unbearable.
This is preventable.
And S.841 is a meaningful step toward that prevention.
Social Media and Dating Platforms Are Profiting From Fraud
The current system financially benefits platforms—not victims.
Social media and dating companies earn revenue every time a scammer engages on their platform:
Every new fake profile is another monetized user.
Every message exchanged increases engagement metrics.
Every day a scammer is not banned is another day of ad-revenue and user-activity growth.
These companies have little incentive to meaningfully intervene, because fraud generates profit. Without federal standards, the platforms continue optimizing engagement while criminals weaponize the very same systems to deceive and groom victims.
S.841 finally introduces a measurable, enforceable expectation of basic safety.
This Bill Does Not Create Excessive Bureaucracy — It Creates Accountability
The Romance Scam Prevention Act provides a simple, practical requirement: when a platform bans a suspected fraudster, they must notify the people who interacted with that account. That is the bare minimum any ethical company should be doing, and yet many still do not.
Having reviewed the text of S.841 myself (and deeply familiar with its operational context), it is clear that the bill represents:
A bipartisan, narrowly tailored solution
A fiscally responsible approach to prevention
A necessary shift toward platform accountability
A first step in protecting Americans before their savings and mental health are destroyed
This bill will not solve every aspect of the problem, but it will save lives. It will prevent suicides. It will reduce the financial burden on families and on the nation. It will empower victims with early warning before irreversible losses occur.
Victims Are Not Asking for Special Treatment — They Are Asking for Basic Protection
The survivors I work with do not want handouts or pity.
They want acknowledgement.
They want justice.
They want to know that their government sees them—not as careless, but as human beings who were targeted by a coordinated criminal enterprise.
Passing S.841 sends a clear message:
The United States values its citizens more than the engagement metrics of social media platforms.
A Respectful Request
Senator Paul, I respectfully urge you to reconsider your opposition to this bill. Your voice holds weight. Your leadership could prevent further devastation for countless families.
If you or your staff would like to speak with victims directly, review case studies, or understand more about the psychological and neurological mechanisms that make these scams so effective, I would gladly share what I have learned in my years of frontline work.
Thank you for your time, your service, and your willingness to hear the voices of those who have been harmed.
Sincerely,
Ronnie Tokazowski
Chief Fraud Fighter
AntiScam.education
What you can do about it
A letter from one fraud researcher is worth something. A hundred letters from constituents is worth considerably more, and this is one of the rare fraud problems where an ordinary person has a lever to pull.
Find your senators at senate.gov. Both of them. It takes about a minute.
Reference the bill by number. S.841, the Romance Scam Prevention Act. Staff sort by bill number, so leading with it means your message lands in the right pile.
Keep it short and make it yours. Three or four sentences beats three pages. Something close to this works:
I am a constituent writing to ask you to support S.841, the Romance Scam Prevention Act. It requires platforms to notify users when an account they were interacting with is banned for fraud. That notification would reach people at the exact moment they are most likely to still be losing money. If you have a personal connection to this, one line about it carries more weight than anything else in the message.
If this happened in your family, say so. Staff count constituent stories differently from form letters. You do not have to give details you are not comfortable giving.
Call rather than email if you can. Phone calls to the district office get logged and tallied, and they take under two minutes.
If you are here because it happened to you
The bill is about the next person. You need something today.
The reporting agencies, bank contacts, and victim support organizations are gathered on my Report a Scam page, free, no signup. If you are in the first days of it, What to Do Immediately After Being Scammed is the step-by-step, and the clock on some of those steps is real.
And if what you actually want is an explanation of how a capable person ends up here, that is Why Smart People Fall for Scams, and at more depth, my course. Access starts at $15 a month.
Choose a plan and start the course
Why this one matters to me
Most fraud policy arrives years late and aimed at the wrong target. This bill is unusual because it is small, specific, and lands at the exact moment intervention still works.
The platforms already know. They banned the account. The only question S.841 settles is whether they have to tell the person still talking to it.
