How to Build Trust with a New Connection, Safely

Trusting someone new doesn't have to mean guessing right on the first try. It means giving trust time to actually earn itself — the same way it would anywhere else.

Why closeness online can outrun what it's actually built on

Talking to someone new online can feel closer, faster, than talking to someone new in person. That's not a coincidence, and it isn't really about the other person yet. A well-established communication theory, first described by researcher Joseph Walther in 1996, explains why. Real-world conversation is full of small, automatic cues — tone, timing, body language — that fill themselves in without anyone trying. Text strips most of those out. People tend to fill the resulting gaps in with an idealized picture of who they're talking to. That picture gets built from whatever's left: word choice, how quickly someone replies, how well-crafted a message feels.

Both sides can do this to each other at the same time. That's part of why an online connection can feel unusually strong, unusually quickly — a specific pattern with a name, not just an anecdote.

None of that makes the feeling fake. It does mean the feeling can run ahead of what's actually been established between two people who've never met. Trust that outruns the evidence for it is exactly the gap a bad-faith stranger benefits from.

The playbook that speed makes possible

Research specifically on romance scams has mapped out how that gap gets used. A widely cited 2013 study by criminologist Monica Whitty traced a consistent pattern across interviews with real victims. It starts with an unusually attentive, idealized presentation. Then a grooming period, one that builds real emotional investment over real time, not a rushed one. Then a request. Often a small one, at first.

If that first request succeeds, the next one tends to be bigger. It's usually tied to a sudden crisis — a medical bill, a stranded trip, a legal problem that's somehow only solvable with money. That escalation isn't improvised. Starting small and building up is a documented persuasion technique in its own right, used because it works.

None of this requires the other person to be unconvincing. It works precisely because the emotional investment by that point is real, even when what it was built on wasn't.

Urgency is the tell, not the ask

A 2025 study on online fraud found something specific about timing. People evaluate the exact same suspicious message less accurately under time pressure than they do with room to think. The effect is strongest exactly when a message frames something as a loss to avoid, rather than a gain to chase. That lines up precisely with the crisis-then-request pattern above. Urgency isn't just part of the story someone is telling you. It does real, measurable work on how carefully you're able to think in that moment.

That's a useful, practical test in itself. A message asking you to decide or send something quickly, sooner than you'd normally feel ready to, is worth slowing down for. That's true regardless of how real the story attached to it feels in the moment.

Careful people get fooled too

None of this happens because someone wasn't paying attention. The techniques above are specifically built to work on people who are engaged and paying close attention. That's what makes the emotional investment real enough to act on in the first place. Being deceived by a well-run version of this isn't a sign of poor judgment. It's a sign the technique did exactly what it was built to do.

What the research actually says about neurotype

There's a specific, honest question worth addressing directly: are autistic or ADHD adults more likely to be targeted or fooled by this. A 2024 study, built specifically to test that exact question, compared autistic and non-autistic adults on a realistic task. Participants worked through social scenarios that gradually revealed criminal intent. Researchers measured how well each group recognized and responded to the warning signs as they appeared. The result: no meaningful difference between the two groups. That doesn't mean no autistic person has ever been targeted or deceived. It means the belief that autistic adults are broadly more susceptible isn't what the direct evidence actually shows. Formal research on ADHD specifically in this exact context doesn't yet exist to draw the same clean comparison. This resource says that plainly, rather than guessing at an answer it doesn't have.

One more piece is worth naming here, briefly. Trust that forms around a performed version of you is trust in the performance, not in you. The masking resource in this library covers what that performance costs in general. That's true with a stranger who turns out to be dishonest. It's just as true with someone who turns out to be genuine. Pacing gives the real version of you room to show up too, which is part of what makes it worth doing either way.

Building trust slower, on purpose

None of the research above turns into a foolproof filter, and it isn't meant to. What it does support is a specific, practical habit. Treat pacing itself as the safeguard, not your ability to correctly read someone's character on the first try. That's a skill nobody has perfectly, scam or no scam. In practice, that can mean video or voice contact before anything financial changes hands. It can mean deliberately giving yourself the time a request tries to take away. It can mean a low-stakes, verified way of confirming who someone actually is before trusting them with anything that would genuinely hurt to lose.

None of that guarantees a particular outcome, and no resource can honestly promise it will. What it can promise is that slowing down is never the wrong call. It isn't, even with someone who turns out to be exactly who they said they were.