This paper explores online groomers’ efforts at winning their targets’ trust via compliments. Though praise is known to be often employed in online and offline grooming, its linguistic realisation via the speech act of complimenting has not been examined to date. The paper explores the topics, syntactic realisation patterns and discourse functions of a corpus of 1268 compliments extracted from 68 online grooming interactions. The results indicate (1) a prevalence of compliments on physical appearance, of both a sexual and a non-sexual orientation, which raises alongside grooming speed ; (2) high syntactic formulaicity levels regardless of speed of grooming; and (3) use of compliments to frame and back online grooming processes that try to isolate the targets, accommodate the online groomers’ with sexual gratification and allow them to ascertain the targets’ compliance levels.