Report: AI Chatbots Are More Effective at Building Trust Than Human Scammers

A WIRED-reported study found that AI chatbots can convincingly impersonate humans and successfully perform the prolonged trust-building phase of “pig butchering” romance scams, potentially enabling large-scale automated social engineering where a human operator only takes over to request money; researchers warn this technique could bypass vendor safeguards even though the study did not document active exploitation beyond the experiment.