AI is Supercharging Romance Scams with Deepfakes and Bots

This report examines the industrialization of online romance scams, highlighting how organized crime increasingly leverages AI—deepfakes, voice cloning, face-swapping, and chatbots—to craft convincing personas, automate emotional manipulation, and sustain long cons. It outlines a typical playbook (initial contact via dating apps or “wrong number,” rapid intimacy, move to WhatsApp/Telegram, and escalating money/crypto or verification-code requests leading to potential account takeover), and cites significant growth and impact (millions of attacks blocked and $1.14B in reported 2023 losses), while advising users to avoid sending funds to unverified contacts and to perform checks like reverse image searches.