Greg's Corner

Scammers employ new weapon in romance scams

By Greg Collier

Whenever someone develops a new and useful tool, it’s only a matter of time before someone uses it for criminal purposes. The large language model ChatGPT was released to the public last year. Essentially, you can give ChatGPT any kind of prompt, and it will write it out for you. Want to write a professional sounding email to a prospective employer, it can do that for you. Want to have it write a script about Batman meeting Abraham Lincoln? It can do that too. Do you want to have ChatGPT craft the best romantic responses to keep a lonely victim believing they’re in a committed online relationship? Unfortunately, it can do that too.

According to cybersecurity experts, scammers have developed their own chat AI that will produce authentic looking messages to romance scam victims. For the initiated, romance scammers typically prey on the single and widowed by pretending to be an online romantic interest. These scammers will cultivate a phony online relationship using fake names and pictures, along with a story about how they can’t meet in public. The scammers will cultivate these relationships for months before asking the victim for money. Victims have lost thousands of dollars and even up to millions of dollars each to these scammers.

Now, armed with an AI chatbot of their own, romance scammers almost have a ‘set it and forget it’ setting for running their scams.

However, while this may make the romance scam appear more like a legitimate relationship, the steps someone can take to protect themselves are still the same. Anytime a prospective partner sends you a picture of themselves, use Google’s reverse image search to make sure they didn’t steal it from someone else’s social media. If they claim to be working overseas or somewhere where they can’t travel from freely, there’s a good chance they’re a scammer. Lastly, if they ask for money without meeting first, it’s almost guaranteed that they’re a scammer.