Seven signs your ‘online romance’ is really an artificial intelligence SCAMMER

The recent emergence of artificial intelligence chatbots has already changed the world. From ChatGPT to Microsoft’s Bing AI and Google’s recently released Bard, advances in human technology will have a huge effect on how people work.

But while AI could represent a new beginning for technology, there are some serious and troubling threats.

For example, what if you find out that you’ve been talking to an AI chatbot for days, thinking it’s a human? Dating apps have changed the way we find love. But what if AI chatbots can access those same apps?

New research has found that fraudsters have become adept AI scammers with romantic sites, a hotbed of victims they can target for money. Experts are now warning that it’s very likely that the heartfelt messages you think you’re responding to on a dating site were generated by a chatbot.

A survey of 2,000 people in the UK found that 30 per cent have been the victim of a romance scam, or know someone who has.

Now that users should be wary of fraudsters using the technology, Daniel Holmes, a fraud prevention specialist for Feedzai who fights financial fraud, has shared seven signs that your love interest could really be an AI scammer.

1. See if that profile exists on other social media apps. When you connect with someone you would expect to find them on Twitter or Instagram or some other platform.

2. View the recentness in which that profile was created. Generative AI like ChatGPT makes it possible to deploy romance scams at scale. Fraudsters often delete profiles quite quickly, so if they fail with one, they may be successful with another and move on to another profile with a different photo.

It used to be romance scams carried out by one person trying to scam one or just a few victims at a time. But with Generative AI, romance scams can spread to millions of users and generate high-quality responses for victims. Romance scammers now have the tools, motivation, and skills to launch high-quality and compelling catfishing campaigns.

3. They refuse to send selfies and videos or maybe they send a very similar selfie all the time and the selfie always looks very generic rather than recent and reflects nothing of what is currently going on – these are all red flags that you have been hooked by an AI scammer.

Generative AI can tailor images. AI-generated art programs such as DreamStudio, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E and DALL-E 2 can also address this problem. These programs can create almost any image you want in seconds. These programs can create very convincing images of something that looks convincingly like a real person.

New research has found fraudsters have become adept AI scammers with romance sites a hotbed of victims they can target for money (file image)

4. Fraudsters will quickly try to leave a dating site and get into a WhatsApp or SMS based conversation where it is easy to access and exchange messages etc. and then they will try to build the story and eventually it will it’s about the scammer building trust in the victim.

5. An early approach or early request for funds is the big one. Sometimes scammers play the long game, sometimes they don’t. It’s a numbers game for the scammers. Almost a common element of the scam is getting the victim to understand why they need the money and eventually that will turn into a request for money at some point.

6. From the point of connection to the point of payment, there is a dialogue that is going on during that time and it is that dialogue that is really the fraudster’s art. But it always comes down to them playing one of two ways: playing on emotions or actively pushing for money.

This can take the form of being lured in romantically and then being convinced that an investment is the right thing to do. Or it will be empathy: ‘I want to be with you, but I need to be able to come to your country, can you send me £2,000 for a ticket.’

7. If you insist on meeting someone and they keep putting it off. You will never encounter a scammer in real life. If you offer to meet and they repeatedly say no, that would be another red flag.

While AI like ChatGPT could represent a new beginning for technology, there are some serious and troubling threats

After giving his top tips, Holmes explained, “One of the big red flags that has historically allowed a victim to spot a scam has been the wording and grammar that surrounds an email or an approach, so what you often have is a group of people in one part of the world trying to scam people in all different parts of the world.

And the UK and the US are basically struggling because English is essentially a universal language, but one of the red flags is always being able to pick up on those grammar issues.

“Chat GPT allows the fraudsters to fix that in that they can tap something into Chat GPT and quickly translate it into something that is not only grammatically correct, but arguably more convincing and better structured as a story section. ‘