Romance fraud is one of the most urgent and pernicious digital frauds, exploiting targets’ feelings of isolation and netting fraudsters hundreds of millions of dollars per year, according to Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy.
These frauds are transforming into more organised crimes, with criminals hiring individuals from across the world to target victims on every popular dating platform and via every social media channel, says Fangzhou Wang, assistant professor of research at the University of Texas at Arlington.
US citizens have reported $4.5bn in losses to romance and confidence fraud over the past decade, according to analysis of the past 10 years of FBI internet crime reports data.
Although the amount of money lost to romance scammers has reduced in recent years, the number of so-called “pig butchering” scams – which usually contain elements of confidence scams – has increased.
Current technology does not yet allow romance scams to be outsourced to chatbots, but this is a future potential risk.
