An emerging AI scam on online dating apps is looting hundreds of thousands of people of their lifetime savings, leading to a massive financial and emotional toll on the victims.
A 45-year-old Australian woman, Sarah, is one of the victims of this fraudulent scheme who lost $100,000 after falling in love with a fictional man who was nothing more than an AI-generated image used by scammers.
She met a man claiming to be Daniel on Tinder last year after ending her 20-year-old relationship in the hope of finding a lifelong partner. Daniel was only an AI-generated image of a beautiful young world traveler who claimed that cryptocurrency investments helped him make fortunes and live a luxurious lifestyle.
The scammers behind Daniel’s image also motivated Sarah to invest in cryptocurrency. Initially, Sarah was able to make quick profits using the scammers’ instructions, who helped her make accounts on legitimate Bitcoin apps and provided her with useful crypto signals. Once Sarah started to trust Daniel, the scammers lured her into another platform, where she invested her lifetime savings of $100,000, which was immediately credited to the scammers’ accounts.
Sarah now believes that there was no red flag in her online relationship, and at no stage did she think that Daniel was not an actual person. She suggested that Daniel’s photos looked real and everything indicated that he was a legitimate human being.
Since the start of the AI boom, fraudulent online practices have been rapidly increasing. These practices are also contributing to human smuggling, where criminal groups win the trust of random people online before inviting them to so-called “pig butchering” factories, which are majorly located in different parts of Southeast Asia.
Once the victims reach there, they are kidnapped and brutally tortured to commit online fraud with other people. If the victims refuse to commit fraud or fall short of achieving the allocated scamming targets, they are being beaten and forced to starve. Reportedly, almost 120,000 are currently abducted in Myanmar alongside the Myanmar-Thailand border, where they are forced to live under severe human rights abuses.
According to one former captive, they did not receive anything to eat or drink for 15 days and were subjected to merciless beating. The former captive noted that the scammers profile their targeted victims, categorize them, and give their profiles to the abducted people who contact them to help scammers make money.
Benedikt Hoffman from the UN Office on Drug and Crime warned online users about the dangers of these “pig butchering” factories and even stated that the situation is getting worse than the drug trade.
Another human rights advocate, Mechelle Moore, stated that the abductees are beaten through hammers and metal pipes in these factories, and their bodies are full of swellings and bruises.
