Romance scams: AI-enabled romance scam workflows

This case study was originally published in OpenAI’s February 2026⁠(opens in a new window) report on disrupting malicious uses of AI.

Since we began reporting on our disruptions of scam networks that sought to abuse our models a year ago⁠(opens in a new window), we’ve taken down many scam operations from different parts of the world. They included “task” scams, which defraud their victims by convincing them to pay money in as a way of accessing non-existent earnings for trivial tasks, and investment scams, which defraud their victims by convincing them to put money into non-existent investment companies.

One common type of scam since long before the days of AI is the romance scam, in which scammers pose as a potential romantic partner and attempt to convince their target that they have met a love match before asking them for ever more money. Our first published scam disruption featured a newly stood up criminal operation in Cambodia that had used ChatGPT to generate messages for a romance scam, some of which were spread on social media. Since then, we’ve disrupted various attempted romance scams. As we wrote in June⁠(opens in a new window), these and other scams tend to follow a common pattern in their use of AI, which we think of as the ping (cold contact), the zing (generate emotion), and the sting (extract money).

The ping (cold contact): the scammer generates content designed to attract the potential target’s attention by appealing to their interests. For example, the “pig butchering” scam we reported last year frequently targeted American men in their 40s in the medical professions by replying to social media posts they made about golf. Other operations used cold-call SMS messages, fake recruitment messages or, in our most recent romance scam case (described below), social media ads. In each case, the threat actors used ChatGPT to generate messages that might be more engaging and less obviously non-native than traditional scams.