AI Scammers Are Better at Building Trust Than Humans
A multi-university study found that AI chatbots are more effective than humans at building trust with potential victims in 'pig butchering' romance scams. The AI bots successfully convinced nearly half of test subjects to follow instructions, significantly outperforming human scammers.
Why it matters
The findings suggest that generative AI could drastically increase the scale and success rate of financial fraud, necessitating new approaches to digital security and user awareness.
Researchers from four universities—Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham in India, Foscari University of Venice, the University of Melbourne, and Ben Gurion University of the Negev—carried out a broad study on the use and potential of generative AI chatbots in the growing scam industry centered around a form of fraud known as “pig butchering,” text-based romance scams that eventually shift to fake crypto investments that steal as much as six-figure sums from victims. In their study, the researchers pitted AI chatbots directly against humans in a simulation of the scamming process—or more specifically, the long, trust-building conversations that eventually lead up to soliciting a fake investment from the scam’s target.
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