AS VALENTINE’S Day approaches, Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, is available to discuss the harrowing evolution of “industrialized” romance scams. New research and firsthand accounts reveal that scammers are now leveraging “frontier” and open-source AI to scale predatory operations within specialised forced-labor compounds.
Romance scams have entered a “dark age,” evolving from disorganised individual actors into a multi-billion-dollar criminal enterprise. According to the FTC, investment scams, the primary “endgame” for romance fraud, resulted in $5.7 billion in losses in 2024, a figure experts believe is a conservative estimate.
“2026 marks our entry into a dark age of romance scams,” said Narang. “The availability of powerful frontier AI models has provided digital gold for scammers. For the price of a cup of coffee, predators can now leverage these tools to generate linguistically perfect, emotionally resonant messages designed to ensnare victims across the globe.”
The industrialization of deception: 4 key trends
Narang identifies four critical pillars currently driving this new era of fraud:
- The AI “Frontier”: Scammers now use LLMs to eliminate traditional “red flags” like broken grammar and inconsistent narratives. By automating the “grooming” phase, they can maintain dozens of highly persuasive, persona-driven conversations simultaneously.
- The “AI Room”: Sophisticated operations now utilise dedicated “AI Rooms” where deepfake technology enables real-time, face-swapped video calls. This allows a scammer to “prove” their identity visually, effectively dismantling the old advice to “just hop on a video call” to verify a match.
- The Investment Pivot: Narang emphasises that “romance” is now simply the hook for “pig butchering” schemes. Victims are systematically “fattened” with trust and staged financial success on fraudulent platforms before being “slaughtered” for their life savings.
- The Open-Source Threat: While frontier models have guardrails, free open-source models like DeepSeek and Qwen allow scammers to operate without ethical restrictions. These models now reach near-parity with paid services, providing a powerful, unrestricted toolkit for malicious use.
Discussing the chilling human cost behind the technology, Satnam adds: “These scams are the engine of a multi-billion-dollar industry often built on the backs of trafficked individuals. Inside these compounds, victims are forced to work ‘sales floors’ governed by strict quotas. They even ring bells and gongs to celebrate when a victim’s life savings are stolen. While the technology is new, the psychological manipulation is as old as time; it just happens at a scale we’ve never seen before.”
Consumers are urged not to be swayed by screenshots of earnings or claims of insider expertise. If a match brings up investments, whether aggressively or ‘coyly’, it is a scam. If the conversation turns to money, the solution is simple: cut contact, unmatch, and report.
Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash
