Chatbots Allegedly Used in Romance Scams Targeting Nearly One-Third of New Zealand's Dating App Users
Description
A Norton Cyber Safety Insights Report found that nearly one-third of New Zealand dating app users have been targeted by romance scams, with AI chatbots allegedly playing a growing role. The report, based on a January 2025 survey, indicates that 50% of dating app users believed they had interacted with AI-generated messages. Private investigators report cases where victims engage in long-term virtual relationships with fraudsters, often sending money.
Actors
Alleged Deployers
- romance-scammers-targeting-new-zealanders
- scammers
Alleged Developers
- large-language-model-developers
- chatbot-developers
Harmed Parties
- new-zealand-dating-app-users
- romance-scam-victims
- financial-scam-victims
Classification
Risk Domain
Malicious Actors & MisuseRisk Subdomain
4.3. Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation
MIT Risk Profile
Source
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Research Papers on This Topic
How Johnny Can Persuade LLMs to Jailbreak Them: Rethinking Persuasion to Challenge AI Safety by Humanizing LLMs
AgentHarm: A Benchmark for Measuring Harmfulness of LLM Agents
Regulating ChatGPT and other Large Generative AI Models
Great, Now Write an Article About That: The Crescendo Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreak Attack