Deepfakes and AI chatbots are transforming romance scams into an industrial-scale threat that extracts millions from Australian victims each year
With Valentine's Day around the corner, many people turn to dating apps and social media in search of connection, companionship and perhaps that perfect romantic relationship. But lurking behind profile pictures and persuasive messages is a darker reality that transforms the season of hearts and flowers into a hunting ground for sophisticated criminals.
Romance scammers are no longer working with stolen photographs and clumsy scripts. They're deploying artificial intelligence that operates around the clock, generating deepfake videos that smile on command while chatbots maintain dozens of personalised conversations simultaneously – each one calibrated to exploit the specific vulnerabilities of lonely hearts.
The timing is deliberate. Romance scam activity spikes around Valentine's Day as scammers capitalise on the emotional vulnerabilities of people seeking love during the season's cultural emphasis on coupling.
What makes 2026 different from previous years is the technological sophistication now available to even amateur fraudsters, creating what security researchers describe as an industrial-scale threat that extracts millions of dollars from Australians every year and more than $US600 million from US citizens.
How scammers are using AI to power romance scams
What's changed in recent times is not the fundamental con of a romance scam, but the technology powering it, according to Dr Lesley Land, a Senior Lecturer in the School of Information Systems and Technology Management at UNSW Business School.
"Deepfakes enable romance fraud by easing the ability of perpetrators to generate fraudulent profiles quickly," said Dr Land, whose research interests include cybercrimes, identity frauds/misuses, romance scams and investment scams.
"Additionally, agentic AI is revolutionising romance fraud by enabling scammers to move beyond simple phishing to creating highly sophisticated, automated, and emotionally manipulative, long-term deceptions.
"Traditional methods relied on persuasion techniques by manipulating characteristics such as credibility, reciprocity, authority and scarcity on profile images and descriptions. Once initiated, these scams require constant human input for continuous grooming."
However, Dr Land said modernised approaches using agentic AI can independently plan, act, and learn to maintain fake relationships, build trust, and eventually persuade victims to part with their money. "Multiple techniques (including AI), when combined, increase the capacity of creating fraudulent dating profiles that enhance hyper-personal communications between daters," she said.
Dr Land noted that the quality of deepfakes varies widely, from highly realistic to low-quality. "Therefore, we cannot guarantee that these technologies have reached a point of trusted authenticity that cannot be detected most of the time," she said.
The stakes are significant for those seeking romantic connections online. Cybersecurity firm Norton has found that two in five online daters have already been targeted by dating scams, while credit reporting agency Experian says AI-enabled romance scams are so profitable that they rank among the top five fraud trends.
When seeing is no longer believing: The deepfake authenticity crisis
The subconscious alarm bells that once protected consumers from digital fraud have been systematically dismantled. Deepfake technologies have reached a threshold where AI-generated media can bypass our natural scepticism.
When an 82-year-old retiree sees what appears to be Elon Musk promoting an investment opportunity in a video, or when a potential romance scam victim receives a personalised video message from someone greeting them by name, the traditional heuristic of "seeing is believing" becomes dangerously obsolete.
For example, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, recently examined a 15-second video used in a romance scam. Even
