Romance scams where scammers convince people that they are in love with them and once they have gained their trust and an emotional connection ask under a variety of pretenses for money has only gotten worse with AI being able to be used for scammers to appear as anyone they wish in videos or change their voice through AI voice cloning to appear legitimate. I also have written many times about scammers posing as celebrities to scam people out of their money and this type of scam too has gotten worse with AI. Now we have a scam that combines both of these scams in the case of a 53 year old French woman who sent $850,000 to a scammer posing as Brad Pitt who convinced her to send him the money telling her that he needed the money for medial care because he had developed kidney cancer and his money ws tied up in his divorce from Angelina Jolie.
The scammer initially communicated with her through Facebook Messenger and then text messages. The scammer then sent AI created deepfake videos and photos including those shown below which were shown by French television station TF1 to convince his victim to send him money. It wasn’t until the victim read about Pitt’s new relationship with Ines DeRamon that she realized she had been scammed.
Last year a scam group called the “Yahoo Boys” based in Nigeria began using artificial intelligence to change their facial features in Zoom videos to appear to be the person they are posing as in the romance scam. They also can use AI to change their voice and accent to sound legitimate and while doing a video conference with a romance scammer in the past was a good way to see if the person was actually who they claimed to be, now scammers using this technology will be very difficult to recognize as scammers.
TIPS
There are various red flags to help you identify romance scams. I describe many of them in detail in my book “The Truth About Avoiding Scams.” The most important thing to remember is to always be skeptical of anyone who falls in love with you quickly online without ever meeting you and early into the relationship who then asks you to send money to assist them with a wide range of phony emergencies.
Here are a few other things to look for to help identify an online romance scam. Often their profile picture is stolen from a modeling website on the Internet. If the picture looks too professional and the person looks too much like a model, you should be wary. You also can check on the legitimacy of photographs or video images by seeing if they have been used elsewhere by doing a reverse image search using google.images.com or websites such as tineye.com.
Recently, the dating sites Match, Tinder, Hinge and Plenty of Fish started a new public awareness program to help people recognize romance scams. One tip they give is to use the verification check on your matches to help confirm they are the person who appears in the profile photo.
As for celebrity based romance scam, it is important to recognize that celebrities aren’t reaching out online to people they have never met to start romantic relationships.
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