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  recent case of a 34 year old Texas woman who received an AI video message that appeared to come from country singer Morgan Wallen that started an online romance culminating with the woman being asked to send the scammer $18,000 worth of gift cards.

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.

Finally, anytime you are asked to send large amounts of gift cards it is a scam.  Scammers love gift cards because they are impossible to trace back to the scammer.

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