AI scammers outperform humans when it comes to building trust

Per Ars Technica reporting on new research, artificial intelligence chatbots may actually be better at running romance scams than humans. The study, conducted by researchers from universities in India, Italy, Australia, and Israel, examined so-called pig butchering scams—where fraudsters build fake relationships that eventually shift to fake cryptocurrency investment schemes stealing six-figure sums from victims. The researchers pitted AI chatbots against human scammers in simulating the trust-building phase that typically stretches across months in real scams. The AI chatbots not only successfully impersonated humans but outperformed human scammers in several measures, suggesting artificial intelligence could execute much of the long con more effectively than people.

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