Love, lies, and LLMs: How to protect yourself from AI romance scams

Romance scams used to feel like a cliché. Everyone pictured an email from an overseas “prince” that was poorly written and full of typos and pleas for cash. Now, that cliché is dead.

Today’s romance scams are industrial-scale operations. Attackers use artificial intelligence to clone voices, create deepfake video calls, and write scripts with large language models (LLMs).

In 2024 alone, the Federal Trade Commission reported that financial losses to romance scams skyrocketed...