Description: A Norton Cyber Safety Insights Report found that nearly one-third of New Zealand dating app users have been targeted by romance scams, with AI chatbots allegedly playing a growing role. The report, based on a January 2025 survey, indicates that 50% of dating app users believed they had interacted with AI-generated messages. Private investigators report cases where victims engage in long-term virtual relationships with fraudsters, often sending money.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Unknown large language model developers and Unknown chatbot developers developed an AI system deployed by scammers , Fraudsters and Romance scammers targeting New Zealanders, which harmed New Zealand dating app users , Romance scam victims and Financial fraud victims.
Alleged implicated AI systems: Unknown large language models , Unknown chatbots , Social media platforms and Dating apps
Incident Stats
Incident ID
954
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2025-02-04
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
A private investigator says young adults conditioned to life online are increasingly clueless about catfishing and other love and sex scams.
Some grifters are now using artificial intelligence to do their online sweet-talking, and a new Nor…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
