Associated Incidents
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 Norton cybersecurity report found nearly one in three Kiwi dating app users had been scam targets.
The 2025 Norton Cyber Safety Insights Report also found generational perceptions often led people to believe other age groups were more at risk than themselves.
Private investigator Julia Hartley Moore said Kiwis would be "amazed" how many under-35s were susceptible to online scammers.
"There are young males that have come to us. They've met a girl; she says she lives in Palmerston North. Yet they can never, ever catch up. These people have been in these virtual relationships for years," she told the Herald.
"Young people have never really been in the world of normal relationships. Because they've been online all their lives, they accept a lot of online stuff as normal," she added.
Young men sought help after sending cash to an online "lover", and Hartley Moore said she had to tell the hapless men: "You're not speaking to a girl... She's probably not even in New Zealand."
But that did not mean old-fashioned scams had vanished, she said.
"It's rife out there. I have an older client, in her late 60s. The electrician that came round to her penthouse apartment is now dating her. There's about a 40-year age difference. She's convinced this man is love and she's the hottest thing since sliced bread."
Mark Gorrie, Norton's Asia-Pacific managing director, said there were about seven scam attempts per capita last year in New Zealand - about 35 million in total, or "a scam attempt every second".
The scams, in order of prevalence, were romance scams, catfishing, fake dating sites, visa or immigration scams, and "sugar daddy" or "sugar baby" scams, where people pretended to either be rich older men or attractive younger women.
The Norton Cyber Safety Insights Report, which surveyed 1008 adults last month, found 50% of respondents using dating apps believed they'd had a conversation with someone on a dating app written by AI.
Christchurch developer Emily Heazlewood said her locally run dating app, Amor, tried to make life harder for scammers but also behaved more like a traditional matchmaking service.
She said Amor had a surge of interest over the New Year period, with a 52% increase in users last month.
Christchurch developer Emily Heazlewood said the Amor app encourages people to put some thought and effort into online dating.
She said Amor required people to answer 60 questions and verify an email address.
She said Amor's premium service users had to provide ID, which was run through the Stripe payments service and verified in the cloud without Amor holding on to the information.
Heazlewood said before she developed Amor, she travelled abroad and found matchmaking services were popular in America.
"They pay upwards of $10,000 for a matchmaker. There's obviously a method behind matchmaking. How do we make it more accessible to people without the embarrassing catfishing?"
Instead of users getting attention by liking someone's photos, they are matched based on the answers they provide.
Heazlewood said when she was single and on other dating apps, there were plenty of awkward moments.
"As a working professional in New Zealand, I didn't want to be seen by the masses. Being single at 30 possibly wasn't the coolest story.
"I'd run into other people I work with. I'd come across a whole lot of CEOs. It was pretty embarrassing."
Heazlewood said 6500 Kiwis were currently on the app.
She said Amor's next goal was to get into Australia and at some point have permanent employees.
She said people could use AI to contrive conversations almost anywhere, but Amor had some safeguards against that.
"You couldn't plug it into the app, you couldn't on-board a robot into Amor. But you could still cut and paste."
Heazlewood said less than 0.2% of matches had been reported for inappropriate behaviour.
One person was kicked off -- for trying to promote an OnlyFans account on the site.