The sexy AI-powered dating app scams are here

A sophisticated scam network involving at least 28 dating apps, such as Dora, Romi, and Kira, has been uncovered. The operation, attributed to a China-based actor, uses AI (including Anthropic's Claude) to run autonomous, realistic female personas that chat with users at scale, primarily men in their late 30s. These AI-driven conversations are the core of the scam. To maintain the illusion of reality, a small number of paid gig workers are hired to pass video liveness checks and interact minimally. Users are then tricked into purchasing in-app coins with real money to continue these conversations, unaware they are largely interacting with bots. The apps masquerade as legitimate dating platforms, explicitly promising connections with "real people." They were designed to evade app store reviews by initially behaving normally before activating the coin meter and AI network. Internal documents, discovered by security researcher Matthew "Zigula" Gore-Kormanik, detail the operation's mechanics, including monitoring gig workers and using tools from Tencent Cloud and ByteDance. Anthropic discovered the misuse via unusual API activity and traced the network using a distinctive grammatical error as a fingerprint. While many apps have since been removed from stores, some remain active, highlighting the challenges of cross-industry collaboration to combat such scalable, tech-savvy fraud.

(Source：The Verge)