HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Chatbots Allegedly Used in Romance Scams Targeting Nearly One-Third of New Zealand's Dating App Users

February 4, 2025

Norton Cyber Safety Insights Report reveals that 33% of New Zealand dating app users have experienced romance scams, with AI chatbots suspected in growing numbers. The survey conducted in January 2025 found that half of the respondents believed they had exchanged messages with artificial intelligence (AI). Investigators report instances of victims maintaining long-term virtual relationships and transferring funds to fraudsters. This highlights the importance of responsible AI, trustworthy AI, and Project Cerebellum's efforts in promoting harm prevention through guardrails for AI.

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Matched TAIM controls

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Alleged deployer
romance-scammers-targeting-new-zealanders, unknown-scammers
Alleged developer
unknown-large-language-model-developers, unknown-chatbot-developers
Alleged harmed parties
new-zealand-dating-app-users, romance-scam-victims, financial-fraud-victims

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/954

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.