According to a cybersecurity expert, romance scams have entered a “dark age” this 2026 as fraudsters increasingly use artificial intelligence (AI) to craft schemes that siphon billions of dollars from victims, as the availability of advanced AI tools has enabled scammers to scale operations at minimal cost.
According to Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at US-based cybersecurity firm Tenable, “2026 marks our entry into a dark age of romance scams. For the price of a cup of coffee, predators can now leverage these tools to generate linguistically perfect, emotionally resonant messages designed to ensnare victims across the globe.”
Citing data from the US Federal Trade Commission, Tenable noted that investment scams – the typical endgame of romance fraud – resulted in $5.7 billion in losses in 2024, the highest of any fraud category.
The actual figure could be much higher as many victims hesitate to report losses due to stigma.
In the Philippines, the police have recorded 75 cases of love scams in 2024 and 54 in 2025.
Narang said AI has accelerated the shift from online romance to investment fraud, commonly known as “pig butchering,” where victims are gradually “fattened” with attention, trust, and staged investment gains before being “slaughtered” through persuasion to commit larger sums to fraudulent platforms.
Some operations now use AI-generated images, voice cloning, and even real-time face swapping tools to effectively cheat traditional methods verification methods, such as asking a match to hop on a video call.
“If it sounds too good to be true, such as investment opportunities that can lead to earning thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s probably a scam,” Narang said.
As scams evolve and take advantage of technologies such as AI, the protectors and targets also have to pick up their game. As the government adds protections and puts more effort into hunting down the criminal groups, our own awareness and vigilance will also need improvement and updating as well. Spotting the scams early by learning to recognize the red flags and then knowing what to do about it will be key.*
