CICC warns vs AI-driven love scams

THE Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) have warned Filipinos against the rising cases of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven love scams, which could increase emotional and financial harm among victims.   

“Artificial intelligence allows scammers to sustain emotional manipulation through fake identities, automated conversations, and staged interactions, making love scams more organized, more convincing, and more dangerous,” CICC Executive Director Renato A. Paraiso said in a statement on Monday.

“These schemes are no longer isolated incidents but coordinated operations designed to emotionally groom victims before exploiting them financially,” he said.

Jocel G. De Guzman, co-founder of group Scam Watch Pilipinas, said the most common love scams include those sharing personal stories before asking money; scammers posing as foreigners drawing victims into fake foreign exchange or cryptocurrency schemes.

Another love-scam profile is “The Seducer,” who “relies on attractive profile photos, quickly steers conversations toward sexual topics, overshares personal details, and may solicit nude photos that can later be used for blackmail.”

Other profiles include which attempt to seek money from victims include “The Serviceman” and “The Escort,” while the “Slow Burn” tries to “build trust gradually through seemingly harmless conversations and personal anecdotes… and later manipulates victims into sending money.”

“Scammers now use AI-generated photos and fabricated identities to create realistic online personas, while scripted and automated conversations allow them to communicate with multiple victims at once in a consistent, emotionally calculated manner,” the group said. — Beatriz Marie D. Cruz