AI scams are getting smarter—here’s how to stay safe

“Jennifer, I missed you at French class.”

The scam usually begins with a seemingly misdirected text or a nudge on a dating site and then develops into a romantic relationship with an AI-enhanced or AI-generated persona. Called “pig butchering,” this romance-to-cryptocurrency investment scam begins with a text from a stranger, a flirtatious connection, the invitation to make cryptocurrency investments that only increase in value, culminating in a subsequent big investment that goes into the abyss of a fake crypto investment website. Merci, au revoir!

The moniker “pig butchering” comes from the increasingly larger investments victims make after their initial investments show impressive-but-fake gains through a fabricated app or website. Last year, consumer losses due to crypto investment scams in the United States soared 47% to more than $5.8 billion, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Reporting from The Guardian in September 2025 revealed drone and satellite images of massive city-sized organizations on the border of Myanmar and Thailand, which were described as heavily guarded scam centers housing tens of thousands of trafficked workers. “These transnational criminal networks have amassed substantial capital and are now huge, complex organizations with development teams that create these mobile apps for crypto,” says Marti DeLiema, a TIAA Institute research fellow and an expert on elder fraud. “They probably have R&D and marketing teams too.”

Pig butchering is just one part of a quickly growing field of AI-fueled scams that target vulnerable people. Here’s what you need to know and what you can do.

AI scams are more real, more targeted, and more often

AI is transforming the cyberscam landscape in two major ways—authenticity and execution. “AI can glean information from victims’ social media accounts and tailor scams to create stories in a way that’s more plausible than ever,” says DeLiema, an assistant professor at University of Minnesota’s School of Social Work. Through generative AI, scammers can ask AI to profile entire groups or individuals to learn who these people are, what their wants and needs are, and then develop a script for interactions with the victim based on that information.

Scammers don’t have to filter the entire online universe for their next victims, they can find them on celebrity fan pages, especially fake ones they set up for the cause. Take the case of actor Kevin Costner: In a recent story in The Hollywood Reporter, an AI-generated Kevin Costner was ready to meet a woman in a hotel near her home in the rural South for a little celebration, only after she deposited $100,000 of Bitcoin into an account that would help him fund his new production company. There might even be a job in it for the 73-year-old retired office manager.

“Fraudsters use fake online fan pages of celebrities to identify victims, whom they eventually exploit through a romance scam seeking money for false investments,” DeLiema says.

The second way AI is transforming the cyberscam playing field is execution. The execution of AI-enhanced cyberscams is the difference between line fishing and commercial trawling. Only recently, fraudsters had to manually type text messages or emails to one or several people at the same time, limiting their human engagement. Now they can use AI to respond to hundreds of people at the same time. “Due to sophisticated natural language processing technology, messaging is much more polished, and it lacks the red flags of misspelled words or poor grammar,” says DeLiema.

Vulnerable populations and risk factors

Older people are more likely to be targeted for a variety of reasons, including accumulated wealth, cognitive decline, and social isolation, and tend to lose more money to scammers, according to a new report from TIAA Institute, Safeguarding Retirement in the Age of Scams.

“As we continue to advance deeper into a world of digital interactions, we have also migrated from ‘trust but verify’ to ‘verify then trust,’” says Rick Swenson, TIAA head of Financial Crimes Management . “Always get at least two trusted sources to verify what you’re reading, hearing, or seeing is real before you make any financial decisions.” If you’re responding to a query from someone purportedly representing a government agency, go directly to that agency’s website to respond. Reach out to a close confidante or family member for advice, but verify early and often.

In 2024 alone, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded almost 150,000 cryptocurrency fraud complaints, with a plurality coming from the FBI’s top age category of 60 and older. That group saw losses of $2.8 billion, double that of any other age group.

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