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

A Norton Cyber Safety Insights Report found that nearly one-third of New Zealand dating app users have been targeted by romance scams, with AI chatbots allegedly playing a growing role. The report, based on a January 2025 survey, indicates that 50% of dating app users believed they had interacted with AI-generated messages. Private investigators report cases where victims engage in long-term virtual relationships with fraudsters, often sending money.

Risk classification

• Primary risk domain: 4 Malicious actors
• Primary risk subdomain: 4.3 Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation

The incident involves scammers using AI to impersonate romantic interests on dating apps to defraud victims of money.

Additional risk subdomains

• 5.1 Overreliance and unsafe use: Victims overrely on and anthropomorphize the AI-driven personas, entering long-term virtual relationships and developing deep emotional trust.

Causal factors

• Entity: Human
• Intent: Intentional
• Timing: Post-deployment

The risk is driven by human grifters who intentionally deploy AI tools to deceive victims and extract financial gain.

EU AI Act risk tier

• Risk tier: 3 Limited Risk

Risk Level 3: Limited Risk. The report describes the use of AI chatbots to generate conversational text on dating apps, which falls under the category of chatbots and AI-generated content requiring transparency.

AI system and alleged parties

• AI system: AI chatbots
• AI purpose: Chatbot; Writing Assistant
• Behaviour type: Assistant
• Alleged developer: Unknown large language model developers, Unknown chatbot developers
• Alleged deployer: Unknown scammers, Romance scammers targeting New Zealanders
• Alleged harmed parties: Romance scam victims, New Zealand dating app users, Financial fraud victims

Harm severity

Severity ratings are based on this scale.

Highest direct severity in any category: Minor. Severity is scored from Negligible to Catastrophic in each harm category, for harm the reports describe as caused directly or indirectly by the AI system.

• Physical: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Infrastructure: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Property: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Financial: direct Negligible, indirect Minor
• Environmental: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Malicious content: direct Minor, indirect Negligible
• Differential treatment: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Civil rights: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Democracy: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Privacy: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Psychological: direct Negligible, indirect Minor
• Epistemic: direct Minor, indirect Negligible
• Child sexual exploitation and abuse: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible

Financial

Reported: The report explicitly describes financial losses from romance scams where victims sent cash to online lovers, but does not quantify the total dollar amount.

Indirectly caused: Victims sent cash to online scammers who used AI to automate sweet-talking, resulting in unquantified financial losses per occurrence.

Inferred additional harm: Significant cumulative financial losses, likely reaching millions of dollars across New Zealand, given the high prevalence of romance scams and 35 million total scam attempts.

Malicious content

Reported: The report describes the use of AI to generate deceptive sweet-talking messages to manipulate victims.

Directly caused: AI was used to generate deceptive and manipulative text messages to sweet-talk dating app users.

Inferred additional harm: Large volumes of AI-generated deceptive messages sent to thousands of dating app users across various platforms.

Psychological

Reported: The report explicitly describes psychological manipulation where victims are led into fake virtual relationships for years.

Indirectly caused: Victims experienced severe emotional manipulation, believing they were in genuine long-term relationships, only to discover they were being scammed.

Inferred additional harm: Widespread emotional distress, heartbreak, and loss of trust among thousands of dating app users targeted by these automated scams.

Epistemic

Reported: The report describes scammers using AI to fabricate personas and conversations, misleading users about who they are talking to.

Directly caused: AI was used to generate realistic, fake conversations that misled users into believing they were interacting with genuine romantic interests.

Inferred additional harm: Widespread erosion of trust in online communication and dating platforms due to the proliferation of AI-generated fake personas.

People affected

• Occurrences reported: 1
• People reportedly harmed: 300
• People reportedly exposed: 504

Potential causes

Technology

• AI-Generated Conversations: Grifters use AI to automate and contrive sweet-talking text to scam users.
• Cut-and-Paste of AI Text: Dating apps allow users to manually paste AI-generated text into chats.

Data Inputs

• Unverified User Profiles: Dating profiles lack verified identity data, enabling fake accounts.

Human Factors

• Over-Acceptance of Online Norms: Young adults accept long-term virtual relationships as normal behavior.
• Generational Bias on Risk: Users mistakenly believe other demographics are more vulnerable than them.

Process and Methods

• Weak Automated Bot Detection: Mainstream apps lack systems to prevent robot accounts from onboarding.

Information quality

• Classification confidence: High
• Reason for confidence: The report clearly outlines the trend of grifters using AI for romance scams on dating apps in New Zealand, backed by a cybersecurity survey of 1008 adults. While specific technical details of the AI models are not mentioned, the nature of the threat (AI-enabled social engineering) and its impact are well-documented.
• Ambiguities identified: The specific AI models used by the scammers are not identified, and the exact financial losses are not quantified.

The incident highlights a growing trend of scammers using generative AI chatbots to automate romance scams and defraud dating app users in New Zealand. While causing financial loss and psychological distress to individuals, the national security impact remains minor as it does not target critical infrastructure, state sovereignty, or systemic economic stability.

• Overall national security impact: Minor
• Scope: Single nation
• Primary target: New Zealand
• Alleged perpetrator: Unknown

Threat characteristics

• Imminence: Long-term. This represents an ongoing, persistent threat of fraudulent activity and strategic concern rather than an immediate national crisis.
• Autonomy: Human-supervised. AI chatbots autonomously generate and maintain deceptive conversations, but human scammers direct the overall operation and handle the financial transactions.
• Novelty: Evolved capability. Represents a significant advancement of established romance scam techniques by integrating automated generative AI tools to scale operations.

Impact by dimension

• Physical security: Negligible. No threats to physical infrastructure, kinetic systems, or physical safety were reported in connection with this incident.
• Information security: Negligible. The incident involves localized financial fraud targeting individuals rather than coordinated information warfare or intelligence compromise targeting state institutions.
• Sovereignty: Negligible. No disruption to government operations, electoral systems, or sovereign state authority was reported.
• Economic security: Minor. Individual citizens suffered financial losses from scams, but there was no systemic threat to national financial systems, critical supply chains, or strategic technologies.
• Societal stability: Minor. The automated scams caused emotional distress and eroded trust among dating app users, but did not lead to systemic civil unrest or widespread human rights violations.