Graphika In The News: Talking Romance Scams With Cyber From The Frontlines

Ask anyone who has been duped - scams can be devastating, financially and emotionally. And these days, they're increasingly difficult to avoid and a seemingly permanent fixture in online fraud.

Graphika Senior Investigator Léa Ronzaud recently spoke with the Cyber from the Frontlines podcast about romance scams in particular, including her work on Graphika's Looking For Love On All The Wrong Pages report which detailed how these types of scams attempt to engage, deceive, and defraud people of their money.

"This is the easiest way of scamming people because it's easy on both a technical and also on an execution level," Ronzaud shared with the show.

So why, in an era when people online are becoming increasingly digitally savvy do people still fall for romance and friendship scammers?

Ronzaud surmised that, "They're playing at a very emotional level and with the ongoing trend of loneliness and social isolation that we're seeing right now and that is unfortunately persisting, it creates for scammers a never ending pool of potential victims... Potentially if you're lonely, you're going to be a bit less suspicious of people you don't know that approach you."

This growing problem, which is global in scope, utilizes impersonation and fake personas as a core component, providing a character for the target to build an emotional relationship with. They might be a celebrity or other high-profile public figure such as an influencer, or an ordinary member of the public whose images the scammers use in fake dating posts. Graphika's intelligence team has also observed examples of impersonation of U.S. military personnel.

Ronzaud noted that for victims, the emotional impacts of falling prey to scams can be massive in addition to financial losses incurred in the process of an online interaction.

"There is this mix of shame and distress and denial. Most of the time we are talking about people who are emotionally very vulnerable that fall for those scams. And often we hear about their experience through family testimonies," she said.

Graphika delivers continuous insights into evolving online threats and narratives -- including on Generative AI Harms. With access, enterprises stay informed on how different actors leverage AI tools to conduct online and offline harm including scams, identify theft, and fraud across a wide range of social platforms and online sources.

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