AI Builds Trust Faster Than Human Scammers

Pig butchering scams drain tens of billions of dollars a year from victims worldwide, and the con typically runs for months before the fake crypto investment ever comes up. That long buildup, the slow accumulation of trust through daily texts and small talk, has always required a human on the other end of the phone. A new study from researchers at four universities, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham in India, Foscari University of Venice, the University of Melbourne, and Ben Gurion University of the Negev, tested whether that's still true.

They built a simulation pitting AI chatbots against human scammers in the exact task that matters most: the extended, relationship-building conversation that precedes the money ask. The question wasn't whether AI could help a scammer write better messages. It was whether a chatbot could run the entire trust-building phase on its own, impersonating a person convincingly enough to set up the eventual fraud without a human steering the conversation.

The researchers tracked how these AI-driven exchanges compared to human-run ones over an extended period, looking at how believable, persistent, and ultimately effective each approach was at moving a target toward the point where a fake investment pitch would land.