AI Romance Scams, BE AWARE!

A friend recently had a chain of extremely bad luck on dating sites! Who doesn't these days!? 
After another failed date, she swiped on a handsome widowed Greek guy, who said all the right things. 
He had a daughter in Greece who he was working hard to provide for with his own successful engineering company. 

We would catch up weekly over coffee about how lovely he was and how there were ‘no’ red flags, she was so happy and excited that she had finally met a decent guy online. 

After a couple of times of trying to meet but illness and kids getting between them, he flew off to Turkey for a big $3M deal pitch for his company. 
Everyday they would facetime 4 times a day and they would text all day long between that. 

When he was in Turkey, she was going to meet him at the airport for a romantic first meet. She dreamed of him coming through the gates and being swept off her feet. However, he had other plans, he called one day to say he had won the pitch and now needed to fly that same day to sort the financial part out to Dubai! He asked if she would wait for him, to which she quickly gushed, she would, of course. 

When in Dubai it was valentines day, so he had sent her a present and some very important documents that he needed for this deal for her to keep safe for him. 

After a few days she receives a message to say the package was at the airport and she would need to pay the service charge to have it dispatched, to which she forwarded to him and he assured her to pay this and he would pay her straight back!! Here comes the reddest of red flags, the bill was $1200, of course she isn't silly enough to pay that, so she politely declined and offered to pick it up from the airport half an hour up the road from her location. 
He came back short and sharp and said no, please pay. 

She googled the name of the company from the link that had come from a random phone number to which, surprises, surprise, did not exist. 
She then told him again that she wouldn’t be paying, to which he then got aggressive and told her he was disappointed in her and that she really should pay for this if she loved him (yes, after 2 months!) 

Upon hearing this I got my stalking head on and asked her for an image of him (we have to be savvy in this dating world these days!) She wasn’t sure how to screenshot on her phone so asked good old google, and before she knew it her phone had already searched the image of him, only to find that this guy has about 15 different names and SCAM written everywhere beside them, someone had even made a youtube video of a mashup of his images saying do not trust this man, it’s not him! 
I googled one of the names that came up the most and it turns out that this guy is an Australian entrepreneur with books, films, juice companies with a thick Australian accent! (Remember this guy was Greek!)

My poor friend had been the victim of an AI led dating romance scam, not only did she see his face on facetime 4 times a day, she also saw all the backgrounds to make the story he told her even more real, so why would she ever question it?!

This story, even to me, was absolutely shocking and it truly made me worry, not only for the people of today who are unaware of AI and the reality of how powerful this is, but also for our children who will grow up with a much more advanced version of this. 

Please, please be careful, do not give any money to anyone you do not know or trust and most of all, do your research on romance scams and anything AI related, soon it will be everywhere and we all need to be aware of the dangers this could bring. 

We will do more posts on this in the future with more information on how to look out for signs if it’s AI or any scam, so watch this space.

Call us here at Directing Design if you suspect you are a victim of any sort of scam and we will do our best to help you with this. 

Be Safe. Take Care.