AI scammers outperform humans when it comes to building trust
Ars Technica AI · Andy Greenberg, wired.com · 2026-07-31
A multi-university study finds that AI chatbots can autonomously execute the months-long trust-building phase of 'pig butchering' romance-investment scams, outperforming human scammers in controlled experiments and confirming that AI can independently conduct the majority of a long con.
Appears in
Extraction
Topics: ai-misusefraudpig-butcheringgenerative-aisocial-engineering
Claims
- AI chatbots can autonomously conduct the trust-building phase of pig butchering scams without human involvement.
- In controlled experiments, AI chatbots outperformed human scammers on at least some measures of the trust-building stage.
- The trust-building phase of pig butchering scams is typically the longest stage, often lasting months in real-world operations.
- Researchers from four universities across India, Italy, Australia, and Israel conducted the study.
Key quotes
can AI fully replace a human scammer, autonomously building the web of deception leading up to the fake investment that defrauds the mark? One study's experiment suggests that it can—and may even be able to carry out the majority of that long con more effectively than humans.
for the relationship-establishing stages of the scam—the stage that in real-world scams typically represents the longest part of the interactions with the victim, often stretching to months—an AI chatbot performed remarkably effectively, successfully impersonating a human and by some measures outperforming the real human 'scammers' in their experiment.