Cybersecurity platform Avast has shared new research about a romance scam chatbot that they’re calling ‘Love-GPT’. The scam technology can create fake accounts, interact with victims, and bypass CAPTCHA, and has already interacted with 13 major dating apps.
Online security company Avast, which provides cybersecurity protections for individuals and businesses, has shared new research about romance scams in their Q3/2023 Threat Report.
Romance scams involve deceiving victims through fake romantic relationships. Scammers will adopt a fake identity in order to gain a victim’s trust, and then use this relationship to get money or valuable information from this individual.
In researching this criminal behaviour, Avast uncovered Love-GPT. This scam program is capable of creating fake accounts, speaking with victims, bypassing CAPTCHA protections, and using proxies to anonymise its actions.
Avast shares that the tool uses AI-powered ChatGPT functionalities in order to create fake profile information, read messages with other users, reply to messages, and even ask for phone number details.
The Love-GPT technology has been found to have interacted with 13 dating platforms. Avast highlights them below:
- Ashley Madison
- Badoo
- Bumble
- Craigslist
- DuyenSo
- Facebook Dating
- Likeyou.vn
- MeetMe
- OkCupid
- Plenty of Fish (POF)
- Tagged
- Tinder
- Zoosk
The cybersecurity company found that the Love-GPT program has been developing for over a decade, expanding across platforms and becoming more sophisticated over time. Avast believes the scambot’s author is Vietnamese, due to some of the data it analysed.
Avast shared that romance scams heightened in Q3 of this year, with the risk ratio of becoming a target rising by 34% during this period.
You can find out more about Love-GPT here, and read Avast’s full Q3/2023 Threat Report here.
