Love, Lies, and Language Models: Investigating AI's Role in Romance-Baiting Scams

ArXi:2512.16280v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Romance-baiting scams have become a major source of financial and emotional harm worldwide. These operations are run by organized crime syndicates that traffic thousands of people into forced labor, requiring them to build emotional intimacy with victims over weeks of text conversations before pressuring them into fraudulent cryptocurrency investments. Because the scams are inherently text-based, they raise urgent questions about the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in both current and future automation.