Abstract
Romance fraud uses the guise of a genuine relationship to deceive a victim for a financial gain. Each year, millions of individuals globally lose money to these approaches. Current prevention messaging focuses heavily on promoting the use of internet searches (specifically reverse image searches) to verify or refute the identity/scenario that one is being presented with. For those who choose to do this, it can be successful and avoid initial financial losses or reduce the overall amount of money lost to an offender. However, as technology evolves, it is likely offenders will alter their methods to deceive victims. This is already evident through the rapid progression and improvements of artificial intelligence and deepfakes to create unique images. This article argues that the adoption of these new techniques requires a need to rethink current prevention messaging, as the utility of conducting reverse image searches may become somewhat redundant into the future.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by the Cyber Security Research Centre Limited whose activities are partially funded by the Australian Government’s Cooperative Research Centres Programme. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent those of the Australian Government. All errors and omissions are the sole responsibility of the author.
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Cross, C. Using artificial intelligence (AI) and deepfakes to deceive victims: the need to rethink current romance fraud prevention messaging. Crime Prev Community Saf 24, 30–41 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41300-021-00134-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41300-021-00134-w