The sexy AI-powered dating app scams are here

What happened

Security researcher Matthew “Zigula” Gore-Kormanik was analyzing a fraudulent dating app called Dora when he got a pop-up message saying he was receiving a call from Jennifer. According to her bio, she’s a 41-year-old Sagittarius with red hair, blue eyes, and piercings. She likes music, horror movies, nightlife, and sports. Gore-Kormanik answered the call, but didn’t see Jennifer in his video feed.

The gig workers were hired to pass liveness checks on video or to follow social media accounts. They didn’t even write their own comments. Instead, they responded to messages by selecting from three pregenerated replies. But they could prove they’re human, whereas the AI personas could only demur with a plausible explanation for why a video chat or call was not possible.

“Backend components fabricated likes, visitors, and pre-recorded ‘video’ when no real person was available, and tracked which users had begun to suspect they were talking to a bot,” Anthropic’s report states. Because of the smattering of interactions with real people, some users began to believe that the entirely AI-generated replies they were receiving on the app were also from real people. Multiple AI providers are involved.

While Claude was misused to run the autonomous conversational personas, the report says that “a small non-Anthropic model generated the short reply suggestions the gig workers tapped, alongside face-attractiveness scoring and photo/voice moderation. ” There is an entire ecosystem of online scams, ranging from automated thirst trap replies to fake social media accounts or dating app profiles.

Why it matters

He saw a tapestry that was moving, probably due to a fan, and heard weird distortion in the background. ” His microphone hadn’t even been connected. Gore-Kormanik was poking around Dora, and other similar apps, because I’d shared with him a spreadsheet of potential dating scam apps.

I was looking into this because on June 5th, Anthropic did something uncharacteristic: The normally tight-lipped company let its threat intelligence researcher Chris Cronbaugh give a talk at a public cybersecurity conference called Sleuthcon. The company had uncovered a fraudulent dating app network after noticing unusual activity on Claude: a prepaid account sending out over 100,000 API requests per day.

During the talk, called “Swipe Right, Pay Up: Industrial-Scale AI Catfishing,” Cronbaugh described a network of around 28 dating apps where the conversation was largely run by autonomous AI personas. The majority of chats, he said, did not involve a human agent at all.

Anthropic has since published its findings in the “scams and fraud” section of its “Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026” report, but not until after we’d spent extensive time looking into the network and trying to corroborate the findings.

I was intrigued by the fact that Anthropic was speaking about this publicly while many of the apps were still live on both major US app stores, and wondered why they hadn’t been taken down. Looking at the apps themselves, I noted that they were presented as helping people find people to talk to.

They did not look like companion apps such as Replika where it’s clear the personas are actually AI. ” Here’s how the scam works: Users, mostly men in their mid-to-late 30s, go on dating apps and match with what they believe to be real women. Only one in four of them actually is, and that person is not a user looking for other dates but rather a paid gig worker.

What to watch

In many cases, people spend months building trust before telling their victims that there’s an emergency and they need financial help. Or they pretend to be investors, asking for money in an account they own that ends up being fake. But this is not your typical romance scam; there’s no money “borrowed” by fake romantic partners, nor is cryptocurrency involved.

The apps are themselves the scam: They ask for coins for continued interactions, and the coins cost real money. Users buy them to continue talking primarily to machines, believing they’re talking to other humans. These gig workers keep the ruse going, while AI can keep conversations going 24/7 as the coins flow.