Love, Lies, & Language Models
We investigate this intersection by interviewing 145 insiders and 5 scam victims, performing a blinded long-term conversation study comparing LLM scam agents to human operators, and executing an evaluation of commercial safety filters.
Our findings show that LLMs are already widely deployed within scam organizations, with 87% of scam labor consisting of systematized conversational tasks readily susceptible to automation. In a week-long study, an LLM agent not only elicited greater trust from study participants (p = 0.007) but also achieved higher compliance with requests than human operators (46% vs. 18% for humans).
Meanwhile, popular safety filters detected 0.0% of romance baiting dialogues. Together, these results suggest that romance-baiting scams may be amenable to full-scale LLM automation, while existing defenses remain inadequate to prevent their expansion.
Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16280
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