OpenAI banned accounts using AI to support romance scam workflows, including outreach, translation, victim engagement, and investment-fraud lures.
This case study was originally published in OpenAI’s February 2026(opens in a new window) report on disrupting malicious uses of AI.
Since we began reporting on our disruptions of scam networks that sought to abuse our models a year ago(opens in a new window), we’ve taken down many scam operations from different parts of the world. They included “task” scams, which defraud their victims by convincing them to pay money in as a way of accessing non-existent earnings for trivial tasks, and investment scams, which defraud their victims by convincing them to put money into non-existent investment companies.
One common type of scam since long before the days of AI is the romance scam, in which scammers pose as a potential romantic partner and attempt to convince their target that they have met a love match before asking them for ever more money. Our first published scam disruption featured a newly stood up criminal operation in Cambodia that had used ChatGPT to generate messages for a romance scam, some of which were spread on social media. Since then, we’ve disrupted various attempted romance scams. As we wrote in June (opens in a new window) , these and other scams tend to follow a common pattern in their use of AI, which we think of as the ping (cold contact), the zing (generate emotion), and the sting (extract money).
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