The sexy AI-powered dating app scams are here

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. He saw a tapestry that was moving, probably due to a fan, and heard weird distortion in the background. After the call ended, “Jennifer” messaged him to say she’d had fun and “your voice is way better than expected.” 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. The majority of chats did not involve a human agent at all.…