AI Investment Scams Often Start as Friendships. The FBI Only Counts the Ending.

Last updated September 1, 2026

Shreya Datta met a man on Hinge in January 2023. He said he was a French wine trader living in Philadelphia, same city as her. They talked for weeks and had video calls, and the face on those calls was computer-generated, though she had no way of knowing. Eventually he mentioned he was doing well trading cryptocurrency, which is digital money bought and sold through apps rather than a bank, and sent her a link to a trading app that looked professional. She moved some savings across. The app let her take her early gains back out, so she moved more. By the time her brother in London ran the man’s photos through a reverse image search and found they belonged to a German fitness influencer, Datta had lost $450,000, savings and retirement both. Her account is from an AFP report published last year.

What happened to her was not carelessness. A crew spent months building trust and then showed her a withdrawal that worked. That test was built to be passed. If you are reading this because it already happened to you, that is the part worth hearing first.

Now, which kind of scam was that? It started on a dating app and ran on affection for weeks. It ended in a fake trading platform. The FBI counts it as the second one, and that filing decision is what this article is about.

The Scam Is Filed Under Its Ending

Investment fraud was the costliest category in the FBI’s 2025 report, at $8.648 billion out of roughly $20.9 billion reported lost overall. Of that investment total, $7.2 billion was cryptocurrency investment fraud, and the FBI describes that bucket as the one dominated by pig butchering.

Pig butchering is the criminals’ own term, sha zhu pan, translated directly. It works like this: someone contacts you, spends weeks or months building a friendship or a romance, and only then mentions an investment they are doing well with. The money arrives in the conversation long after the trust does. The 2025 report describes the method plainly: contact by text, social media or dating app, a move to private messaging, then the opportunity.

So the largest AI-linked fraud category in the FBI’s books is, in large part, a relationship scam recorded under where the money ended up. The cases where the AI did the most work are counted in the column nobody looking for a romance scam would think to check. The FBI does not publish a figure for what share of investment fraud began as a relationship, so I can’t tell you whether that is sixty percent or ninety. What it does say is that the crypto portion, five-sixths of the category, is dominated by it.

How the Handoff Works

The sequence below comes from the FBI’s description of cryptocurrency investment fraud and from an August 2026 warning by ASIC, the Australian corporate regulator. It is not the only version, but it is the one both regulators describe most often.

One: someone finds you

There are two front doors and they matter equally. The slow one is a person: a match on a dating app, or a text that arrives looking like a wrong number (they always apologize, and they always keep talking). The fast one is an advertisement with a face you recognize appearing to endorse a trading platform. In the United States that face is most often Elon Musk, usually attached to a fabricated product called Quantum AI. Australian regulators tracked an A$350 million operation using generated images of politicians and presenters from the ABC, their national broadcaster.

If you came through the advertisement, do not assume the rest of this does not apply. Within days there is usually a person too.

Two: the person

There is almost always a human on the other end, and their job is rapport, not selling. They ask about your day. They remember your sister’s name. Some will talk you out of a deposit that feels too big, which reads as integrity and is the most expensive thing that happens to you, because after that you trust them.

That last part raises a fair question: if someone being careful with your money is now a warning sign, what is left to go on? The answer is not the person’s behaviour at all. It is whether the platform they are steering you toward is registered, which you can check in about a minute. More on that below.

Three: the article that is not an article

If an advertisement brought you in, the next page copies the layout, fonts and logo of a real news outlet, with a generated interview inside it. In the Australian case the scammers were paying Meta to run those fake pages as ads.

Four: the platform

You sign up and see a dashboard, meaning a screen of charts and a running balance, and none of it is connected to a real market. The dashboard is a picture of a market, drawn to your account.

Five: the withdrawal that works

You take a small amount out early, it lands in your bank, and the platform stops feeling like a risk. Datta withdrew her early gains and then sent more. The FBI describes the same mechanism, and it is the step most warnings leave out, which is why it is the one I would want a friend to know.

Six: the wall

When you go for the larger balance, a fee appears. Then a tax. Then a hold that clears the moment you deposit a little more to cover it. By then the money has moved through several accounts. The FBI notes these operations are frequently run by organized networks in Southeast Asia.

Seven: the second approach

Weeks or months later someone offers to recover your funds, claiming to be a law firm, an advocacy group or a government agency, and asks for a fee up front. Between February 2023 and February 2024 the FBI logged more than $9.9 million in losses from victims re-targeted this way by fake law firms. The SEC files it as advance fee fraud.

What the Numbers Can and Can’t Tell You

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3, is where Americans report online fraud. Its 2025 report logged 22,364 complaints mentioning AI, with $893 million in losses, the first time in twenty-five years that AI got its own line. Of those AI-flagged dollars, about seven in ten left through an investment platform.

You would think the next step is obvious: compare how much AI shows up in investment fraud against how much shows up in romance fraud. I tried. It cannot be done with this data, and the reason is the same filing problem this article is about.

The AI flag records what victims noticed. A deepfaked video is memorable and gets reported; months of warm messages from a chat program leaves nothing to report. On top of that, the relationship scams where AI does the heaviest lifting are exactly the ones that get filed as investment fraud, which pulls them out of the romance column and into the investment one. Two distortions, both pushing the same way, neither of them measurable. And because 2025 is the first year AI was counted at all, there is no earlier year to compare against.

What survives is simpler and sturdier. Investment fraud losses ran about nine to one against romance fraud losses in 2025, $8.648 billion against $929 million, and no AI flag is involved in that comparison at all. The gap between those two columns is mostly not about AI. It is about which column the money gets written down in.

If You’re Worried About a Parent

Americans over 60 reported about $7.7 billion in losses in 2025. Within romance fraud specifically, victims 60 and over account for 63% of the money lost from 44% of the complaints, so when it reaches them it costs more. The door that opens for them is the relationship, not the trading advertisement.

Which makes the conversation harder than a warning about crypto, because the honest version is asking someone whether a person they like is real. Two things help. Ask about the mechanics rather than the man: has he ever appeared on video unexpectedly, has anyone else in the family spoken to him, has money or an investment come up. And skip the argument about whether he is genuine, because that is the part they will defend. The line that tends to land is that the check is free and takes a minute, and if he is real it will show that.

Expect to be told you do not understand. That is normal and it is not the end of the conversation.

How to Check Before You Send Money

The SEC is the federal regulator for investments and FINRA is the body that licenses brokers. Anyone selling an investment in the United States should appear in one of their free databases, and looking is the whole check.

1. Search the firm and the person at Investor.gov, the SEC’s registration lookup, and at FINRA BrokerCheck. If neither has heard of them, that is your answer.
2. Reverse image search their photos, which is what broke Datta’s case. On a phone: screenshot the picture, install the free Google app if you do not have it, tap the camera icon in the search bar, and choose that screenshot. This works when a stranger is using someone else’s pictures. It will not help if the face is a real celebrity being faked, because you will get thousands of genuine results.
3. If a news article convinced you, type the outlet’s address into your browser yourself and search for the story there.
4. Never move from where you met to a platform the other person recommends. That handoff is the scam, and a real friend has no stake in which app you use.
5. Treat an early withdrawal as meaningless. It is designed to clear.

Common Questions About AI Investment Scams

I wrote about AI scams in March and treated romance fraud and investment fraud as two separate problems. They are frequently the same one, counted at opposite ends.

Related reading: AI scams, romance fraud and voice cloning | How to spot AI fake images | Microsoft on AI deception | The security jobs AI is creating | New to AI? Start here