Love You! Now Please Buy Me Gift Cards
Your online soulmate just needs one small favour: your bank account. AI now writes the messages, clones the voices and generates the faces while the attackers sit back and watch. Romance scams have stopped looking like scams. They look like real people in relationships. So how do you tell the difference between social engineering and love when everything just feels so real?
Scams have shifted from obvious fraud attempts into highly personalised manipulation campaigns. AI has accelerated that shift, making it easy for attackers to maintain long-term engagement and adapt in real time to victims. This talk looks at how those scams operate today, with a focus on romance scams and fintech-enabled fraud. It covers how AI is being used to scale emotional manipulation, why victims often miss or rationalise warning signs and how fraud sits at the intersection of cyber security and psychology.
We will emphasise how trust is being engineered, the evolution of cyber fraud tactics and what that means for those trying to educate and protect users in practical settings.
Aurelia is a multi-award winning early-careers advocate in cyber security. Her work spans chairing the UK Cyber Security Council's Youth Advisory Panel and supporting several tech community groups across the UK. Her past experience is in IT and Cyber Security, in both retail and banking environments.