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I'm Chelsea Daniels and This is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. There have been a number of headlines trending throughout twenty twenty five so far, tariffs, trade wars, geopolitical tensions, and romance scams. Fake online relationships better known as catfishing, have existed as long as social media has been around, but the increasing prevalence of AI is making it trickier to tell fact
from fiction. One woman in France was conned out of eight hundred thousand euros after believing she was in a relationship with Oscar winner Brad Pitt, while closer to home, US based Kiwi actor Martin Henderson has seen his face used as a front for these kind of scams. So how common are these elaborate scams and what protections can
be put in place to better protect vulnerable people? Today on the Front Page, National Cybersecurity Center Threat and Incident Response Team Lead Tom Roberts is with us to discuss what can be done to break up with these scammers. First off, Tom, it seems like we're hearing about romance scams all the time, Awful tales of pensioners losing their retirement savings, and people believing they're in relationships with celebrities online.
Things like that. Can you tell me how prevalent they actually are in New Zealand?
Well, we know romance scams or dating scams or that sort of thing are severely underreported. People feel ashamed about it. They feel like they're more vulnerable because they've potentially lost something, they've exposed something often that involves sending intimate images, and so therefore people don't want to report things for us. Over the last reporting period, we saw about twenty eight dating and romance scams reported through to US. We know
that number is very low. For what I said earlier, It's awful, though, isn't it. It's exceptionally awful.
Do we know how much money is being lost due to romance scams.
I don't have specific data relating directly to romance scams. I can say we had seventeen incidents over the last year that was one hundred thousand or more, and that was for you know, for whatever. It could have been unauthorized access, cryptocurrency scams, you know, people being tricked at when they're buying property. We had one for dating and romance, and that dating and romance scam category of over one
hundred thousand dollars. What's particularly concerning about the dating and romance scams is the way that they get money out of people is like it's a slow leach. It's withdrawing money small amounts over a long period of time. You don't actually realize that a lot of that money is leaving your bank account. It could be, you know, fifty dollars for a bill here, twenty dollars for a bit there, and before you know it, you're hooked and you've drained a lot of your bank account.
Yeah. Apparently A and Z alone sees about three cases a week where customers suffered a financial loss from a romance or friendship scam. The average loss was thirteen thousand, five hundred compared to two thousand, five hundred for any other type of scam. Do you reckon? That's about right?
Yeah, and ain zid You know, being a bank, when people have a problem with their finances, they go directly to the bank, as they should. You know, the bank will stop any transactions, automatic payments, and potentially help recruiter with funds where they can, So that would probably be about right.
So, when these scams happen and they're reported to you, guys, what are the next steps from there? What do you do with it?
Well, at NCC, we really just make sure that their cybersecurity hygiene and security is top notch and intact. Then the police or net safe are, depending on the type there will be able to provide that further advice. Certainly, we help them get into a date where you know, the bad person doesn't have access to their Gmail accounts or their Facebok or potentially their bank accounts, and we make sure that they have the right advice, the best advice in the world to be able to secure their
cyber defenses. After that, the police can go down that prosecution track depending on the information that they've got available.
Just this year, we heard of how multiple women around the world poured money and emotions into a romance scam using the image of a former Shortland Street star, Martin Henderson.
Martin here just wanted to warn people again of the fact that there are a lot of people out there who are pretending to be me and trying to get people to believe that I'm in need and I need financial help or medical help, and they're essentially fleecing people out of a lot of money. I just can't tell people enough. I don't communicate with my followers. This is my only account, I promise you I do not I don't have another account.
They lost hundreds of thousands of dollars and dedicated years to fake relationships. One woman alone lost three hundred and seventy five thousand dollars. Now, using a celebrities likeness and catfishing is just one way a romance scam works.
Hey, yeah, there's multiple, absolutely multiple. They could be pretending to be a friend that you haven't seen in years. They could be using AI generated images. There's dozens and dozens. It's really bad for the celebrity ones because you've also got the well known person that's in the news and media, and then all of a sudden, you know their name is being dragged through the mud. So it's awful for everyone involved.
Yeah, this French woman was swindle. I don't know if you heard about this. She was windled out of a ton of money from somebody pretending to be rare. I don't like this AI stuff. The scammer used AI to generate pictures of Brad Pit. They catfished her for so long that she thought she was dating rab Pit. So what the scammers did was the scammers then said Radpit needed money for surgery. Okay, when I heard that, I said, I would like to know if the scammers are hiring, because apparently.
I'm doing something what.
I mean, good, great, honoring, integrity.
And I saw a woman who believed she was in a relationship with Brad Pitt, who believed she was sending him around one point five million dollars for cancer treatment. Now, the comments on that story I remember were pretty harsh, things like, how could you believe this? That's stupid, that kind of thing. But that's a huge reason why people don't come forward. Hey, that embarrassment aspect.
Yeah, embarrassment is the number one reason why people wouldn't come forward about this sort of thing. I think when people are commenting on this, they need to make sure that they remember these people aren't just strangers. They could be your brother, sis, the best friend. Because people don't really talk about this so much, that's why people fall into the trap, and that's why it's not found sooner. These people that often fall for these types of scams,
they're not blow people they're not. They're just the regular citizens who truly believe that they are in love and really nastily. You know, the bad actors that are siphoning the money are really good at their social engineering and they're really really manipulative in a way that many people potentially don't ever experience.
And what are some of those ways.
Yeah, So when they start, they'll start with small amounts of money typically, and then they'll start doing it on a very regular basis, and you know, it'll just be consistent over time. Then there might be a wee bit of gas lighting in there. There might be depending on
how they're doing it. If they're using different technology, they might say, let's have video calls, and so if people having video calls with people that they think of their love, of their life, and the adds legitimacy to us, and then they'll say, hey, let's potentially can you pay two thousand dollars for me to fly over or something like that. And then it starts getting really deep and really dark,
not necessarily quickly, but over a period of time. And then when you've got you know, the elderly element to it, Like you mentioned before, these elderly don't necessarily want to talk about this stuff, so because it can be very embarrassing if they've got to tell their kids and things like that. So, look, there's multiple ways that they do it. But these social engineers are exceptionally skilled or what they do, and what they do is exceptionally nasty.
Yeah. Another case was an Auckland man who met a Singaporean woman on a dating app tender. He was tricked into sending five hundred and sixty nine thousand dollars believing he was investing in bitcoin. Now, how has the rise of dating apps changed the game here?
It just makes it more easy for people to be fooled into fake relationships. The people that do them are often working in these sort of scam farm type areas where they are basically being some of them are being held under slave like conditions to extort money out of people through multiple different romance scams at once. There's that element to I guess about it.
So there are places around the world where people are being held against their will and working in a kind of factory, scam factory or something.
Yeah. Absolutely, and I'm certainly not going to name places, but there are places where they basically go and they think they're going to be going into work, and then they'll get their passports and their identity documents held captive and then told that you can work them back for a certain amount of money. So often the people that are doing the scamming are victims as well, which is just terrific. And then the money flows back into organized crime,
and then you have that sort of thing. To your point about cryptocurrency or dating apps before, it sort of means that because everything's digital, that the scammers or the nasty actors can run multiple at a time if they're in a different time zone. You know, that gives them the excuse to delay messaging you. So we'll delay messaging the victims so then they can run multiple This anecdotal evidence of now chatbots being used from machine learning algorithms.
So it's getting complex, it's getting dark, and unfortunately it doesn't look like it's stopping anytime soon.
In a world where it seems impossible to meet somebody organically and online dating is kind of the new norm, how do people stay vigilant if.
You're using dating apps and to meet someone, All I'd say is that you just need to verify through different methods, right, So try and meet them as soon as possible, you know, move away from the apps, try and move to a method that you can verify. Even video calling might not necessarily be enough. But then if you're traveling overseas to meet these people, you know you're going to have to be cognizant of the safety elements that come into it. People just have to apply a certain amount of risk
to themselves or a risk thought to themselves. The old fear go adage. If it's too good to be sure, it probably is, and then yeah, just make sure you verify, verify, verify.
What's one of the worst cases you've seen.
To be honest, the worst case that I've seen wasn't necessarily involving money so much, or at that point it didn't involve money, but it was involving into images. And so this person got into a bit of a romance scan. They reached out and said, hey, I don't think this is quite right. And then the person or the bad actors started saying that, you know, I've got all these images of you. I'm going to show the world, I'm going to show your friends, I'm going to show your family,
I'm going to ruin your job. I'm going to ruin your career aspects. This poor person was just having an absolute mental battle that they were going through. Fortunately, what we were able to say to them is that we passed them over to the right agencies as well, but also that the bad actors often can't hurt you as much as what they think, and they'll have you to believe that the world is going to end, but it's not. They often don't have as much power as what they'll claim.
They'll say that they will send stuff, or they'll expose you to the world and things like that. Even if they did do that, the person that's going to be exposed is going to be seen as a victim, right, It's going to be a tough period. But even if the actor could do that, so, yeah, it was. It was. It was really rough for the person involved. I think they're doing a lot better now, thankfully, but just the mental toll was was heart wrenching.
Cybersecurity expert Dominic Tuifoccus so scamers are grabbing videos posted online to create AI generated avatars that look and sound so much like the real person. They can fool people who know them well.
You can even use just a picture of the person and then the lip syncing will will take care of the rest. So yeah, it doesn't. You don't need long video segments even if still image will do.
And when it comes to video calling, you mentioned that it might not be enough. Is that because AI you can actually mimic video calls or use other videos to try and mimic a call.
Yeah, and it's becoming easier and it's becoming cheaper. So it is for a person that's dedicated or determined enough, they can absolutely fake someone's face onto their body. There's some simple checks that you can do, you know, which is asking them to put the hand in front of their face, or turn the heat right round, or get
up and pick something up from the background. But even then that can often not be enough for some things because people can just replay videos of them doing that, and they might set up their background knowing that someone's going to ask them to pick stuff up. So yeah, that the rise in artificial intelligence generated imagery is.
Also heard as well. If you think that somebody is sent to an AI generated photo to ask them to send a photo back with an okay symbol with your hands, because the AI cannot really generate hands too well. Is that right.
Yeah. Absolutely, small details like that show me, you know, pulling your left ear or something like that that is going to have a limited shelf life on its ability to be able to work, but at the moment, for most things, it seems to be a good method.
Thanks for joining us, Tom, Thank you very much. That's it for this episode of The Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzdherld dot co dot MZ. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also a sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to The Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in on Monday for another look behind the headlines.