Don't Believe Your Eyes: An AI-Powered Romance Scam
The Perfect Scam
AARP
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2026
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David is a retiree who remains active in his Florida community, but he would like to have someone to share his life with. When an Indiana woman named Bonnie strikes up a friendship with David on Facebook, he is delighted but cautious. A video call is reassuring, and their relationship deepens over several months. They make plans to move in together after Bonnie completes a large interior design job in Australia. Bonnie will be paid millions for the job, so when she needs to borrow $25,000 to pay the upfront cost for workers, David is confident she will pay him back. But when the bank notifies him of another transfer from his home equity line of credit, David knows that Bonnie is a fraud and possibly an AI creation. Ricardo Amper, founder and CEO of Incode Technologies, explains the surprising ways AI may be used in scams and why the best tool to combat AI scams may just be … AI.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week on The Perfect Scam. |
| 0:05.4 | It's scary because biology taught us to believe the person we're looking at and the voice that we're hearing. |
| 0:14.2 | And this is not really about your instinct. |
| 0:17.0 | It's more about how technology is evolving in a way that humans cannot even detect it. |
| 0:21.6 | You would like to have someone be part of your life that's somewhat of a match so that we have something to look forward to |
| 0:29.6 | for whatever many years that you have here on the earth. |
| 0:34.6 | The unfortunate thing is people don't need a gun anymore to rob you. All they need is a |
| 0:44.4 | computer. Welcome back to the perfect scam. I'm your host, Bob Sullivan. |
| 0:55.0 | We've all been hearing so much about artificial intelligence, AI, and all the wonderful and potentially scary things AI can do. |
| 1:05.0 | I think we'll learn a lot about AI in 2026. There's a lot of hype and a lot of hope for it. But one thing I'm fairly |
| 1:13.6 | certain about, criminals will be using AI to scale up their scams this year, but perhaps |
| 1:19.5 | not in the way you think. One of today's guests will tell you that there are already |
| 1:25.6 | 2,000 documented cases of deep fake videos |
| 1:29.6 | being used in attacks on people and corporations. |
| 1:32.9 | The only countermeasure, he thinks, is to fight AI with AI. |
| 1:39.0 | But before that, we're going to hear from someone who fell in love with a woman he now thinks was just an AI creation. |
| 1:49.0 | My name is David and I'm in Port Ritchie, Florida. |
| 1:53.0 | And how long have you been in Florida for? |
| 1:55.0 | Oh, I've been here since 2009, so probably 16 years now. |
| 2:00.0 | David grew up on Long Island in New York and came from a very large family, which he misses. |
| 2:08.6 | My father, being the second youngest of 17, aunts, uncles, everybody are gone, cousins gone, everybody. |
| 2:18.6 | I had cousins that were in their 80s when I was in my 50s because of the lifespan of the family. |
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