Protecting your wallet matters more than anything.

Lately, news about AI scams has been getting more outrageous by the day. When Xiao Lei Bibi (ID: xiaoleibbb) saw these stories, our first reaction was: today's scammers are no longer satisfied with the old low-level tricks.

In the past, they relied on real people chatting and real people acting; now they go straight to AI for mass production. With one script and a few AI tools, they can run ordinary people in circles.

The AI Beauty Scam Escalates: ¥180,000 Swindled in Half a Month

In a case CCTV just exposed, a scam gang used AI to generate a beauty and used her to swindle money. The gang even ran an assembly line, simultaneously "dating" nearly a thousand people.

Image source: generated by Doubao AI

According to reports, Mr. Liu from Shanghai came across a beauty named Tingting while scrolling short videos. However he looked at her, this pretty girl struck him as very pure and sincere—completely unlike those influencers doing suggestive content. So he took the initiative to message her, and before long he had added her contact.

Mr. Liu thought Cupid's arrow had finally found him! He never dreamed this was the beginning of a scam.

After adding her as a friend, the persona of the beauty Tingting was quickly established: her parents died in an accident when she was 6, she grew up living with relatives, and she has an independent personality. She is now an art teacher who likes painting and keeping cats. Within a few days, the two confirmed a romantic relationship and even started talking about where they would settle after marriage. Mr. Liu was completely immersed in the sweetness of love at the time and didn't think much about it—wasn't this just the ideal girlfriend?

After about a month of dating, Tingting suddenly sent Mr. Liu a tearful message, saying her aunt had been hospitalized with a sudden brain tumor and urgently needed surgery fees. She sent hospital diagnosis reports, hospitalization photos, and even photos of her own ID card. She said she had nowhere else to turn and had no money, so she asked him for help.

His girlfriend's family had such a big problem, so of course he had to help. He immediately transferred 40,000 yuan.

Over the next half month, the aunt's condition "kept deteriorating," requiring surgery fees and special medicines. Mr. Liu transferred a total of 180,000 yuan, emptying his savings and even taking out several online loans.

Later, Tingting began to grow cold, and Mr. Liu gradually felt something was wrong and called the police. When the police investigated, he was stunned: the girlfriend "Tingting" he had dated for over a month did not exist at all.

The avatar, lifestyle photos, and hospital diagnosis reports were all generated with AI tools. Behind "Tingting" was a scam gang whose operation process had become fully assembly-line.

Image source: Weibo screenshot

Step one: find beauty photos online, use AI to generate videos with one click, carefully select some sentimental copy, and post in bulk across platforms to cast a wide net;

Step two: dedicated staff reply to private messages and funnel interested people to private chat accounts;

Step three: use a unified romance script to chat with victims and cultivate feelings. From first contact to confirming a relationship, the "account nurturing" can be completed in as little as 7 days. At the same time, scammers use AI technology to create lifestyle photos, food photos, and other content, making the other person feel they are truly living a real life every day;

Step four: once the persona is stable, they start swindling money with reasons such as family members getting sick, extracting as much as they can.

When the relationship heats up to a certain point, the scam gang arranges a so-called small test. It may only require a few hundred yuan, not a large sum. But this is exactly an important step for the scam gang to screen targets. People willing to spend a little money are often considered more likely to accept subsequent financial demands.

If the victim is willing to pay, the chatter continues to follow up. If not, they give up the conversation and turn to find the next big sucker.

After investigation, the police finally mapped out the structure of the scam gang. They carried out coordinated arrest operations in Guangdong, Shandong, Guizhou, and other places, capturing suspects Yang A, Yang B, Yang Ting, Zhong, Cui, and others. This scam gang defrauded 15 victims nationwide of more than 1.8 million yuan in total, with the highest amount stolen from a single victim exceeding 380,000 yuan.

Xiao Lei Bibi (ID: xiaoleibbb) wants to say that what is truly worth guarding against is not how smart AI is, but that scammers have begun using AI to precisely exploit human weaknesses.

Pitiful AI Xiaohai: Selling Products by Playing the Sympathy Card

AI beauty pig-butchering scams mainly target adults' emotional needs, while the previously viral AI Xiaohai targeted many middle-aged and elderly people's emotional needs and their retirement pensions. This is even more frightening...

Not long ago, a boy called "Xiaohai" frequently appeared in videos. His image is that of a teenage boy wearing ordinary clothes. He would say to the camera: "Auntie Mom, can you help Xiaohai?", "Auntie Mom, Xiaohai has really tried hard," "Only the last order is left, I hope Auntie Mom can support me."

They all follow a tragic script, such as Xiaohai lacking motherly love since childhood, living with his father, having poor family conditions, and usually having to help with work and study.

Image source: Weibo screenshot

In short, Xiaohai in the videos always seems to have all kinds of hardships. Whenever Xiaohai finishes crying about his experiences, the video suddenly cuts to introducing products. It might be multigrain pancakes, soy milk powder, cooking oil, condiments, or even jade pendants. Finally, it ends with: I hope Auntie Mom can help place an order.

With such a simple trick, countless middle-aged and elderly people were completely hooked. Many uncles and aunts scrolled to the videos, saw that Xiaohai was both pitiful and sweet-talking, and instantly overflowed with maternal love. While commenting "Don't cry, child, Auntie will help you," they clicked into the product showcase and placed orders.

Even more exaggerated, some elderly people even treated Xiaohai in the videos as a real child. In May this year, when a train police officer from the Urumqi Railway Public Security Bureau was patrolling the carriage, he found a 79-year-old elderly person traveling alone. After asking, the officer learned that the elderly person was preparing to go to Yuncheng, Shanxi, to visit a child. And this child was Xiaohai, whom she saw every day in short videos and who often called her auntie.......

The elderly person even said that Xiaohai had invited her over to eat morel mushrooms. The problem was that the elderly person had never truly met Xiaohai and did not know exactly where to find him. She only knew that this child called her auntie every day on her phone and felt that he was a younger person in need of help. Only after the train police patiently persuaded her did she realize that the child she was worried about did not actually exist.

A 79-year-old elderly person was willing to take a train alone thousands of kilometers away for a child she had never met. This shows she did not simply want to buy something, but truly treated the child on the screen as her own relative. Scammers precisely exploited this emotion.

The so-called Xiaohai is not a real child, but a batch of digital humans generated through AI technology. As long as the AI tools are prepared and the corresponding story and lines are entered, a new Xiaohai can be generated. The same face, with a different background and different lines, can become a tragic boy in different accounts. AI-generated videos, combined with automated publishing tools, can achieve batch updates.

An operator of a related account previously interviewed by The Beijing News revealed that if you choose the right track for middle-aged and elderly people, earning two to three thousand yuan a day is not considered much. The profit model of these accounts is also very direct. First use tragic stories to attract middle-aged and elderly people's attention, then build emotional connections through affectionate forms of address, and finally guide users to the product showcase. It is worth noting that some of these products are clearly more expensive than on other e-commerce platforms.

In other words, consumers may buy the products not because the products themselves are so good, but because they feel they are helping a poor child.

For elderly people unfamiliar with the internet, this kind of video is extremely deceptive. This is the most disgusting part of the whole trick: what is truly being monetized is sympathy and goodwill.

What is worth guarding against is that this trick is not appearing for the first time. Previously, a batch of AI-generated middle-aged male images appeared online, such as AI Wang Jianguo. Now AI Xiaohai has appeared, with a different face and a different script, but the profit logic behind it has not changed at all.

Final Words

We often say seeing is believing. But video production that previously required a professional team can now be completed by ordinary people with AI tools. Content that required real people on camera and real voice acting can now also be done by AI.

At the same time, AI has lowered the threshold for fraud to an unprecedented level. In the past, they could only swindle one at a time; now they can harvest thousands at once.

AI itself is neither right nor wrong; what is wrong is the people using it for evil. The more powerful the technology, the more bottom line the people using it should have.

Source: Leitech

Images in this article are from: 123RF licensed image library Source: Leitech