Romance As A Weapon: The New Face Of Cyberattacks

Romance scammers blend emotional manipulation with cybercrime tactics to exploit unsuspecting ... More victims around the world.
The Department of Justice recently recovered $8.2 million in Tether — or USDT — stolen through a romance baiting scam. One Ohio woman lost $663,352 of her life savings after replying in 2023 to what seemed like a routine wrong-number text. The conversation began with casual talk about faith and hobbies. It ended in a calculated, large-scale financial ambush.
This is not about love. This is not a mistake. It is a cyber attack. The damage isn’t measured in gigabytes — it’s measured in wiped-out savings, broken trust and shattered retirement plans.
This Is Psychological Warfare
Romance baiting — once known as pig butchering — is a cybercrime built on social engineering. It doesn’t rely on malware, zero-day exploits or system vulnerabilities. It relies on one thing: human trust. The attacks are personal, deliberate and relentless. And the playbook is both simple and disturbingly effective.
The Hook: It starts with a seemingly accidental message — “Oops, wrong number” or “Is this John?” What follows is casual conversation, often warm and disarming. The scammer plays polite, curious and a little persistent. This is not phishing. It’s bait — targeted at someone who may be lonely, distracted, in a life transition or simply polite enough to respond.
The Grooming: Once a response is received, the long game begins. Scammers build daily rapport around emotionally resonant topics: family, faith, loss, goals. The dialogue feels real — sometimes too real. Victims may be encouraged to share photos, private stories or even financial aspirations. The scammer listens, adapts and mirrors emotions, slowly building a false sense of intimacy and trust.
The Opportunity: At some point, the conversation shifts to finances. Crypto investing is introduced as a casual side topic — framed as something the scammer is already doing successfully. Victims are encouraged to try it themselves. Instructions follow, step by step, often pointing to legitimate platforms like Binance or . The setup is legitimate. The trap is not.
The Illusion: Once funds are deposited, the illusion kicks in. Victims are shown fake dashboards or real-looking apps with forged data — showing their accounts doubling or tripling in value. Screenshots are sent. “Success stories” are shared. Victims see growth and reinvest. The scammer encourages this — claiming bigger returns require larger deposits.
The Trap: Eventually, the victim tries to cash out. That’s when the excuses begin — unexpected taxes, frozen accounts, legal clearances. These are stalling tactics. If the victim pushes, the tone shifts. Scammers threaten exposure, resort to blackmail or go dark altogether. By the time the victim realizes what’s happened, the money is gone.
This isn’t casual fraud. It’s psychological warfare — engineered to disarm the target’s judgment, manipulate emotion and gain access to assets. And it’s being executed at global scale using automation, AI and professional-level scripts sometimes developed by psychology professionals.
One Woman’s Story — And Why It Matters
Another case is Judith Boivin, an 80-year-old retiree from Maryland, who spent her entire life helping others. She worked as a nurse, a psychotherapist and a social worker. She was the kind of person who trusted institutions, believed in public service and had no reason to question the legitimacy of a call from the government.
That call came in September 2023. A man claiming to be with the FBI told her that her Social Security number had been used by drug traffickers. He said her name had come up in a major fentanyl investigation involving the Sinaloa cartel. She was told she was a material witness in an active federal case and needed to cooperate.