The Industrialization of Messaging Scams in the LLM Era

A messaging scam is one in which a scammer exploits a victim through a dialogue of text messages, a process that can unfold over hours, weeks, or even months. Scams such as romance-baiting (“pig butchering”), family-emergency impersonation, account-security impersonation, and sextortion all depend on sustained text-based dialogue to build trust or fear and coach victims through irreversible actions. Through an insider investigation of crime syndicates in Southeast Asia, we have observed that LLMs are increasing both the scale and quality of these scams, a dangerous trend that has received remarkably little attention.