Case openai-cambodia-romance-baitingAI phishingFeb 21, 2025Worldwide

Cambodia-based romance-baiting scam used ChatGPT to generate multilingual social lures

A likely Cambodia-based network translated and generated comments in Japanese, Chinese and English for romance and investment scams, which OpenAI disrupted alongside a separate Urdu-English task scam.

MediumAttack using AIStatus: ContainedVerified case file

Open in the interactive map Cite this case

Reported: Feb 21, 2025
Location: Worldwide
Target: Social-media users in Japan, China and English markets
Severity: Medium
Triggered by: Unknown Cambodia-based scam network
Actor type: Criminal
Reported loss: None reported
CVE: None

What happened

Impact: Scam reach extended across languages; victim losses not quantified.

Who triggered it

Actor: Unknown Cambodia-based scam network

Attribution: OpenAI assessed the accounts as likely originating in Cambodia.

Motive: Financial fraud

How it happened

Attack vector: LLM translation and comment generation for pig-butchering lures

Root cause: Translation requests are benign in isolation; detection relied on behavioural clustering

Timeline

Feb 21, 2025OpenAI publishes the romance-baiting and task-scam cases and bans the accounts
Jun 9, 2025OpenAI June 2025 report documents further Cambodia-based scam activity (Wrong Number)

Response

Accounts banned; findings shared with platform partners.

Current status: Contained

Sources (open in a new tab)

OpenAI February 2025 report PDF cdn.openai.com
AI Incident Database report incidentdatabase.ai

Cite this case

Cambodia-based romance-baiting scam used ChatGPT to generate multilingual social lures. AI Threat Watch, case openai-cambodia-romance-baiting, Feb 21, 2025. https://aithreat.io/cases/openai-cambodia-romance-baiting/

Permanent link: https://aithreat.io/cases/openai-cambodia-romance-baiting/