ZeroFox Brief - Introduction to Social Engineering: Romance Scams

ZeroFox Intelligence Brief - Introduction to Social Engineering: Romance Scams

Product Serial: B-2025-03-14a

TLP:CLEAR

ZeroFox's Social Engineering series breaks down aspects of the threat into digestible reports and outlines defensive actions that can be taken to combat it. Part Six of this series takes a deep dive into romance scams: why and how threat actors conduct them, and how the threat can best be mitigated.

Standing Intelligence Requirements

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https://cloud.zerofox.com/intelligence/advisories/14956

Link to Download

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Key Findings

• Romance scams are a type of confidence scheme whereby a threat actor seeks to exploit a victim’s romantic emotions—usually to achieve a financial objective.
• Romance scams take many forms and are perpetrated by a host of different types of threat actors, from individuals seeking punitive retribution to semi-structured collectives sometimes able to extort millions of dollars in revenue.
• Threat actors conducting romance scams are rapidly incorporating artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technology into their toolsets, augmenting attack techniques during victim selection and initial contact phases through to exploitation.
• Threat actors conducting romance scams are very likely to continue evolving their attack techniques in 2025, circumventing security hygiene measures and capitalizing upon the challenges faced by national and international law enforcement (LE) bodies.