Report: AI Chatbots Are More Effective at Building Trust Than Human Scammers
KnowBe4, Monday, August 24th, 2026
KnowBe4 covers research finding AI chatbots outperform human scammers at building trust in pig-butchering scams.
A study reported by WIRED has found that AI chatbots can be more effective at social engineering than human scammers.
The researchers examined pig butchering, a romance scam format in which criminals spend weeks or months building a relationship with a victim before steering them toward a fraudulent investment scheme.
The finding is that AI systems build trust more effectively than humans over that long conversation, and that the models can be pushed past vendor safeguards before the interaction is handed off to a human operator for the financial stage. The economics are significant, since the labor-intensive relationship phase is what previously limited scale.