We hope you had a fantastic Valentine’s Day, whether enjoying it as a couple, with friends or giving yourself a little “self-care”, which never hurts.
But today we want to tone down the romanticism a little to talk about a reality that touches us very closely as marketing professionals and fans of Artificial Intelligence.
If you follow tech news closely, you may have seen a recent Axios headline that left us all with a little heavy heart. It turns out that this 2026, love is not the only thing that is in the air; so are deepfakes** and hyper-personalized romance scams.
As communication experts, we cannot ignore how the tools we use to connect brands with people are being “hijacked” for much less noble purposes.
The “boom” of the romance scam: Figures that give chills
To put ourselves in context, we are not talking about four isolated cases of “catfishing” (traditional identity theft). We are facing a true fraud industry.
According to the latest reports, losses from romance scams in 2025 exceeded $1.16 billion in the United States alone. What’s more worrying: AI-powered scams have grown by 1,210% in the last year.
Why now? Very simple: AI has eliminated the barriers to entry for the scammer. Before, you could detect a fake profile by its misspellings, disjointed sentences or pixelated photos.
Today, generative models write perfect love poems and maintain fluent conversations for months without making a single grammatical error. AI has industrialized deception.
From fake photo to “Deepfake” in real time
What Axios tells us is that scammers have leveled up. It’s no longer just about a pretty photo on Tinder. Now we face four horsemen of the emotional apocalypse:
- Celebrity impersonation with Deepfakes: Imagine that you receive a message from your favorite actor or actress. It looks like their voice, it moves like them in a video call… but it is an AI model that is “mapping” the scammer’s face in real time.
- “Pig butchering”: This ugly name describes a cruel tactic. The scammer “fattens” the victim’s trust for months, even years, before taking them to the financial slaughterhouse, convincing them to invest in fake cryptocurrency platforms.
- Agentic Systems: This is the part that blows our minds the most for those of us who work in technology. There is no longer a human on the other side writing. They are AI agents that operate 24/7, managing hundreds of “relationships” at a time, analyzing your social networks to know exactly what to say to you so that you feel understood.
- The false displaced worker: The classic military man on a secret mission or the engineer on an oil platform. AI now generates documents, ambient audio and proof of life so realistic that it is almost impossible to doubt.
Why is this a Marketing lesson for us?
You may be thinking: “Okay, this is terrible, but what does it have to do with a communications and marketing agency?” The answer is: everything.
As marketing professionals, our job is to build trust and emotional bonds between brands and consumers. We use AI to personalize emails, to better understand the customer and to create content that resonates. Scammers are using exactly our same playbook, but for criminal purposes.
This presents us with a fundamental ethical dilemma. When we talk about “hyper-personalization” in a marketing campaign, we are one step away from “algorithmic manipulation.” The line is thin.
If a scammer can use AI to detect that someone is feeling lonely after a divorce and exploit that vulnerability, we have a responsibility to use those same capabilities to protect and provide real value**, not just to “push” a sale.
If social and dating platforms become filled with bots and scams, the digital ecosystem becomes toxic. And in a toxic ecosystem, legitimate advertising loses effectiveness. Nobody wants to advertise their product next to a profile that has just scammed 50,000 euros from a grandmother.
AI against AI: Defense also evolves
It’s not all bad news. The same technology that creates the problem is offering the solution. In 2026, we are seeing how the MarTech (Marketing Technology) sector is pivoting towards security:
- Behavioral biometrics: AI systems that analyze how you type or how you move the mouse. A bot, no matter how advanced it is, does not behave the same as a human with butterflies in the stomach.
- “Liveness” Detection: Video tools that detect whether the person on the screen is real or an AI filter by analyzing micro-dots of light and blood pulse in the skin.
- Digital watermarks: The fight for all content generated by AI to carry an indelible mark that tells us: “Be careful, this was created by a machine.”
Tips to avoid falling into the network (or letting your clients fall)
If you are reading this and you are a little dizzy about the future, here are some basic guidelines that you could apply in both your personal and professional life:
- The “trick” video call rule: If you are suspicious, ask the person to touch their face, stand in profile or pass an object in front of their face. Current deepfakes often “break” or give visual glitches at the edges when something gets in the way.
- Reverse research: Don’t just stick to the profile photo. Use reverse lookup tools and, above all, analyze the consistency of your digital footprint across different networks.
- Zero money, zero exceptions: It doesn’t matter if it is a medical emergency, a plane ticket or a “safe” investment. The moment love asks for digital money, love is usually a binary code with bad intentions.
- Educate your environment: In marketing we say that an educated customer is a better customer. In cybersecurity, an informed user is a safe user. Share what you know about AI with your less tech-savvy friends and family.
A future of honest communication
At Comunicagenia we believe that Artificial Intelligence is the most exciting advance of our generation. It allows us to do magical things, create impossible images, and connect in new ways.
But Valentine’s Day reminds us that, at the end of the day, communication is an act of human vulnerability.
Our challenge as communicators is to defend that humanity. The marketing of the future will not be the one that best uses algorithms, but rather the one that uses them in the most ethical and transparent way to regain the lost trust of users.
And what do you think? Have you had any close experience with this type of suspicious profiles? Do you think brands should get more involved in the fight against AI fraud? We would love to read your reflections in the comments.
Until next time and continue to love each other very much (but with your eyes wide open)!a
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