A new kind of phone farm is being used in dating scams. And they are going to look a lot more human than the old bot farms.
Mechanical fingers and robotic AI are now being used to swipe, type, and interact on social media in a way that has never been seen before.
Videos posted by fraud fighter Derek Schmidt online this week reveal this growing trend.
The New Bot Farms Use AI Robotics
The old phone farm was crude but effective. Someone loaded an app onto dozens of cheap phones and let a script do the rest.
The new bot farms are adding machinery. Custom rigs old rows of phones while mechanical fingers run by AI swipe through endless feeds of videos, running round the clock.
Each one of these swipes mean someone is amassing thousands of views that look authentic, but are manufactured by AI.
AI Makes The Bot Farms Better
Derek Schmidt, Payments and Fraud Leader for Novation Financial says these new bot farms are created “To bypass fraud-detection algorithms that easily flag software emulation and says “the system uses mechanical arms with stylus tips to physically tap the screens and mimic human behavior.
Older bot farms repeated a fixed set of steps, which made them easy to flag and detect. Scroll for thirty seconds, like five posts, stop, and repeat. That rhythm made it easy for companies to uncover.
AI now helps the scammers break that rhythm. Smart scripts now adjust as platforms push updates, add natural pauses, and vary the likes and comments so accounts stop looking completely the same.
A Mechanical AI Bot Farm Built For Dating Scams
On Telegram this week, users posted a Chinese Mechanical Bot Farm that is marketed for dating scams.
The bot appears to work in the video demo. One phone reads the messages and transmits them to an AI, while a robotic arm types the response on another smartphone.
It’s only a matter of time before we see an influx of these new AI bots being used to perpetrate more realistic scamming online.
