AI-generated fake women are being used to scam money from men online—exposing a gap in platform defenses

A medical student created fake photos and videos of a fictional conservative woman using generative AI (software that creates synthetic images and video from text descriptions) and sold them to men online for thousands of dollars. He is one of several people running similar scams, targeting men who believe they are interacting with real women.

Unlike deepfakes (AI videos of real people's faces), these scams use entirely synthetic people—faces that never existed, generated from scratch by AI tools. This makes them harder to detect and easier to scale, since there's no original person's face to compare against or copyright to violate.

Dating app users and men seeking online relationships now face a category of fraud that existing safeguards were not designed to catch. Social platforms lack reliable ways to verify whether profiles are real people or AI-generated personas, making it harder for users to trust who they're talking to.