The pig-killing plate uses AI, and the scam begins batch production

Scammers don’t have to let AI run a scam from start to finish. A face-changing video, a synthesized voice, or a set of character materials used to attract traffic may change the victim’s judgment as long as it appears at the critical moment of gaining trust.

Public cases show that AI has been used in different scenarios such as dating, fake investments, pretending to be relatives, and emotional selling, but its role in each incident is different.

Among them, emotional marriage and love scams are also commonly known in the circle as “collapse old man”.

In 2025, in a case handled by the Minhang District Procuratorate in Shanghai, a criminal gang used AI to generate videos of beautiful women to attract traffic, first packaged the persona, and then forged medical records and certificates to gain trust. In just one year, 15 victims were defrauded of a total of more than 1.71 million yuan. In the end, the principal criminal was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Yang Ke, a criminal lawyer at Shanghai Landi (Guangzhou) Law Firm, said that many criminals use AI to mass-generate virtual characters such as handsome military officers, wealthy daughters, perfect uncles, and investment mentors, targeting the 40-70-year-old group with savings and emotional gaps to implement emotional arbitrage. When marriage and love routines and investment inducements are nested in each other, the damage will be multiplied, and the victims will suffer both property losses and emotional blows.

Investment and financial management fraud may cause the highest single property loss.

Fraudsters combine popular concepts such as AI quantitative trading, intelligent stock selection, and virtual currency, use AI digital people to pretend to be analysts for live broadcasts, and induce victims to download counterfeit apps whose background data can be artificially tampered with. The platform will forge beautiful profit data, and some gangs will open small withdrawals to gain users’ trust. Once the victims invest large amounts of money, they will directly close the withdrawal channels to achieve illegal possession.

Liu Zongxin, a lawyer who has been deeply involved in the field of economic crimes for many years, pointed out that the “sunk cost psychology” prevalent in this type of fraud will bring about secondary harvests. Many victims have invested a sum of money but are unable to withdraw it. They will hypnotize themselves to “invest another sum and withdraw it all”, and then get deeper and deeper into the trap.

Use AI to impersonate acquaintances or public officials to defraud, focusing on quickly setting up traps.

Scammers use voice cloning to copy the voiceprints of relatives, rely on AI face-changing to forge videos of acquaintances, and fabricate emergency reasons such as car accidents or being detained and urgent need for money; or they pretend to be public officials, falsely claiming that the parties involved are suspected of breaking the law, and then arrange for offline men to come to collect cash. Online deception and offline collection work together to complete the scam.

The aforementioned case of AI onomatopoeia defrauding the elderly issued by the Supreme Court is a typical example of this type of model.

There is also a category that uses AI to attract traffic to sell goods, or uses AI to generate virtual sales personas. A large number of AI robots in group chats act as “shills” to create the illusion of hot buying, and ultimately induce consumers to complete purchases at prices that are several times or even dozens of times higher than the market price.

This kind of borderline fraud in the sale of goods is also the type with the most blurred boundary between civil and criminal crimes, because the goods sold by criminals themselves have legal properties.

2. Use AI technology to gain trust

Compared with the traditional pig-killing plate, the core of the pig-killing plate in the AI ​​era is the use of AI technology to build trust.

“Traditional pig-killing sites are highly dependent on manpower, and salespeople have limited energy and can only deal with a small number of victims at the same time; AI relies on computing power to achieve batch account maintenance and automatic dialogue reply, and the marginal cost of fraud is almost zero.” Lawyer Liu Zongxin analyzed.

In the past, the personas created by artificial chatters were often thin, and it was easy to be confused once a video call was needed. AI can complete full-sensory forgery. In addition to outputting chat words, it can also batch generate fake medical records, fake ID cards, and fake transfers, forming a set of false evidence chains that can corroborate each other, with extremely low copying costs.

AI can also simulate the delay effect of real-person typing, autonomously memorize conversation details, proactively start new topics, and most of the early emotional preparation work can be run independently of manual labor.

The portrait of victims is also changing markedly. Traditionally, pig killing is mainly aimed at the elderly who are greedy for small profits. Now the range of victims continues to expand. Middle-aged and elderly people are still a high-risk group, but many young and middle-aged people with a certain level of education, assets, emotions or investment needs will also fall into the trap.

Lawyer Liu Zongxin said based on his experience in handling cases that there are still some victims who, out of shame or participating in virtual currency transactions that are not protected by law, choose to tolerate it even if they are cheated. He came into contact with a case of covering up and concealing criminal proceeds. The amount involved in the case was as high as millions of dollars, but very few victims came to the public security organs to report the case. This also means that the true scale of victims is higher than the statistics reported by the police.

At the regional level, traditional telecom fraud gangs are mostly concentrated in Southeast Asia. AI has weakened the constraints of geographical conditions, and similar fraud groups have appeared in many places in the Americas, Africa, and the Middle East. Fraudulent software and servers are mostly deployed overseas, further increasing the difficulty of domestic investigation and evidence collection.

3. Scam the industry and establish a “cyber assembly line”

Two lawyers unanimously stated to “Leopard Change” that the AI ​​​​pig killing plate has evolved into a highly modular black and gray production line, with different gangs dividing labor and cooperating, and participants in the chain may not be fully involved in the entire process of fraud.

The whole chain starts with the supply of technical tools. Relevant entities export tools such as AI face-changing, voice cloning, batch account generation, and automatic chat robots to provide a technical base for the entire scam and support audio and video forgery and large-volume account operation and maintenance. One operator can control hundreds of fake accounts at the same time and output various virtual personalities in batches.

Followed closely by the human traffic flow link. The operation team uses AI to batch-produce short videos and friend circle materials with fake personas, puts them on short videos and social platforms, screens potential victims with emotional appeals and investment willingness, and then directs the targets from public platforms to private chat windows.

The third link is the implementation of artificial intelligence superimposed on AI. AI generates a complete set of speech packages and is responsible for about 90% of daily emotional foreshadowing chats; when the foreshadowing is completed and the harvest node of large-value transfers is approaching, the manual chatter is switched to complete the key persuasion.

Fund laundering is a crucial link in the chain. In a large number of cases, criminals prefer virtual currencies to launder stolen funds, and continue to confuse the tracking paths of funds through repeated switching of hot and cold wallets and multiple rounds of currency mixing operations.

The end of the chain is the transfer of overseas assets. The laundered stolen money is transferred out of the country; some domestic persons involved in the case will choose to leave the country or immigrate before the case occurs in order to avoid domestic jurisdiction.

Modular division of labor also brings complex legal qualitative problems. For participants at different positions in the chain, judicial practice uses the subjective cognitive level of the perpetrator as the core judgment criterion.

Lawyer Yang Ke explained that in judicial practice, upstream and downstream personnel in the same AI fraud chain who provide tools, technology, services and other assistance may be charged with different crimes with disparate sentencing due to their different “subjective degrees of knowledge”. If relevant persons knowingly help others commit fraud crimes, conspire in advance or form a relatively stable cooperative relationship, they will generally be punished as accomplices in the crime of fraud, and the corresponding maximum statutory penalty is life imprisonment.

If the relevant person only has a general understanding of helping others to commit cyber crimes, but does not know the details of the crime, the degree of participation is not deep, the cooperation is temporary and accidental, does not participate in the sharing, and only provides general technology, it may constitute the crime of assisting information network criminal activities, and the corresponding maximum statutory penalty is three years in prison.

Lawyer Yang Ke also mentioned that due to the different “behavior types” of people in the upstream and downstream links, they may also be suspected of other crimes, such as the crime of forging identity documents, illegal use of information networks, infringement of citizens’ personal information, concealment and concealment of criminal proceeds, proceeds of crime, and even money laundering.

What needs to be clarified is that although vicious incidents of AI fraud occur frequently, AI is only evaluated as a criminal method or tool, rather than a statutory statutory circumstance of severe punishment expressly stipulated in my country’s criminal law. The fraud judge still uses the amount involved as the core basis for sentencing, and will not directly increase the penalty just because the tool used to commit the crime is artificial intelligence.

In cases involving borderline sales of goods, the determination of the boundary between civil and criminal cases is particularly difficult.

The goods themselves are legal, with a formal transaction contract and physical delivery, and their appearance is highly similar to ordinary civil transactions. Attorney Yang Ke proposed the judgment logic in practice: first, compare the purchase cost, processing cost and actual selling price of the goods to see whether there is a huge gap between the selling price and the true market value of the goods; secondly, examine the subjective purpose of the perpetrator, combined with whether the merchant is willing to actively refund the money to make up for the loss after the consumer dispute occurs, to assist in judging whether the purpose of illegal possession is established.

“Normal market operations allow for reasonable profit fluctuations, but products with extremely low costs are sold at hundreds or even thousands of times the price, with fictitious functions, quality or uses, etc., and are paired with a large number of AI ‘shills’ to create a fictitious rush-buying atmosphere, which is often accompanied by a high risk of fraud and crime.”

AI deep forgery has also completely changed the working logic of investigation and evidence collection. For traditional telecom network fraud, the focus of investigation is fixed chat records, call recordings, bank statements and other objectively retained materials. In the AI ​​pig killing plate case, audio, video, screenshots, and documents all have the possibility of deep forgery, and the focus of the investigation has shifted from “fixed recording of evidence” to “identifying the authenticity of evidence.”

“AI forged content is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish with the naked eye, and case investigators need to entrust a professional third-party appraisal agency to conduct deep forgery appraisals,” said lawyer Yang Ke.

In recent years, industry standards and national standards have been continuously introduced for synthetic authentication and detection in image, audio and other fields. However, there is a structural imbalance in the coverage of the standard system, and the participation of different institutions and personnel in standard implementation and proficiency testing varies. The deeper problem is that the underlying forensic assumptions on which detection technology relies are gradually eroded in the iteration of generation technology. This means that even if the procedures are compliant and the qualifications are complete, the technical reliability of the appraisal opinion itself still faces systemic challenges.

At the same time, a large number of forged traces generated by AI are stored in overseas servers, making it difficult for domestic investigation agencies to retrieve the original data, further raising the threshold for evidence fixation.

4. How to deal with AI fraud

The management of AI pig killing trays cannot only rely on post-event strikes by the public security organs.

On the technology supply side, large model companies have become the “source responsible” for risk prevention and control. At present, China has not yet issued very detailed and implementable compliance guidelines for the AI ​​industry, and the existing system is more focused on market access. This link relies more on companies hiring specialized compliance personnel to avoid the risk of falling into related criminal cases.

Lawyer Yang Ke said that the law naturally lags behind, and AI criminal methods iterate very quickly, making it difficult for legislation and industry standards to predict all new criminal methods in advance. Therefore, it is realistically necessary for AI-generated artificial intelligence service companies to maintain technology neutrality and proactively isolate risks. However, “technology neutrality” is not a reason for exemption. In practice, the boundaries of obligations are usually based on the company’s risk control capabilities, requiring companies to undertake monitoring and early warning obligations for abnormal calls that can be identified at low cost, and to implement content generation safety management and control obligations.

For ordinary netizens, establishing identification awareness and guarding the transfer gate are the core lines of defense against AI pig-killing attempts.

“Many fraudsters will induce victims to uninstall the National Anti-Fraud Center APP in order to successfully complete the fraud activities. This in itself is a high-risk signal.” Lawyer Yang Ke suggested not to uninstall the National Anti-Fraud Center APP and increase your vigilance. When facing an online video call, if the identity of the other party is in doubt, you can ask the other party to complete complex actions such as touching ears and turning the head, or ask questions about a common past that only both parties know, to verify the authenticity of the identity. At the same time, abandon speculative fantasies and remain highly vigilant to any investment rhetoric on the Internet that claims guaranteed profits, high returns with guaranteed capital, and insider information.

Lawyer Yang Ke specifically reminded that if a scammer induces you to use a software that will burn after reading, you need to fix all the contents inside the software as soon as possible and do not delete or modify the original records. After sorting out the materials, go to the local police station to report the crime as soon as possible. You can also submit case clues through the National Anti-Fraud Center APP.

Regarding how victims of fraud can recover stolen goods and recover losses, lawyer Yang Ke specially reminds:

1. After the victim discovers that he has been defrauded, he can dial 110, 96110 and other police hotlines as soon as possible, or submit case clues through the National Anti-Fraud Center APP;

2. Contact payment channel customers in a timely manner to block the flow of funds;

3. Fix the original carriers such as chat records, call recordings, payment records, etc. that can reflect the process of defrauded money. If you are tricked into using software that will burn after reading, you need to fix the software content as soon as possible and do not delete or modify the original records;

4. After sorting out the materials, go to the local police station to report the crime as soon as possible;

5. Recovery of stolen goods and losses can only be achieved through formal judicial channels. Do not trust any Internet “hackers” or “platform customer service” to avoid being defrauded again.

Both lawyers reminded that the recovery of stolen money in criminal cases mainly relies on judicial organs to recover and order refunds. People on the Internet who claim that they can help you recover defrauded money through hackers and private customer service are almost all secondary frauds. The only formal channel for recovering stolen goods and recovering losses is the criminal case handling process of the public security organs.

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