Romance & Pig-Butchering
7 postsWrong-number openers, fake dating platforms, and advance-fee crypto investment schemes.
Aged-Domain Rotation Behind Two Adult-Dating Credit Drains
Two adult-dating operators spent 2026 monetizing fabricated romantic interest across 37 domains, some of them bought and parked as far back as 2017.
Celebrity-Impersonation Romance Ads and the Telegram Pivot
Since mid-May 2026, disposable Facebook profiles impersonating celebrities and lonely singles have run romance ads that pivot targets to Telegram.
Fake-Dating on Autopilot: The Punctipes Auto-Login Notification Family
Since late 2023, one operator has run a family of fake-dating sites emailing fabricated 'new message' notifications from personas who do not exist.
The Wrong-Number Opener Behind SMS Pig-Butchering Scams
A polite wrong-number text is rarely a mistake: it is the engineered first move of an SMS pig-butchering operation built to turn one reply into a long con.
Burner Numbers and Shared Scripts: An SMS Pig-Butchering Network
Since July 2025, more than 100 burner phone numbers have run a coordinated SMS romance and pig-butchering operation held together by shared scripts.
Anatomy of a Ten-Cluster Dating-Spam Credit-Drain Ecosystem
Across a seven-month window, analysts mapped a dating-spam ecosystem where ten operator clusters funnel users into credit-draining fake-romance platforms.
A Freemail-Only Romance-Scam Ecosystem on an Abused Chat-to-Email App
Since late 2025, a romance-scam operator has groomed victims from dozens of Gmail burner accounts, riding a chat-to-email app to fragment each conversation.