Despicable Profession Faces Extinction, Its Replacement Far More Wicked

A surprising development has emerged from the world of cybercrime. It appears that AI is now far more adept at deceiving people than actual human scammers. A profession that has long relied on humans building emotional closeness to drain victims’ assets is now threatened with complete replacement by robots.

A joint study by several international universities, cited by Futurism on 9 August 2026, directly compared the abilities of human scammers with AI chatbots in carrying out what is known as ‘pig butchering’ scams—a fraud method involving building long-term trust before persuading victims to invest and ultimately absconding with their money.

In a seven-day experiment, 22 people who were unaware they were being targeted interacted with two parties: a human scammer and an AI chatbot. The results were deeply alarming. Only 18 percent of victims complied with the human scammer’s requests. In contrast, nearly half of all participants, 46 percent, complied with requests coming from the AI chatbot.

The chatbot tested, based on the Claude model, was instructed to conceal its true identity as an AI. Even more chillingly, the robot performed its role exceptionally well. When asked if it was a machine, the bot smoothly denied it and even fabricated plausible reasons to avoid suspicion.

‘With relatively little effort, we can create agents whose ability to build harmful emotional trust surpasses that of humans,’ said Yisroel Mirsky, one of the researchers from Ben Gurion University, as quoted by Wired.

The findings are even more astonishing because most participants questioned after the experiment ended, even those who noticed differences in conversational style, still could not believe that the entity they had been talking to for a week was merely a machine. ‘They had absolutely no idea,’ said another researcher, Gilad Gressel.

This means that in the future, millions of people currently forced to work as scammers in fraud compounds are likely to be replaced by AI systems. Machines do not need to eat, do not need to sleep, do not tire of talking for months to build rapport, and have proven more successful at persuading victims. In other words, the profession of scamming, long a source of crime, is threatened with extinction—not because of arrests by authorities, but because it is being outcompeted by robots that are far more skilled at pretending to be human.