A Filipino domestic worker named Maria saved for an entire year, only to lose every peso of it in a matter of weeks to a man she believed was a Dubai prince.
Maria lost 100,000 Philippine pesos, roughly $1,625, to a fraudster posing as Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed, heir to Dubai’s throne, using deepfake video technology. She paid the money for documents the scammer claimed would secure her employment in Dubai and formalize their supposed marriage. When he later asked for an additional 60,000 pesos (about $974) to book a hotel room for an in-person meeting, she grew suspicious and investigated. She found that the Facebook account belonged to someone based in Nigeria. The money was already gone.
The deception had been strikingly effective. Maria first encountered the scammer on a dating site, and their conversations quickly moved to WhatsApp, where he sent affectionate messages at all hours. During video calls, an image appeared on screen resembling the real prince, lips moving in sync with spoken words, though the voice did not match Sheikh Hamdan’s actual voice. The caller greeted her with “Hello, beloved. I really appreciate your love and support.” For weeks, she had no reason to doubt him.
“He kept on messaging me even when I was sleeping,” Maria told AFP. “It felt like there was a love spell that connected our minds.”
Researchers have traced these schemes to criminal syndicates operating in Nigeria, where fraudsters have increasingly adopted artificial intelligence to make impersonation scams harder to detect. The “fake Dubai prince” fraud is part of a broader wave of romance scams targeting people seeking relationships online.
Scammers exploit Sheikh Hamdan’s enormous social media presence, which includes more than 17 million Instagram followers. They appropriate his image, identity and even authentic poems to convince victims they are communicating with the real royal. AFP identified multiple Facebook groups pretending to represent the prince, some drawing thousands of followers. These pages featured manipulated but highly realistic images, including one showing the prince kneeling with a ring and another depicting him holding a red rose alongside the caption: “Sweetheart can I get a ‘love you’ on WhatsApp?” Some commenters warned the accounts were fraudulent. Many others responded with hearts and kiss-blowing emojis.
Meanwhile, legal experts warn that the mechanics of these schemes are deliberately slow and calculated. Todd Spodek, a New York-based federal criminal defense attorney who represents clients in fraud cases, explained that scammers build trust over extended periods before any money changes hands.
“They’re building these long-term relationships with vulnerable people, building trust, building a rapport,” Spodek said. “And then ultimately slowly putting them in a position to freely give money until they could take full advantage of them.”
Scammers employ what is known as “social engineering,” targeting people at vulnerable moments: those coping with divorce, the death of a spouse, or other major life disruptions. Ordinary people in difficult circumstances are the primary targets, not the wealthy or the naive.
Spodek stressed that awareness is the most practical defense available to the public right now. He urged people to treat any online relationship that turns toward requests for money or gifts as an immediate warning sign. “Once it gets to the point where someone’s asking you if you can send money or gift cards or iPhones or do anything like that, it should trigger a red flag,” he said.
Artificial intelligence has raised the stakes considerably. Deepfake video technology can now produce convincing real-time impersonations that ordinary people have no reliable way to identify without prior knowledge of what to look for. For someone like Maria, a domestic worker hoping for both love and a better job, the scam was engineered to hit every pressure point at once.
She has since found some equilibrium. “Many people told me it’s good I didn’t go crazy after this experience,” she told AFP. Her final message to the man who took her savings was brief and unambiguous: “Go to hell, scammer.”
The question facing regulators, platforms and the public is whether the tools available to ordinary people will ever catch up to the technology being used against them.