Around Valentine’s Day, romance scams took a high-tech turn. Fraudsters utilized real-time deepfake video filters during video calls to maintain their fake personas, making the “catfishing” nearly impossible to detect. Victims were lured into “Pig Butchering” schemes, where they were convinced to invest in fake cryptocurrency platforms. These scams are now industrial-scale operations, often run out of compounds in Southeast Asia using trafficked labor to manage thousands of profiles simultaneously.