Threat Intelligence

Anthropic threat intelligence researcher Chris Cronbaugh traced a network of roughly 28 fraudulent dating apps after spotting a five-day-old prepaid account sending more than 100,000 Claude API requests a day. Over a two-week window in April 2026, more than 4,700 fabricated AI personas exchanged about 2.36 million messages with at least 25,000 real people — roughly 94 messages each. Only one match in four was human, and those were paid gig workers choosing from three pregenerated replies. The Verge’s Yael Grauer published the full investigation on 16 September 2026 with security researcher Matthew “Zigula” Gore-Kormanik, who found the operation’s internal Chinese-language manual shipped by accident inside the Doni app. This article covers the numbers per user and per day, the named apps and their removal dates, the China-based infrastructure, and the signals that expose this kind of operation before anyone pays.