The cyber-industrialization of catfishing and romance fraud

The article investigates a contemporary variant of online fraud that builds on romance scams and catfishing but is distinguished by its industrialized form, enabled by corporate practices, software platforms, and service workflows. The authors conduct an inductive analysis of publicly available testimonials and reviews provided by current and former employees connected to a particular contractor operating in the online customer service sector. In this arrangement, firms recruit individuals to act as chat moderators or general customer service agents with the instruction of promoting engagement across social channels. In practice, these workers are recruited to perform intimate texting tasks, compensated on a per-message basis, with clients led to believe they are interacting with female participants on a dating site. The operational framework is governed by client management systems that monitor worker productivity and monetize every exchange between clients and workers. The enterprise pursues efficiency by programmatically assigning multiple workers to single clients and by assembling background profiles on clients in real time, creating a tightly coordinated and scalable workflow. This mode of operation is described as an industrialized, corporatized form of fraud, characterized by procedural rigor and performance metrics rather than isolated incidents. The researchers refer to this practice as Intimacy Manipulated Fraud Industrialization (IMFI). They conclude that workers occupy dual roles, acting as both exploiters of clients and victims of the corporate structure that employs them. The study highlights how organized service platforms can transform exploitative intimate interactions into scalable business processes, raising questions about accountability, worker vulnerability, and the broader ethics of monetized online intimacy.