Taiwan Charges 57 in AI Voice-Cloning Romance Fraud Ring

TAIPEI — Prosecutors have charged 57 people over a romance fraud operation that allegedly used artificial intelligence to clone women's voices, extracted at least NT$900 million from more than 20,000 targets, and disciplined its own workers with what prosecutors described as inhumane physical and sexual punishments.

The Taipei District Prosecutors' Office indicted the group on Wednesday, naming a man surnamed Huang and his wife, surnamed Hsu, as the organizers. It is seeking at least 25 years in prison for Huang and at least 18 for Hsu.

The charges include fraud, money laundering and jointly committing internet fraud as a group of three or more people, under the Fraud Crime Hazard Prevention Act, the Money Laundering Control Act and the Criminal Code.

What prosecutors describe is not a scam so much as a sales organization.

A "list team" used photographs of women to create accounts on dating apps. When a target made contact, a "new customer team" took over the conversation, claiming to be short of a sales target and pressing the target to buy a small item — fish oil, the medicinal mushroom Antrodia cinnamomea, a power bank — for NT$1,000 to NT$2,000, roughly US$32 to US$63.

The purchase was the qualification. Once a target paid, their personal details and chat records were posted to a group chat, where the operation decided whether to route them to a "cultivation team" or a "returning customer team."

The cultivation team did the expensive work: continuing to use photographs of women, building relationships, requesting gifts such as smartphones, air purifiers and hair dryers, and soliciting money directly.

The structure resembles a commercial sales funnel, with each stage screening for willingness to pay before handing the target on.

The AI element sat inside that structure rather than replacing it.

The group employed a software engineer who built a voice-changing program capable of mimicking and learning the voiceprints of women, prosecutors said. The program took over some conversations with targets.

That is the constraint romance fraud has always faced. Each victim requires sustained individual attention, which limits how many any operator can maintain. A cloned voice removes part of that ceiling — and defeats the verification most people reach for instinctively, which is asking to hear the other person speak.

The same engineer built something else: an employee performance management system.

Members of the group who failed to meet performance targets were subjected to inhumane physical and sexual punishments, prosecutors said.

That detail reframes the case. The same person automated the deception of the targets and the discipline of the staff, and some of the 57 people charged may have been coerced participants rather than willing ones. The indictment does not distinguish between them in the material available.

Huang and Hsu targeted men genuinely seeking relationships, exploiting their trust and ultimately costing them their savings, prosecutors said. Some of those targeted took on debt to cover their losses.

The scheme inflicted severe financial losses and undermined trust and stability in society, prosecutors said.

The investigation concluded on Wednesday. All 57 have been indicted, not convicted, and no trial date has been reported.