Poster: Longitudinal Analysis of Romance Scam Infrastructure Evolution: Evidence of Strategic Legitimization

초록

Romance scams represent a cybercrime category causing more than $650 million in reported losses annually, with limited systematic longitudinal analysis. We present a 12-year infrastructure evolution study analyzing 11,674 romance scammer profiles from ScamDigger (2012-2024). Using IP geolocation and ASN classification, we identify a marked inflection in 2019. Contrary to expected technological advancement, we observe apparent migration toward legitimate infrastructure: Traditional ISP usage increased substantially while proxy usage declined from an average of 90.6% (pre-2019) to 53.1% (post-2019), corresponding to a 37.5 percentage-point decrease. Analysis reveals observed geographic patterns specialization with operational bases in West African Traditional ISPs (Nigeria: 94.2%, Ghana: 94.6%) and deceptive infrastructure in Western cloud services (US: 53.1%, Germany: 59.9%). ASN diversity contracted 31.3%, indicating ecosystem consolidation. These findings suggest ongoing industrialization through legitimacy exploitation, motivating adjustments to detection methodologies.

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