AI-Disguised Human Relationship Mentor Pipeline: Batch Customer Acquisition, Tiered Scripting, and High-Pressure Sales for Costly Reconciliation Services

Who Gets Targeted

The primary victims are young women aged 18 to 35 who have just experienced breakups or marital crises, as well as urban white-collar workers trapped in parent-child conflicts or workplace anxiety who are reluctant to seek offline medical help. When searching keywords such as 'emotional consulting' and 'reconcile with ex,' they are precisely targeted and captured. Caught in a vulnerable window of emotional collapse and diminished judgment, they treat AI-generated empathy scripts as life-saving straws, lack awareness to verify authority personas, and are unwilling to seek verification from friends and family due to privacy concerns. As they sink deeper, they are held hostage by sunk costs, repeatedly paying extra as mentors upgrade to supervisors.

骗局怎么运作

• Step 1: AI Batch Customer Acquisition. The black industry team uses AI to batch-generate emotional copywriting and short videos, placing emotional reconciliation and breakup-to-makeup keyword information stream ads on social platforms. A single operator can manage dozens of accounts simultaneously, achieving ultra-low, controllable customer acquisition costs at this stage.
• Step 2: Persona Packaging. Using AI-generated or stolen real-person profile photos and professional qualification screenshots, they package a senior relationship mentor persona, forging psychological counselor certificates and successful case chat logs. Initial dialogues use free analysis as a pretext to collect users' emotional details and private information.
• Step 3: High-Pressure Scripting. User self-narratives are fed into the large language model to generate seemingly professional psychological analyses, manufacturing panic conclusions such as 'you are at high risk of relationship collapse.' The tone then abruptly shifts to claim that system-intervention guidance is needed, introducing thousands of yuan worth of one-on-one reconciliation packages.
• Step 4: Tiered Harvesting. After payment, the service is actually supported by cheap script templates or even pure AI dialogue. Once users question the results, excuses such as 'complex circumstances requiring supervisor escalation' or 'the other party requiring third-party intervention' are used to hike fees layer by layer, pushing costs from several thousand yuan to tens of thousands of yuan.
• Step 5: Slipping Away. When users demand refunds or file large-scale complaints, operators refuse on the grounds that 'consulting services are non-refundable as agreed in the contract,' or log out accounts, rebrand, and reopen new entities to continue advertising. When victims seek recourse, they often cannot even find the real business entity of the opposing party.

红旗信号（看到这些快跑）

• 🚩 Mentors never conduct real-time voice or video calls; all communications are text-based with round-the-clock second-response speeds, and phrasing is highly templated.
• 🚩 So-called psychological counseling qualification certificate numbers cannot be queried on public channels of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security or relevant industry associations, nor can market regulation registration information be found for the institution.
• 🚩 Analysis is initially free, but the conclusion inevitably exaggerates the crisis level and immediately transitions to a fee-based scheme, with pricing never explicitly or transparently stated.
• 🚩 Payment recipients are personal accounts or micro-enterprises inconsistent with the ad name, and contract terms explicitly state that once consulting services begin, no refunds are given under any circumstances.
• 🚩 Claiming a reconciliation success rate of over 90% and promising reunion within 7 to 15 days, packaging psychological services as a guaranteed-result transaction.
• 🚩 Continuously demanding additional fees under the guise of upgrading mentor tiers or involving third-party coordination, implying that refusal renders all previous investments void.

真实案例

• In late August 2026, a young Chengdu woman surnamed Jia experienced low spirits after breaking up with her boyfriend and clicked a push link while searching for emotional consulting on a social platform, connecting with someone branding themselves as a senior relationship mentor. After a few dialogues, she—working in the internet advertising industry—noticed abnormal reply patterns from the other party, ultimately seeing through that the person on the other side of the screen was actually an AI program, and reported the customer acquisition pipeline to the media. This case was reported by Guangming Daily in September 2026.
• A report by Guangming Daily in September 2026 pointed out that consulting services under the banner of emotional reconciliation and relationship repair have formed an assembly line on the internet: AI batch customer acquisition, persona account fan building, and tiered closing scripts are interlocked. Multiple interviewed subjects received only general AI-generated scripts after paying tens of thousands of yuan, leaving reconciliation hopeless and refunds unreachable.
• China Youth Daily reprinted an investigative report on September 15, 2026, titled 'Turning Online Emotional Consulting into Secondary Psychological Trauma,' disclosing that multiple seekers suffered not only severe economic losses after receiving so-called AI emotional mentor services, but also secondary psychological trauma because their private confessional content was retained for script training, with some delaying regular psychological intervention timing as a result.

Official Stance

• In September 2026, Guangming Daily published an investigation titled 'The Emotional Mentor Behind the Screen Might Just Be an AI Program,' exposing the black industry of AI assembly lines in the emotional consulting industry and warning the public to be vigilant against uncertified online emotional services.
• On September 15, 2026, China Youth Daily released 'Turning Online Emotional Consulting into Secondary Psychological Trauma—The Emotional Mentor Behind the Screen Might Just Be an AI Program,' exposing the chain of AI batch customer acquisition and tiered closing scripts, calling for strengthened industry regulation and platform auditing.
• On April 28, 2026, Xinhua News Agency's 'Xinhua Investigation' column broadcasted a report warning against AI customer service phone scams, with cyberspace administration, public security, and other departments warning that AI voice synthesis and deepfake tools have extremely low acquisition costs and have been widely used by criminals in telecommunication network fraud, requiring strict regulation of AI tool usage.

How to Protect Yourself

• ✅ When psychological assistance is needed, prioritize calling the national unified psychological assistance hotline 12356, or visit psychiatry or psychology departments in regular hospitals, rather than accepting unverified sponsored emotional consulting ads on social platforms.
• ✅ Before engaging in any financial transactions with online emotional mentors, verify the opposing institution's market regulation registration information and psychological counseling qualifications, and demand real-time video calls to verify true identities.
• ✅ Make payments only through official corporate accounts and retain complete chat logs, contracts, and transfer vouchers. Refuse to transfer funds to personal accounts and beware of any boilerplate terms stating no refunds.
• ✅ Treat services promising reconciliation success rates or time-bound reunions as false advertising and block them directly. Do not send private confessional content to unverified stranger accounts.
• ✅ If already scammed, preserve evidence, call 110 to report to the police, report the advertising account through 12321 and platform complaint channels, and simultaneously report false advertising to market regulation authorities.