It's called a "Pig Butchering Scam" and no, they won't (directly) ask for money from you. The scam industry knows people are suspicious of that.

What they do is become your friend. They'll actually talk to you, for weeks if not months on end. the idea is to gain trust, to be "this isn't a scammer, scammers wouldn't go to these lengths." One day your new friend will mention that his investment in crypto or whatever is returning nicely, and of course you'll say "how much are you earning?" They'll never ask you for money, but they'll be happy to tell you what app to go download from the App store to "invest" in. It looks legit as fuck, often times you can actually do your homework and it checks out. Except somehow it doesn't.

Don't befriend people who text you out of the blue.

Basically yes, but only after you're emotionally invested.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam

A lot of them are crypto scammers. I encountered a ton of those when I was on dating apps - they'd get you emotionally invested by just making small talk, flirting, etc. for a couple days, then they'd ask about what you did for work, and then they'd tell you how much they make trading crypto. Eventually it gets to the point where they ask you to send them money that they promise to invest on your behalf and give you all the profits. They simply take that money for themselves though, obviously.

I don't know specifically, but there are lots of options.

One I've heard is "sexting -> pictures from you -> blackmail."

Another one might be "flirting -> let's meet irl -> immigration says they want 20,000 pls help 🥺"

Could also be "flirting -> I just inherited 20,000 -> my grandma is trying to take it -> can you hold it for me?" where they're pretending to give you money, but there are bank transfer fees they need you to pay for some reason.

The AI convo step is just to offload the work of finding good marks. You're likely to get a real person eventually if you act gullible enough.

Using AI lets scammers target hundreds of people at once and choose likely candidates for a pig-butchering scam (rich, dumb, vulnerable, etc). Once the AI finds one, it passes the phone number on to a human scammer for further exploitation.

It's like the old war-dialers that would dial hundreds of people and pass along the call when they got an answer from a real human being.

Probably going to eventually send you to some cam site to see "them". This seems like the old school Craigslist eWhoring affiliate scam, just way more scalable now. Shit, there's probably millions to be made if you get a good enough AI.