Safeer Mohammed Koorimannil had four days to make each victim fall in love. The trafficked man impersonated a 28-year-old Singaporean woman named Ella, chatting with more than 100 people across dozens of profiles during a typical shift at a Myanmar scam compound, while supervisors prowled the desks with electric batons. In just a month, he targeted some 50,000 victims from at least 17 countries, according to records he smuggled out to The Associated Press.
His targets were ordinary people: a widowed tailor in Kurdistan, a pastry chef in Turkey, a sheep farmer in Kyrgyzstan, soldiers in Iraq, an engineer in Russia, a building painter in Germany, a port officer in Argentina, a student in Indonesia, a security guard in Poland, a dairy farmer in the Republic of Georgia. An AP and "FRONTLINE" investigation found that American technology companies are powering what amounts to an industrial revolution in fraud—one that the Federal Trade Commission estimates cost Americans nearly $200 billion in losses in 2024.
The investigation exposed a troubling reality: watchdogs say these companies have the technical capacity to prevent abuse but lack the legal, regulatory and business incentives to do so. The digital supply chains exploited by scammers are studded with American technology at every level—from AI models baked into specialized scamming software, to satellite dishes helping criminals evade internet crackdowns, to internet service providers carrying traffic from Myanmar to millions of victims worldwide.
How American Tech Fuels a Global Crime Machine
American-made AI models—chiefly ChatGPT and Gemini—were used to build specialized software that allowed scammers to work across dozens of languages, surveil workers, and target victims around the world. Two platforms emerged as particularly powerful: Kongtian Intelligent Customer Acquisition (KT) and Global Social Traffic Navigation (007TG). Both used ChatGPT and Gemini to generate automated replies, power role-play chatbots, and embed real-time translation in over 100 languages, according to analysis by C4ADS, a Washington-based nonprofit focused on global security.
Scammers who purchased these tools took in tens of millions of dollars, according to blockchain analysis by TRM Labs. A sophisticated global internet infrastructure supported Myanmar's scam compound economy, which relied on services from Cogent Communications, AT&T, DigitalOcean and Oracle, among others. One in five signals from devices at four scam compounds linked to sanctioned entities in Myanmar was carried by a U.S.-registered company, according to an AP analysis of more than 200,000 device connections.
Elon Musk's Starlink emerged as the critical infrastructure enabling this crime. Despite public pressure from Congress and a widely publicized crackdown, Starlink became the number one internet service provider in Myanmar, including to scam centers. At least 25 new scam compounds had been built deep inside Myanmar since the high-profile crackdown along the Thai border last fall. Scammers from at least 13 of these outposts used Starlink IP addresses to get online between early March and the end of May, an AP analysis showed.
Cybersecurity experts laid bare the problem. Sascha Meinrath, the Palmer chair in telecommunications at Penn State University, said, "If there's no disincentive to continuing this, if there's no cost to actually facilitating scamming, then why would I spend a dollar to prevent scamming? This is the problem. It's identifiable, it's addressable—at least somewhat—but it costs something. And right now the cost of facilitating scamming is zero."
The Human Cost of Corporate Negligence
Chris Colocousis, a divorced man in his 60s, thought he was falling in love. A woman named "Eliza" reached out to him on Facebook with a New York phone number and said she worked at a well-known financial firm in Atlanta. She suggested a video call, and there she was—the same blond beauty as in her Facebook photos. He thought she was too real not to be real. Now he has no idea if he was talking with her, with ChatGPT, or even if she was a woman at all. The $400,000 he "invested" under Eliza's guidance is gone, robbing him of the secure retirement he'd spent years working toward.
On Jan. 25, 2025, Colocousis laid out $80,000 cash in neat rows on his table, just as instructed. Eliza had told him if he paid this last bit, he could unlock his funds and withdraw all his money. "I will tell you that I feel a little uneasy but I know you keep telling me it's ok," he messaged her. She responded instantly with kiss emoji. The next morning a young man in a Jeep with New York plates showed up at his doorstep. Once inside, the man told Colocousis to put the stacks of $50 and $100 bills in a plastic shopping bag. The money instantly appeared in the fraudulent crypto trading account. "See you next time," the man said with a smile and a wave. "Maybe. OK. Bye-bye."
Colocousis said he's still so shaken he sometimes has trouble leaving his house. "The greed is--," he said. "I'm all for capitalism, but when it's totally ruining people's lives, people that have worked their whole life towards a goal so that they don't have to work anymore, only to have it just ripped out of their chest—you know, something's wrong."
The victims aren't just Americans. Koorimannil, who was beaten for being bad at scamming people—leaving his body red and swollen with lashes—eventually paid 500,000 Indian rupees ($5,300) for his freedom. An Ethiopian engineer named Ebisa, who worked at Deko Park collecting WhatsApp numbers of vulnerable men, was constantly punished for failing to meet impossible performance goals. One day he tried to evade a beating. Security guards beat him so badly he was blinded in one eye. Photographs show his eye injuries. Speaking from a shelter for human trafficking victims in Thailand in December, he said he wanted to get his eye fixed before going home because his mother's health is fragile. Later, from his home in Ethiopia, he told AP that doctors had informed him they could not save his eye. "It's been a tough reality to face," he said. "They told me that it's too late to bring back my sight."
A Nigerian named Obinna Okeadu, who was tricked into working at Deko Park, never made it back home. On the afternoon of Oct. 28, 2025, after an unsuccessful overnight shift, he and his roommate were called out for punishment. Back in their dorm room after the beating, his roommate watched as Okeadu began to tremble uncontrollably. "I'm going to die like this," Okeadu called out. The next day, his computer disappeared and his name was deleted from work chats. His roommate never saw him again.
The Starlink Paradox
Starlink has been a lifeline for schools, humanitarian groups, hospitals, and media in Myanmar, according to Amnesty International and others. But data indicates that scammers represent a disproportionate share of its user base. Myanmar has become a haven for industrial-scale scam compounds, which have drafted some 300,000 people from dozens of countries, often against their will, according to the United Nations.
Data from a sample of devices at Deko Park, a major scam compound near the Thai border, showed Starlink among the top internet service providers in use from Dec. 10, 2025, to Jan. 6, 2026. In early 2025, Thailand temporarily cut off internet connectivity, electricity and gas supplies to scam compounds just over its border with Myanmar. Starlink became a way around the blockade. Satellite dishes proliferated on rooftops of scam centers in Myanmar, and Starlink usage surged. In April 2025, as the United States prepared sanctions against foreign scam networks in Southeast Asia, SpaceX reassigned IP addresses from Tanzania to create a dedicated block for Myanmar.
By June 2025, Starlink was the number one internet service provider in the impoverished, war-torn country, with a 14% share of the market. In October, amid another sweeping crackdown, Starlink said it cut services to more than 2,500 units near scam compounds in Myanmar. It lost nearly half of its users in the country and its market share plunged from 15% to 6.5%. But in December, Starlink use surged back, and by February, the company was again number one in Myanmar. Today it has a nearly 20% share of the market.
SpaceX's October service cuts demonstrated that the company can sever scam centers from its satellites when it wants to. Yet the cuts haven't stopped scammers. When Myanmar's military government began demolishing the high-profile KK Park compound in October and seized Starlink terminals, the scammers scattered—and brought their tech with them. By January, at least seven devices used at KK Park had migrated to a new compound some 30 kilometers to the northwest, near Hpakalu, according to International Justice Mission.
Eric Heintz, a global analyst at IJM, said, "These new compounds are showing up in the middle of nowhere and they're walled multibuilding complexes with a bunch of these terminals on the roof. You should be able to shut them down, and there should be a paper trail for who's paying the subscriptions for them." Heintz identified at least 25 new sites in Myanmar that have appeared or grown significantly since the crackdown last fall. Satellite imagery showed empty fields transformed into industrial-scale office parks in just a few months and new roads cut through thick trees. White satellite dishes dotted the rooftops, and geolocated device data showed that scammers from at least 13 were logging on with Starlink, just as they did before.
The Regulatory Gap
In Washington, lawmakers and government officials have been asking American tech companies to cooperate on a voluntary basis. In November, District of Columbia U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro created the Scam Center Strike Force to target scam compounds. In a four-day exercise in May, the Strike Force worked with Meta, SpaceX, Google and others to disrupt more than 1.4 million social media and email accounts, interrupt malicious IP address traffic, seize satellite internet terminals, and decommission servers and hosting infrastructure linked to Southeast Asian scam networks. Pirro said in an email to AP, "We will not allow criminal organizations to weaponize our own infrastructure against us or devastate the life savings of hardworking families. Our message is clear: we will find you, we will stop you, and we will protect the American people."
OpenAI and Google said they have robust programs in place to proactively disrupt scammers from abusing their tools. OpenAI said that based on information AP shared, it identified and banned three accounts that had been using its models to support online scams. Oracle said it was "diligently working with law enforcement" on the material shared by AP. UpCloud, a Finnish cloud services provider with servers in the U.S., said AP's query had prompted an internal review and refinement of its risk assessment processes.
Starlink did not respond to detailed requests for comment. Internet service providers said they can't see the content their networks carry or what end users are doing online, citing privacy by design, and said they respond to valid abuse reports and cooperate with law enforcement.
Outside the United States, the cost of facilitating scamming is starting to rise. The United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia and Singapore have introduced new regulations that require companies to do more to prevent scams—or face financial penalties. Sen. Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat who is leading a bipartisan congressional investigation into the role Starlink and other companies play in surging scam losses, said in an email to AP, "We need to do more at every level to combat the scams that are plaguing Americans across the country. Given that SpaceX's Starlink is the first choice of satellite internet technology for many scammers, cutting off scammers' access to Starlink is a key way to prevent scams at the source."
Matthew Moynahan, the CEO of GetReal Security, offered a utility framework for thinking about the problem. "This has to be like clean water," he said. "Anything coming out of the tap for an end user, whether that tap is a PC, a browser somewhere, or your mobile phone, dirty water shouldn't get to you. This is what this is."
Cybersecurity experts warn that the use of AI in scams is exploding so fast that many fear fully automated scams run by AI agents will soon become commonplace. Ari Redbord, global head of policy at TRM Labs, said, "We're moving towards a world where maybe you don't need human scammers anymore. All you need is hundreds, thousands, millions of agentic agents who don't need to sleep, don't need to eat, who are 24/7 doing this."
Why This Matters:
This investigation reveals a fundamental failure of corporate accountability and regulatory oversight. American technology companies—from OpenAI to Starlink to major internet service providers—possess both the technical capacity and the legal obligation to prevent their infrastructure from being weaponized against vulnerable people worldwide. Yet they face no meaningful financial or legal consequences for facilitating fraud at industrial scale. The $200 billion in annual losses falls on individuals: retirees robbed of retirement savings, trafficked workers beaten and blinded, families devastated by scams. Meanwhile, the companies profiting from these tools face only voluntary cooperation requests and occasional account bans. International regulators in the UK, EU, Australia, and Singapore have shown that mandatory standards with financial penalties work—companies respond when it costs them money. The question facing American policymakers is whether they'll wait for more victims or finally impose the legal and regulatory framework that treats internet infrastructure as a public utility requiring accountability, not as a lawless frontier where profits trump human welfare.