How global scammers in Myanmar use US tech to fleece people

The instructions were clear: He had four days to make each victim fall in love. And there were a lot of victims. Online, Safeer Mohammed Koorimannil, who was trafficked to a scam center in Myanmar, impersonated a 28-year-old Singaporean woman named Ella. On a typical shift, he said, he chatted with more than 100 people across dozens of profiles at the same time, as supervisors prowled among the desks with electric batons. In just a month, Koorimannil targeted some 50,000 victims from at least 17 countries, according to records he smuggled out to The Associated Press. His “clients” included 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 and a dairy farmer in the Republic of Georgia. And he did it using software built with artificial intelligence models from American tech companies that scammers are abusing to target victims at unprecedented speed and scale. “Everyone is a robot there,” he told AP from his home in southern India in his native Malayalam language. Technology from American companies is being used to power a revolution in the scam industry, playing a key role in the industrialization and globalization of fraud in ways that have not been clear until now, an AP/”FRONTLINE” investigation has found. Watchdogs say these companies have the technical capacity to do more to protect against abuse but lack the legal, regulatory and business incentives to crack down on a crime the Federal Trade Commission estimates cost Americans nearly $200 billion USD in losses in 2024. While most public scrutiny of the technology that fuels scams has focused on the social media platforms victims see, the infrastructure exploited to commit fraud begins much farther upstream, the investigation showed. American technology is present all along the digital supply chains that connect scammers with the scammed, from AI models baked into powerful new tools to optimize workflow and create more perfect fakes, to satellite dishes that enable scammers to evade internet crackdowns, to internet service providers that carry traffic from the lawless borderlands of Myanmar to the phones and computers of millions of victims. The AP found no evidence to suggest these companies were doing anything illegal themselves. However, the abuse of their tools and tech infrastructure at scam compounds in Myanmar, as documented by the AP and “FRONTLINE,” raises questions about how vigorously they are enforcing their own terms of service, which prohibit illegal activity and, in many cases, explicitly ban fraud. Among the AP’s findings: Spread of scam compounds in Myanmar since fall of 2025 Satellite imagery analysis by International Justice Mission and reviewed by AP found at least two dozen new sites have been built since the crackdown on scam compounds late last year in Southeast Asia. The AP/”FRONTLINE” investigation was based on tens of thousands of leaked scam center files, videos and photos; an analysis with C4ADS of misuse of AI at scam centers; an examination of more than 200,000 connections made by devices over a year at four scam compounds in Myanmar linked to entities sanctioned by the U.S. government; and interviews with 58 scam victims and three dozen current and former scammers from 19 countries. Cybersecurity experts say internet service providers, AI companies and Starlink could do more to prevent the abuse by scammers — but lack the legal, regulatory and business incentives. “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? ” said Sascha Meinrath, the Palmer chair in telecommunications at Penn State University. “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.” Outside the United States, that cost 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. Meanwhile, in Washington, lawmakers and government officials have been asking American tech companies to cooperate to cut scammers off from U.S. infrastructure, but on a voluntary basis. AP