‘All of Us Are Potential Victims’: Where to Watch FRONTLINE’s Documentary on Scams

Millions of Americans have fallen victim to a growing epidemic of online scams — from sextortion schemes aimed at teens, to crypto investment scams targeting seniors.

What is behind the rise of these scams, and why do so few people ever get their money back?

FRONTLINE and The Associated Press have spent more than a year investigating those questions — and the resulting documentary, Scammed, is now available to stream, for free, at pbs.org/frontline, in the PBS App, and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel.

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Scammed

September 29, 2026

From an award-winning team that includes director Peter Klein and reporters Erika Kinetz, Juliet Linderman and Martha Mendoza, the 90-minute documentary goes inside the shadowy world of online scams, and exposes how this global criminal industry is stealing billions of dollars each year.

The team’s findings are stark: The scam industry’s explosive growth has been powered in many cases by organized crime, trafficked labor, American technology, and, increasingly, AI — and governments and law enforcement have struggled to keep pace.

“It’s being done at a scale that we have never seen and never even anticipated,” Erin West, a former U.S. prosecutor who worked on a special unit with the FBI and Secret Service focused on cybercrime, says in the documentary.

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Drawing on interviews with perpetrators, victims and officials, as well as thousands of never-before-seen documents, Scammed pieces together a picture of the global scam industry — from sextortion scams run from Nigeria, to massive “scam compounds” in Southeast Asia that rely on human trafficking for labor — and the underlying technologies and platforms being used to scam victims in the U.S. and worldwide.

“What we’re seeing here is the scaling of fraud, the industrialization of fraud,” says Ari Redbord of TRM Labs, which tracks cryptocurrency crime.

Scammed is part of a multiplatform investigation that also includes ongoing, in-depth text stories and Inside the Scam, a digital interactive that takes users inside four different types of scams, explores tactics used to manipulate victims, and shares red flags to watch out for.

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All told, the joint investigation offers an urgent and essential look at the online scam industry, the people and technology enabling it, its impact on victims, and the status of efforts to shut it down.

Online scams are “a global menace that we all have to fight together,” Michael Wetkas, who helped lead an anti-scamming operation for Nigeria’s economic and financial crimes commission, says in the documentary. “All of us are potential victims.”

Watch the Full Documentary | Scammed