Scammed

This program contains mature content, including discussion of suicide. Viewer discretion is advised.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 1:

They stole $25,000.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 2:

$13,500.

MALE SCAM VICTIM 1:

$50,000.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 3:

Almost a million dollars.

NARRATOR:

In collaboration with The Associated Press, a global investigation.

ERIN WEST, Founder, Operation Shamrock:

Victims are getting hit with romance and cryptocurrency and then losing all of their money.

JULIET LINDERMAN, The Associated Press:

Every single person is vulnerable to scams in a different way.

JACOB SIMS, Asia Center, Harvard University:

Long-con crypto-based investment scams.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 4:

A police impostor.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 5:

He promised to love me.

ERIN WEST:

It’s gut-wrenching and it’s life-changing.

NARRATOR:

The perpetrators.

ERIKA KINETZ, The Associated Press:

Do you ever feel bad about what you do?

NARRATOR:

Victims.

JULIET LINDERMAN:

Doctors, lawyers, IT professionals, people who work with computers and work with the internet. And they were scammed.

NARRATOR:

The efforts to shut it down.

BRANDON GUFFEY, Gavin’s dad:

At some point, the big tech companies have to be held responsible because they are providing the tools. They’re aware of what’s happening.

MICHAEL WETKAS, Economic and Financial Crimes Comm.:

We have to fight it locally and internationally.

NARRATOR:

And the dangerous role of artificial intelligence.

JULIET LINDERMAN:

The scam industry is heading like a rocket ship towards the AI universe. You can just have an army of AI avatars scamming people.

ERIKA KINETZ:

If you look to the future, it’s only going to get harder to be able to tell what’s real, to be able to tell

who’s a scammer, to be able to defend yourself on your own.

NARRATOR:

Now on FRONTLINE—

MARTHA MENDOZA, FRONTLINE:

There are so many layers to this.

NARRATOR:

Scammed.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

It’s a very industrialized criminal organization that is capitalizing on human trust.

BRANDON GUFFEY, Gavin’s dad:

I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason. I believe that there is good and there is evil in this world, and sometimes evil attacks you. For someone to tell me that this would be part of God’s plan, I can’t accept that.

HOLLY HOOD, Gavin’s teacher:

Gavin was a very quirky kid and a very artistic kid, and when he walked into a room, it just lit up. I mean, he just had this spirit that spread through everybody. And he included everybody.

GAVIN GUFFEY:

We walked everywhere. We found lightsabers.

NATHAN HAMEL, Gavin’s friend:

He loved arts. He loved music. Just a guy that you want to be with, interact with.

TRENTON CATOE, Gavin’s friend:

He knew how to make you laugh. He was that type of person that you wanted to hang out with.

NATHAN HAMEL:

He was just somebody that was creative, always had ideas for stuff to do. We would explore abandoned buildings. That was one thing that we did a lot, which was so much fun.

TRENTON CATOE:

Goop.

NATHAN HAMEL:

That was the nickname he gave himself. [Laughs]

TRENTON CATOE:

Mm-hmm. That was his nickname.

He was such an outgoing person. Playful, fun type of person. It kills me inside to think, what would he be doing? What type of life would he be having?

NARRATOR:

Late one night in 2022, 17-year-old Gavin Guffey was alone in his bedroom, playing video games online with friends. His father, Brandon, who was running for state representative, was just getting home.

BRANDON GUFFEY:

I came in from a political event right around midnight that night and I could hear Gavin on his video game with friends.

NATHAN HAMEL:

I had been playing video games with him that night, and I do remember him talking and he was saying, “I’m texting this girl.”

NARRATOR:

Her username was BellaJannet28, and she was messaging him on Instagram.

BRANDON GUFFEY:

First message was, “Hey, you’re cute. Are you in the Army?” Gavin, being a teenage boy, just replied back, “Thanks. You’re not too bad yourself,” or you know, just starting the conversation.

MARTHA MENDOZA, FRONTLINE:

Who did he think BellaJannet was?

BRANDON GUFFEY:

Gavin thought that BellaJannet was a college girl playing volleyball.

NARRATOR:

The conversation turned flirtatious.

NATHAN HAMEL:

And then, of course, I think they exchanged inappropriate pictures.

NARRATOR:

As soon as Gavin sent his picture, the flirting stopped. BellaJannet demanded money and threatened to share the photos with people he knew and the media.

Gavin sent $25, but that wasn’t enough.

BRANDON GUFFEY:

And at that time he mentioned that he had a gun in his room and that he was going to end it all.

NARRATOR:

He pleaded with BellaJannet not to post the photos.

BRANDON GUFFEY:

Gavin walked out of his bedroom. He was very quiet. And at that time, Gavin walked into the bathroom.

Sounded almost like a bowling ball put on a top shelf and just taking down shelves. Loud enough noise to wake my wife up. I immediately yelled, “Gavin,” run to the bathroom door, and without thinking twice, I shouldered the door in. I yelled for my wife to call 911.

GAVIN’S MOM:

Oh, my God! [inaudible]

MALE 911 OPERATOR:

Police, fire and medical?

GAVIN’S MOM:

My son just shot him—my son shot himself.

MALE 911 OPERATOR:

How old is he?

BRANDON GUFFEY:

Gavin was laying in between the tub and the toilet.

MALE 911 OPERATOR:

Stay on the line with me.

BRANDON GUFFEY:

And the only thing I’m thinking is if I can stop him bleeding then we can get him help. And even trying to put pressure to feel for a pulse, I couldn’t stop it. And I could feel it fading very quickly. I could—I could feel the life leave him. And I remember sitting outside of the house that night, I’m Googling, “What do I do, my son just committed suicide.” I didn’t understand that Gavin was a victim of sextortion.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Fraud by phone and the internet in this nation is surging.

NARRATOR:

Gavin Guffey was one of the millions of Americans who’ve fallen victim to a growing epidemic of online scams.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

Tell me about how the scam first began for you.

NARRATOR:

The Associated Press and FRONTLINE have spent more than a year investigating this shadowy world—

JULIET LINDERMAN, The Associated Press:

Would you be the only person in touch with a certain target? Or would there be—

MALE SCAMMER:

No, no.

NARRATOR:

—interviewing perpetrators, victims and officials—

JULIET LINDERMAN:

How much did you lose in total?

SIMON:

$812,000.

NARRATOR:

—and reviewing thousands of never-before-seen documents.

CAMBODIAN POLICE OFFICIAL:

[Speaking Khmer] All these devices that we confiscated are related to online investment scams.

NARRATOR:

It’s a worldwide criminal industry stealing billions of dollars a year—

ARI REDBORD, Global Head of Policy, TRM Labs:

These individuals have industrialized fraud.

NARRATOR:

—powered in many cases by organized crime, trafficked labor, American technology—

ERIC HEINTZ, Global Analyst, International Justice Mission:

All these white dots on the roofs here are satellite internet terminals.

NARRATOR:

—and, increasingly, AI.

ZVIKA KRIEGER, Fmr. Dir., Responsible Innovation, Facebook:

This is a brave new world that we’re in right now, where essentially, you’re not going to know if you’re talking to another human being unless you’re in the same room as them.

NARRATOR:

While governments and law enforcement struggle to keep up.

ERIN WEST, Founder, Operation Shamrock:

It’s a massive, massive crime.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Federal prosecutors have extradited a Nigerian man who was indicted in a sextortion case they say—

NARRATOR:

In 2025, a Nigerian man was extradited to the U.S. to face charges for carrying out the scam that led to Gavin Guffey’s death.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

South Carolina state representative Brandon Guffey, emotional seeing the accused man brought back for trial.

BRANDON GUFFEY:

This whole process— [exhales]

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

But eager to continue pushing for justice.

BRANDON GUFFEY:

It’s just the beginning of the next fight.

NARRATOR:

The suspect, Hassanbunhussein Lawal, has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

NARRATOR:

In recent years, at least seven other alleged scammers have been extradited from Nigeria in connection with other suicide cases around the U.S.

ERIKA KINETZ, The Associated Press:

We’d been hearing about the growing number of suicides in the United States among teens who had been sextorted. And we knew from the FBI that they had traced a lot of those crimes to Nigeria. So we went to Nigeria to understand what was happening on the other side of the scam.

FBI footage

NARRATOR:

We arrived in Nigeria not long after the FBI announced a crackdown operation with local authorities that led to the arrest of 22 suspected scammers. Around half were allegedly involved in scams that led to a suicide.

CHARLES SMITH JR., FBI legal attaché:

These perpetrators are becoming more and more aggressive.

NARRATOR:

Charles Smith is the FBI’s attaché in Nigeria.

ERIKA KINETZ:

What drew the FBI here to Nigeria?

CHARLES SMITH JR.:

Well, it was an increase—an increase in reporting, an increase in victims, tragically, suicide victims amongst young teenagers, and most of the perpetrators were from West Africa.

ERIKA KINETZ:

Are these mostly people working on their own, or are there criminal organizations behind them?

CHARLES SMITH JR.:

Sometimes they operate independently. Sometimes they operate in small groups. You can have one perpetrator, you can have as many as—be responsible for two to 300 victims.

ERIKA KINETZ:

One perpetrator responsible for two to 300 victims.

CHARLES SMITH JR.:

That’s right.

ERIKA KINETZ:

Can you tell us how much money these guys are making?

CHARLES SMITH JR.:

Well, it depends and it varies. The perpetrator can demand something as little as, I’ve personally seen $15, and it can go all the way up to thousands of dollars. The victim is usually a young person, a teenager, so they don’t have access to vast amounts of money.

ERIKA KINETZ:

How do they see what they’re doing? Is this a job to them? Is this a game to them? How do they see their victims?

CHARLES SMITH JR.:

It’s difficult to get inside the head of a perpetrator. But some individuals, it’s part of their role in a job, especially if they are part of an organized network. And other individuals, it’s an avenue of wealth for them. It’s for financial gain, so there’s no emotional connection to the victim.

PULSE TV NEWS ANCHOR:

Internet fraud has blended with our music industry so that it is hard to differentiate what’s real and what’s not.

ERIKA KINETZ:

There is quite a large subculture in Nigeria where this activity is completely normalized. There’s music that celebrates this. Videos. There are scripts that circulate online that they can cut and paste from to target their victims. There are groups of people that get together to share knowledge and tips and tactics. The barriers to entry are very, very low.

NARRATOR:

Some scammers even have a name for themselves: Yahoo Boys.

ERIKA KINETZ:

It goes back to Yahoo Mail and these cybercafés years and years ago. People would start these Yahoo accounts, and it became known as they were Yahoo Boys because they were running scams online. And the name has just kind of stuck.

TALK SHOW MODERATOR:

Many times people have described this here whole business almost as if it’s a victimless crime.

DEBATE SHOW PARTICIPANT:

If you support Yahoo, therefore you should clap. You should celebrate when another man scams you.

ERIKA KINETZ:

There’s a real active debate, I think, in Nigerian society. The head of the Economic Crimes Commission has called scammers, Yahoo Boys, a national shame. But the people we spoke with had so little economic opportunity, this was the one way that they saw forward in life.

Are we good to go?

NARRATOR:

Through contacts we made, we were able to talk to several scammers, including one named Ayomide, we met in Lagos.

ERIKA KINETZ:

So how did you get—When did you first start doing scams?

AYOMIDE:

I’ve been doing scams about the last year or last two years.

ERIKA KINETZ:

Last two years. How did you learn how to do this?

AYOMIDE:

I learned from a friend. You just, like, it’s a simple way. Go on TikTok. Create a page, like, create the scam page. Add pictures, then you can name yourself any name, just any name, then you start talking to them.

ERIKA KINETZ:

So this is your character, Ava from California.

AYOMIDE:

Yeah.

ERIKA KINETZ:

How did you create her? Where did you get the picture?

AYOMIDE:

On Google.

ERIKA KINETZ:

On Google. You just downloaded this picture?

AYOMIDE:

Yeah.

ERIKA KINETZ:

Tell me how it works. What do you do to make money?

AYOMIDE:

How to make money is when you open TikTok, then you start chatting, ask for his name, where he’s from, did he have kids or no? Is he married, single? So from there you collected his number, taking to maybe private app where you can talk physical. So from there, maybe you ask him, what is he looking for on TikTok? Maybe hookups or dating.

ERIKA KINETZ:

Can you show me a chat where you were threatening to post someone’s nudes?

AYOMIDE:

This is a small boy, like, he’s from Canada.

ERIKA KINETZ:

Where did you meet him?

AYOMIDE:

I met him on TikTok. Yeah, TikTok. Then we started chattting.

ERIKA KINETZ:

He sent you a picture?

AYOMIDE:

Yes.

ERIKA KINETZ:

And then you send him back the nude that he sent you.

AYOMIDE:

Yes.

ERIKA KINETZ:

And you threatened, “I’m going to show this picture to all your followers on TikTok.”

AYOMIDE:

Yes.

ERIKA KINETZ:

He sent you he sent you 50.

AYOMIDE:

Yes, he sent me 50.

ERIKA KINETZ:

And then he sent you another, and then he sent you more money. But you keep asking him for more.

AYOMIDE:

Yes, because the deal—that’s not the deal. The deal is $150. He’s going to get more 50. That’s what the deal. So that’s why I keep asking for more.

We’re actually not planning to post the pictures on internet.

ERIKA KINETZ:

Have you ever posted anyone’s naked pictures online?

AYOMIDE:

No. No.

ERIKA KINETZ:

This was a big case in the United States recently. Maybe you heard about it here, too. It was this 17-year-old boy, and he shot himself in the head. Bled to death in his dad’s arms.

AYOMIDE:

F—. That’s bad.

ERIKA KINETZ:

And there’s been like more than 50 kids around the world who’ve killed themselves because of stuff like this. Has anybody ever threatened to kill themself that you’ve talked to?

AYOMIDE:

Nope. No one.

ERIKA KINETZ:

Do you ever feel bad about what you do?

AYOMIDE:

Yeah, I do feel bad, but, as a man, you have to make money.

ERIKA KINETZ:

Right. Do you think much about the people you’re scamming, about their feelings and thoughts?

AYOMIDE:

Yes. I do.

ERIKA KINETZ:

What do you think about?

AYOMIDE:

I think about that scamming is not good, but you have to make money. That is all. That is all.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Suspects linked to cryptocurrency investment fraud were apprehended during a surprise operation in Victoria Island, Lagos.

NARRATOR:

Despite the efforts of law enforcement, the scamming industry has continued to thrive here. In one case, Nigerian authorities discovered nearly 800 people in an office building in Lagos allegedly working on various forms of financial scamming.

Around a quarter of them were foreigners, who have become a growing part of the scam industry.

MICHAEL WETKAS, Economic and Financial Crimes Comm.:

It was amazing, because the number of people involved, the number of resources deployed into this crime and the modus operandi was worrisome.

NARRATOR:

Michael Wetkas helped lead the operation for Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.

ERIKA KINETZ:

Had you ever seen anything like this in your professional career?

MICHAEL WETKAS:

No. It’s like a dream. If you look at the picture, you cannot imagine that people in that kind of number will be in one place trying to mastermind something for them like that.

ERIKA KINETZ:

What do you think this teaches us about the future direction of cybercrime?

MICHAEL WETKAS:

Scary. I’ve not been able to come to terms with the quantity of money invested in that particular fraud. So if people perpetrating this have sinking that kind of amount of money to commit fraud, then we have a lot to be afraid of, isn’t it? It’s a problem all over the world. It’s a problem for Nigerians within Nigeria itself just as it is a problem for the world itself, too. So that is why we say it’s a global menace that we have to all fight together. All of us are potential victims, and that is why we have to fight it locally and internationally.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 6:

I fell in love with someone through words and wound up shattered beyond recognition.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 7:

Everything seemed to be legitimate.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 8:

His sole intent was to steal every cent I own.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 1:

They stole $25,600 from me.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 9:

Forty-five grand.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 3:

Almost a million dollars.

MALE SCAM VICTIM 2:

4.28 million U.S. dollars.

JULIET LINDERMAN:

Scams affect everyone. Every single person is vulnerable to scams in a different way. I spoke with people with advanced degrees, doctors, lawyers, IT professionals, people who work with computers and work with the internet. And they were scammed.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 4:

I received a phone call from the scammer, a police impostor.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 5:

He promised to love me, spend his life with me.

MALE SCAM VICTIM 3:

Every promise came with deadlines, pressure to act quickly.

JULIET LINDERMAN:

And so I really wanted to understand this world and understand what it’s like when you become caught in a scam.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 8:

Everything about him appeared legitimate. We talked about a relationship we were willing to explore between us.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 9:

This has forever changed how I see the world.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 10:

I do not trust any technology.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 7:

I am now paranoid, questioning everything.

JULIET LINDERMAN:

You know, some of these scams can happen in a matter of minutes. Some of them can take months or years. And they’re evolving all the time. When people didn’t have smartphones, right, the types of scams, the way that people were being reached by scammers, it was different. But now there’s so much access that anything can be spoofed and become a scam.

And then there are romance scams, of course, people falling in love with partners online with big promises of happy ending, beautiful shared future. Some of the people I interviewed for this project were generous and brave enough to share transcripts with me. I’m talking tens of thousands of messages. But a lot of them keep it secret. Several victims I spoke to, I was the only person that they’ve ever told.

NARRATOR:

One of the people she spoke with was this man, who has never told most of his family what happened to him.

SIMON:

I cannot—I don’t even want to think about it. I can’t explain. You know, I could cry. It’s bad.

NARRATOR:

In 2023, he was living in New York, recently widowed and using an online dating site, where he met someone claiming to be a woman named Emilie.

Her pictures were stolen, assembled into a fake persona: a 37-year-old who said she’d lived all over the world and was now in Florida.

SIMON:

I just thought I was talking to a wonderful girl.

JULIET LINDERMAN:

What did she tell you about herself?

SIMON:

She told me that she had a boyfriend and the boyfriend cheat on her, that they split up.

NARRATOR:

She shared many of his interests. And while he was wealthy, she claimed to be even wealthier.

SIMON:

Emilie was telling me that she owned a 51-foot yacht that was for sale because she’s thinking to buy a bigger one.

NARRATOR:

Before long, she was telling him about her cryptocurrency investments.

SIMON:

She was telling me that, you know, if I want to start, she guide me very, very carefully on that—what to do, which app to download.

JULIET LINDERMAN:

And she described herself as your teacher.

SIMON:

Yes. She show me different item to invest in. And it went just perfect. Go like fantastic interest.

JULIET LINDERMAN:

And what did those numbers look like? I mean, how much money were you seeing in your account?

SIMON:

From $500,000 my balance grew up to a million-two.

NARRATOR:

But when he tried to withdraw the money he’d invested, he hit a snag.

SIMON:

I contacted customer service at Web361.cc to request the money to be sent to my bank. And they told me that I need to pay a miner’s fee, which is 20% of my investment.

JULIET LINDERMAN:

What was the experience like hearing this, having someone say, “Oh, you need to invest more than a hundred thousand more dollars”?

SIMON:

I already put $500,000. I say I’m going to have to do it because I’m going to lose it.

NARRATOR:

The “customer service” team told him there was a second “conversion fee.”

SIMON:

They guarantee me, “Oh, yeah yeah yeah, pay that fee, the next day you have your money in the bank.” All right. So I pay that fee.

NARRATOR:

But unbeknownst to him, the customer service team was also part of the scam.

After paying more than $300,000 in fees, he still couldn’t withdraw his money.

SIMON:

At that time, I realized I was definitely in a scam.

JULIET LINDERMAN:

How much did you lose in total?

SIMON:

$812,000.

JULIET LINDERMAN:

That’s a tremendous amount of money.

SIMON:

I can’t—I don’t even want to think about it. I just—you know.

JULIET LINDERMAN:

This victim tried to report his crime to the FBI and the local police, and like so many scam victims, really nothing came of it.

NARRATOR:

The FBI and local police declined to talk to us about this case. In a statement, the FBI said it takes scams and fraud seriously but can’t comment on individual cases to protect privacy. After three years, neither the scammer, Emilie, nor the money has been found.

But we found evidence from this scam far from the U.S., in the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar. Using the online platform Telegram, reporter Martha Mendoza was able to talk to a man who told her he worked at a compound there filled with other scammers.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

Over the course of days, weeks, months he explained how the business worked.

Everybody working in a scam compound has a job to do, and there’s a manager keeping tabs. And so there’s somebody whose job it is to just chit-chat with thousands of people. There’s someone whose job it is to lure them in. There’s someone whose job it is to do the crypto part of it. And all the while, all those different people are all pretending to be one person.

And then he told me, “I’m going to drop you some documents. You better download them fast.” And when I opened them up, there it was: the inner workings of a scam compound. More than 10,000 pages.

What are the working records that show how to go about these scams? I felt like I had just gotten the playbook.

There was a five-step plan for how to manipulate people psychologically. They call this “emotion building.” It’s always looking forward toward the relationship, always building more of what’s to come in the relationship.

One of the categories of documents we found were what they called bios or profiles. And they have notes on them that describes who this person is, this persona who is scamming a victim. And I was shocked by the level of detail in them. I’m looking at Aillen. She’s Japanese. Her Japanese name is Sakamoto. Her age is 36. Her blood type is A. The hobbies include things like watching movies, swimming and investing. It describes a personality, and what I came to understand is that the next person to come along and have the same—you know, the next shift of the scamming also needs to have this personality. And that’s why these details within these profiles mattered so much.

NARRATOR:

And there among the profiles was Emilie.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

Emilie’s scam covered hundreds of pages of scripts.

The victim thought that they were conversing with Emilie in English. But the script that I got was in Bahasa, in Indonesian. This scammer doesn’t even speak English. This whole thing was happening in a different language and was being translated in real time.

Some days Emilie was cheerful and buzzy. Some days Emilie was very sad and needed some consoling. Some days she was just checking in. But at each step, they’re just getting to know one more little detail about them that they can then weave back into their relationship.

NARRATOR:

The documents and our conversations with the source from the scam compound detailed not just the highly organized nature of the industry, but also pointed toward who was behind it: Chinese crime networks that have allied with other criminal groups and power brokers in Southeast Asia, particularly in Cambodia.

JACOB SIMS, Asia Center, Harvard University:

They came and started consolidating power by building close corporate, personal and financial relationships with the ruling elite in that country.

NARRATOR:

Jacob Sims is an expert in transnational crime who has studied the rise of the scam industry in Asia—including one of its alleged key figures, a businessman named Chen Zhi who became a personal adviser to Cambodia’s prime minister.

JACOB SIMS:

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Chen Zhi is one of the most powerful, wealthy and well-connected criminals in the world. He’s the founder of Prince Group, who actually came to Cambodia and started throwing around not millions but billions of dollars, developing real estate across the country.

NARRATOR:

Eventually, his companies expanded into the casino business, one of Cambodia’s hottest industries.

Promotional video

JACOB SIMS:

Cambodia has been a large casino market for quite some time—permissive governance and environment, lots of ease for people to move money back and forth. It’s been a major asset storage location for criminals across the region for many, many years.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Cambodia says it is banning online gambling and will stop issuing licenses to preserve public order.

JACOB SIMS:

In 2019, the Cambodian government issued a universal ban on online gambling in the country. And so what happened was you saw all of these tech-enabled casinos that had all of the tools and modern instruments in the world to launder money, and then the start of the pandemic—

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Millions of people under quarantine—

JACOB SIMS:

These once-thriving casinos were then all of a sudden just empty but are quite expensive to maintain—these are very large speculative real estate investments. And so, effectively almost overnight you started seeing them repopulate. And what they found very, very quickly was that long-con crypto-based investment scams were actually far more lucrative than online gambling.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

All but a handful of states have issued stay-at-home orders in an effort to keep people safe during this pandemic.

NARRATOR:

Many of the casinos essentially became scam compounds, which increasingly targeted Westerners, who were spending more and more time online because of the pandemic.

ZVIKA KRIEGER:

I don’t think any of these dynamics were created by COVID, but COVID was absolutely an accelerant.

NARRATOR:

Zvika Krieger was working at Facebook as the pandemic got underway.

ZVIKA KRIEGER:

You saw a massive uptick in social media usage. People were trapped inside their homes, they weren’t able to have face-to-face interaction, and so, you know—it became a lifeline for people. It became a place where people could find connection, relationship, intimacy, social outlet, and so skyrocketing numbers that we saw during COVID. And the intersection of the rapid growth of social media use, the emotional vulnerability that people were experiencing and then the rapid rise of e-commerce I think all kind of congealed to create a perfect storm around scams.

NARRATOR:

Political unrest in Myanmar added to the opportunities.

MALE NEWSREADER:

After nearly a decade sharing power with civilians, Myanmar’s military staged a coup.

NARRATOR:

Armed militias teamed up with organized crime groups, many of them Chinese, and began building dozens of new, heavily guarded compounds, housing tens of thousands of scammers working around the clock.

ERIN WEST, Founder, Operation Shamrock:

One of the most dramatic pieces of evidence about the scale and the growth is to look at images from 2020. And you see that it was a field. And then you look at 2022 and you realize, oh, my God, there’s a whole city here. How did that happen?

NARRATOR:

Erin West is a former U.S. prosecutor who worked on a special unit with the FBI and Secret Service focused on cybercrime.

ERIN WEST:

Starting in March of 2022, we were seeing victims of a crime that we had never seen before, where victims are getting hit with romance and cryptocurrency and then losing all of their money. Here’s why it’s different: It’s being done at a scale that we have never seen and never even anticipated. It’s being done in an industrial manner out of massive compounds in Southeast Asia and growing around the world.

It’s miserably hot out here, and steamy, but I can’t believe that we got the access.

NARRATOR:

West now runs an anti-scam organization and has traveled to the Myanmar-Thai border to see the situation firsthand.

ERIN WEST:

Myanmar’s beautiful. That Thai area is beautiful, and you get up on this overlook and you look down and there’s a community down there. And it looks like it could be a resort.

NARRATOR:

In fact, it was one of the largest scam compounds in the world, known as KK Park.

ERIN WEST:

The Thai military has given us access to this area just across the Moei River from KK Park. As you can see, there are definitely people living in there. Tons of laundry hanging from buildings. And if you look closer to the river you’ll see the cement wall that divides us from them, with barbed wire over the top.

KK Park is the most notorious and one of the earliest-built scam compounds. It was where scammers proved this could be done. That we could build a city and wall off the rest of the world and commit horrendous crimes.

NARRATOR:

Tens of thousands of people are estimated to have worked here at its peak—many who thought they were traveling to legitimate jobs in Thailand, only to be trafficked into Myanmar.

ERIN WEST:

The buildings with those red roofs that look like Monopoly hotels, those are dormitories housing thousands of human-trafficked workers. You need a lot of people behind screens to be able to reach out to the number of people who have been hit with these scams. And so to do that, to generate the human power that they needed, they had to traffic people in. They had to trick people about what they thought they were doing.

NARRATOR:

That is what happened to the husband of a woman named Thu, who we met in Vietnam. She told us her husband, Hoc, had left on the promise of a restaurant manager job in Thailand.

THU:

[Speaking Vietnamese] He was under intense financial pressure. He’s the type who worries too much about the future. He was scared we wouldn’t have enough for our child’s education and things like that. He felt that as parents, if we couldn’t provide fully, he’d failed.

Then he found a post on TikTok and followed it to a Facebook page. They were recruiting for a restaurant manager. When he told me they were covering all expenses, I was suspicious immediately. There’s no such thing as a path paved with roses. It seemed too smooth. They even paid for his bus and plane tickets. When he got on the bus, my son was crying, begging his dad to stay. But he was determined.

NARRATOR:

Hoc’s journey ended at KK Park.

THU:

[Speaking Vietnamese] It was when my husband was being transported by boat across the river that he realized he’d been scammed. At that moment, he cried so much. He called home, sobbing. He was crying because he didn’t know when he would ever see us again.

NARRATOR:

For years before Hoc was trafficked, thousands of workers had fallen for the same kinds of promises and wound up in scam compounds.

In January 2025, one case put a spotlight on the practice. A Chinese actor named Wang Xing was lured to Thailand on the promise of a film role. When he arrived, he was instead taken over the border to a scam compound in Myanmar.

Back in China, people began raising alarms on social media.

VIETNAMESE POLICE OFFICIAL:

[Speaking Vietnamese] At first, he willingly went there for a casting job. But the situation turned out to be a different one, once he arrived.

NARRATOR:

The public outcry led to his return in January 2025.

WANG XING:

The army just went rampant and pushed me into the car—

ERIN WEST:

When someone important gets touched by this scam, that’s when people move to action. And that’s exactly what happened.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

A multinational crackdown on scam compounds in Myanmar.

NARRATOR:

A few weeks later, an operation by Thai, Chinese and Myanmar authorities led to the release of more than 7,000 other captives from multiple compounds.

JACOB SIMS:

So over the last several years, Chinese law enforcement have conducted selective, targeted raids against scam compounds all over the region that were believed to be targeting Chinese people. And that’s resulted in tens of thousands of people being extradited back to China.

ERIN WEST:

There was Chinese pressure put on these militia groups that were controlling the area where the Chinese organized crime syndicates were operating these scam facilities. And while it was claimed by some that it was a crackdown, what it really was is—I think of a layoff. I think of a shakedown of the bosses being asked to, OK, you’ve got to give up some people. Give me some people.

NARRATOR:

Despite that crackdown and increased public attention, scam compounds continued to operate and lure more workers, like Hoc.

THU:

[Speaking Vietnamese] Since the day he left, I haven’t missed a single month of going to pray for him. I just keep praying and waiting, hoping my husband is safe and protected from harm. As for when he’ll actually come home, I’ll leave that to fate, because I really have no idea when that might be.

NARRATOR:

In October 2025, four months after he had left home, she heard from Hoc. He was free.

Myanmar forces had moved into KK Park.

THU:

[Speaking Vietnamese] I’m happy, of course. But I’m waiting until I see him in the flesh before I can be sure. [Laughs]

NARRATOR:

The journey home took several days. He took photos along the way.

The AP filmed with the family as they were reunited.

HOC:

[Speaking Vietnamese] The moment I stepped out of that zone, I felt like I had been reborn.

NARRATOR:

He told us what it had been like inside the notorious scam compound.

HOC:

[Speaking Vietnamese] If we made a mistake, we’d be punished or beaten.

INTERVIEWER:

[Speaking Vietnamese] What kind of mistakes?

HOC:

[Speaking Vietnamese] Punctuation, grammar—and especially American English.

Sometimes I thought, “I can’t scam people, but I can’t keep getting beaten and punished either.” I used to wonder if I could just go to sleep and never wake up again.

If they catch you dozing off, they make you work while kneeling or standing. If someone keeps falling asleep, they’ll deduct money or beat them. If you cross your legs even a little or shake your leg, they’ll fine and beat you.

NARRATOR:

He said he was beaten after being caught planning an escape and showed us a picture he surreptitiously took of himself.

HOC:

[Speaking Vietnamese] Every day there was some incident. Every day we heard people being dragged into rooms to be beaten. It kept me in a constant state of fear and anxiety.

NARRATOR:

In the documents we obtained from the source in Myanmar, we saw strict codes of conduct for workers at the compounds, with severe punishments, including solitary confinement.

Human rights groups have reported and published instances of beatings and abuse across the region.

ERIN WEST:

Violence, extreme violence, war crime-level violence. Excessive exercise, deprivation of food and water, being placed in dark rooms, being forced to do violence against their fellow people. And for a lot of people, that’s more than they can take.

NARRATOR:

In the weeks after Hoc’s release, Myanmar’s military demolished much of KK Park.

In Cambodia, a series of high-profile crackdowns was underway.

But for the victims caught up in scams, the long-lasting damage had already been done.

ALICE LIN:

It was so stressful to find out, and I was checking it because, you know, all of a sudden you lost all your life savings. Not only my life savings, also my husband’s life savings.

I felt bad. I felt a little bit stupid at that time. Why would I do things like that?

NARRATOR:

Alice Lin was 79 and retired in California when, in 2022, a stranger contacted her on the Chinese messaging app WeChat.

He called himself Justin.

ALICE LIN:

In one of the chat groups, someone said, “Do I know you?” And then I replied, “No, I don’t know you. Please delete it.” And right away he asked, “What’s your occupation?” I said, “In home health.” And then he said, “Oh, well, I’m in the medical equipment.” Right there, that’s the biggest mistake. I mistook him as one of my colleagues.

NARRATOR:

Hiding behind stolen photographs, Justin unspooled his fake identity: a plane crash, a near-death experience.

ALICE LIN:

And he sent me the picture.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

And what’s happening in this picture?

ALICE LIN:

He was lying in the hospital bed and was with all the machine hook on him. And he was really terribly injured. And then he told me that his wife died in the air crash and how he wished that was him. And right there, you know, I guess, had that sympathy for him.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

So he’s being vulnerable with you.

ALICE LIN:

Yeah. I think again and again he was kind of building up the trust.

NARRATOR:

He told her he was worth over $100 million.

ALICE LIN:

And then he said he could teach me. He told me that, you know, just follow his instruction and download some app. At that time I thought I could trust him—not only that we had the same language, same religion, and also he built himself as the image of a billionaire. I don’t think he would ever take my money. I just totally followed what he said, step by step.

NARRATOR:

Following his instructions, she sent more than half a million dollars to what she thought was a cryptocurrency trading app. On screen, her investment appeared to double.

ALICE LIN:

He told me that the more money you put in, the more benefit, the more gain you would receive.

NARRATOR:

Justin pushed her to invest more. So she turned to her children.

ALICE LIN:

I decided I would just ask my older daughter to borrow a little bit of money from her.

FLOY SHIEH, Alice’s daughter:

So my older sister said, “Is there a reason why Mom needs money?” I said, no, not that I know of. And then we realized it was a scam.

NARRATOR:

It was straight out of the scam playbook—fake identity, fake trading app.

FLOY SHIEH:

And then I think it was shocking, because then you think, oh, my gosh, this is actually her life savings.

ALICE LIN:

The scammer knew I’m retired and I’m old. And to do that, it’s hard for me to take. The last sentence the scammer say before he left, he said, [speaking Mandarin] “Nǐ hái huózhe ma.” [Speaking English] “Are you still alive?”

MARTHA MENDOZA:

What do you think he means?

ALICE LIN:

I think deep in his conscience, with the way that I lose all that money, and most people could not take it. They probably kill themselves.

I really want to commit suicide.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

Really, Alice?

ALICE LIN:

Yeah. Yeah. Because I—the situation. I cannot handle it.

So he asked me, “Are you still alive?” I told myself, I’m alive, and I’m going to fight back.

NARRATOR:

She reported what had happened to the FBI and local police. It led nowhere, but she didn’t stop there.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

Alice Lin sued her bank under a very unique to California statute that says that says that knowingly assisting somebody who is preying on a senior citizen is equal to committing the crime yourself. The bank said it had multiple layers of protection. There was a teller who talked to her and said, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” And she insisted. But in the end, that was the legal basis for the lawsuit. The bank ultimately settled without admitting any guilt, saying instead it was going to cost more money and be more difficult perhaps to deal with this lawsuit. So she, Alice Lin, walked away with an undisclosed settlement that she says was satisfactory.

NARRATOR:

The bank denied any knowledge of the fraud. But the hundreds of thousands of dollars she’d converted to crypto and sent to the scammers was gone.

We asked Ari Redbord at TRM Labs, which tracks cryptocurrency crime, to see if he could find it.

ARI REDBORD, Fmr. senior advisor, Treasury Dept.:

Essentially, in crypto, every transaction is traceable, trackable and immutable, meaning it’s there forever, because every transaction occurs on a blockchain, which is an open public ledger. But it remains today this cat-and-mouse game. Bad actors are trying to take those funds that they’ve taken from a victim and move them as fast as they can, ultimately off-chain, so they can convert them to cash and run away with them, if you will.

NARRATOR:

TRM followed her money to a crypto wallet containing $18 million.

ARI REDBORD:

So Alice’s funds are being sent to this wallet along with all these other victims, which gets you to that $18 million. What they’re doing is they’re taking Alice’s funds and sending it through a whole series of intermediary wallets, basically to obfuscate that flow of funds. But eventually, and it’s almost true in every case, you ultimately end up at a cryptocurrency exchange.

Essentially, exchanges allow cash for crypto, crypto for cash. Once the funds move to the exchange, these bad actors will, as fast as they possibly can, convert those funds and then move them into traditional currencies.

Alice’s case is a pretty standard case. But the reality is that what we’re seeing here is the scaling of fraud, the industrialization of fraud. This is a highly organized network that isn’t just, hey, like looking out there for one individual at a time to scam. We’re seeing hundreds of people scammed at the same time and the same infrastructure being used.

NARRATOR:

Until recently, Rebecca Keithley helped lead the FBI’s national financial crimes program.

REBECCA KEITHLEY, Fmr. Assistant Section Chief, FBI:

Scams over the past eight years as reported to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center have grown exponentially.

Last year alone, in 2025, $17.7 billion were reported lost through cyber-enabled fraud or scams, comprising 453,000 complaints. Last year it was $39,000 lost per victim. It’s become more lucrative.

Cryptocurrency is one of the things that’s fueled the exponential growth in scamming victimization over the past decade. Because it’s difficult to trace, once the money has been put into crypto it can move between wallets very quickly across international lines. One could think of it as instant money laundering. The victim is putting the funds into the platform.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

And then it’s just gone?

REBECCA KEITHLEY:

Yeah.

NARRATOR:

According to the FBI, one of the most popular cryptocurrencies for scammers is Tether, whose flagship token is pegged to the U.S. dollar, so its value doesn’t fluctuate like other cryptocurrencies.

But that stability comes at a price: Tether is considerably easier to freeze.

ARI REDBORD:

Issuers like Tether can freeze funds in a way that you can never do with cash. Stablecoin issuers have really unique capabilities when it comes to compliance. They are actually able to burn, or essentially seize, their native token anywhere in the wild. We can’t do this with anything else. We can’t do this with bitcoin. We can’t do this with ethereum. But stablecoin issuers are able to do that.

It’s all this cat-and-mouse game, because law enforcement is using tools to track and trace these flow of funds, Tether and others have this capability to burn and reissue, but bad actors want to get their funds in a stable asset, and then ultimately off-ramp them as fast as possible.

MATT NOYES, Dir., Cyberpolicy & Strategy, Secret Service:

It is imperative that those criminally involved in this crime are brought to justice.

NARRATOR:

Matt Noyes directs cyber policy at the Secret Service, which can have assets and currencies used in scams blocked or frozen.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

When I look at the assets that are being frozen or blocked, it seems like it’s almost all Tether.

MATT NOYES:

Yes.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

Why is that?

MATT NOYES:

Ultimately, their goal in using crypto is to move the assets. And so they want stable value. Tether is the largest stablecoin by far. And so that becomes the most attractive medium for them.

BRIAN GLICK, Cybercrimes Survivors Advisory and Recovery podcast:

Hello, everyone. We are here because there are way too many Americans getting scammed.

NARRATOR:

Brian Glick started a podcast about scams after he lost $575,000 in one three years ago.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

What’s your goal with doing this?

BRIAN GLICK:

I want all those scammees out there to know that through education comes empowerment.

NARRATOR:

Glick had sent money to the scammers using Tether. He later provided the FBI with his financial transactions, which helped them track what happened.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

You could identify the money.

BRIAN GLICK:

Yes. Yeah, I have the transactions, the accounts, to and from, where they went, and it was all on the blockchain. All of it.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

And you could identify this Tether with this code is my money.

BRIAN GLICK:

That’s correct. We could do that.

NARRATOR:

The FBI wouldn’t do an interview about the case.

Glick provided us emails he received that show how the FBI asked Tether to freeze the funds, but the company told them it couldn’t.

BRIAN GLICK:

This is not me saying that it’s my money, it’s the FBI saying it. And here’s all the evidence. I was hopeful, hopeful, hopeful, and the floor fell from under me. And I knew I was never getting my money back. And I—It felt terrible.

NARRATOR:

In the emails, the FBI urged Tether to freeze Glick’s money even though it had been comingled with other people’s funds and the company was balking at doing so.

In a statement, Tether told us it could not, quote, “arbitrarily freeze funds of unrelated users without proper process.”

MATT NOYES:

They’ve made a number of announcements of where they’ve assisted us in freezing assets. It’s one of the challenges of this new form of finance. And it’s one of our constraints in working on this.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

Are they doing enough?

MATT NOYES:

When you look at the volume going through it, it’s clear they could be doing more. That’s the more important thing, is they need to be doing more. They’re working towards doing more.

NARRATOR:

Paolo Ardoino is the CEO of Tether, whose cryptocurrency is also known as USDT.

PAOLO ARDOINO, CEO, Tether:

There are enormous amount of cases in which we work with law enforcement and the FBI, which is on board. The reason why I said the FBI is on board on Tether, because that’s the only way that restitution can happen. We are not law enforcement.

NARRATOR:

Tether has been under federal scrutiny in recent years even as it has cooperated with authorities to stop a number of scams.

PAOLO ARDOINO:

So first of all, our competitors, even the stablecoin business, they wait for a judge-ordered freeze. We get a notification from law enforcement, and we freeze.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

I mean, you know that’s not always true, right? Like I—we saw NYPD and other law enforcement who have gone to Tether and said, please, even in this one with Mr. Glick, they’re saying, “Please freeze this,” and Tether is saying, “We can’t do it.”

PAOLO ARDOINO:

I’m not familiar with the specific case, but—

MARTHA MENDOZA:

Of course.

PAOLO ARDOINO:

—usually we would need to take some time, go through this document and see exactly what happened. Then of course, there is a process, there has to provide some proof. So I don’t know the cases in specific, but I think that there is no company, even in the banking industry, in the traditional financial industry, that is so helpful as us.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

I’m worried, though. I’m worried someone’s going to watch this, and if they’re watching this, then, and they’re thinking, “Well, that’s actually not too risky, because USDT can freeze my money. We can follow it down the blockchain.” Is that a reasonable takeaway?

PAOLO ARDOINO:

If a criminal is trying to use USDT or stablecoins that are centralized, is—they are very stupid criminals. So we will freeze illicit activity on USDT.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

And so, again, if I’m putting my money in USDT, I am getting an assurance from you then that you would freeze that if it’s a mistake or a scam investment.

PAOLO ARDOINO:

We are working with law enforcement. We are not above the law. We are working with law enforcement to ensure that our actions are in line with law enforcement and with the proper judicial system.

NARRATOR:

Last year, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned dozens of individuals and entities linked to cybercurrency scams, including Chen Zhi and the Prince Group companies in Cambodia.

JACOB SIMS:

In October of 2025, the Eastern District of New York announced the seizure of $15 billion in bitcoin. And simultaneously, the U.S. Treasury Department and the FCDO in the U.K. announced joint sanctions against him and against his transnational criminal organization, which is called Prince Holding Group. The $15 billion bitcoin seizure was the largest criminal asset seizure in history when it took place.

NARRATOR:

Chen himself was indicted in the U.S. but arrested in Cambodia and sent back to Beijing.

Chinese authorities touted the arrest and called Chen the ringleader of a major criminal syndicate.

JACOB SIMS:

The Chinese government put pressure on the Cambodian government and secured his extradition. There’s a famous image of him being walked off a plane, a black bag being pulled off of his head, and then he’s being rolled into a Chinese prison—probably with none of the evidence about him ever to see the light of day again.

ARI REDBORD, Global Head of Policy, TRM Labs:

My take is that China saw this all happening. Chen Zhi likely flew a little too close to the sun, so China pulled him back before the U.S. could ultimately get their hands on him to really do a full debrief, full criminal trial, to really learn as much as we possibly can. If you read the indictment, it’s very clear that Chen Zhi and Prince Group had connections at the highest level of the Cambodian government, but also within Chinese intelligence circles.

NARRATOR:

The Prince Group told us in a statement that the allegations are “demonstrably false,” and that Chen is a victim of “a geopolitical tug of war resulting from a flawed U.S. indictment.”

MARTHA MENDOZA:

Since that $15 billion seizure, which currently just sits in a crypto wallet and frankly the value fluctuates by the billions, the U.S. government has set up what’s called the Scam Center Strike Force.

JEANINE PIRRO, U.S. Attorney:

Good morning, everyone. I’m Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney in Washington. This new strike force’s mission is to identify and charge the leaders of these cryptocurrency scam organizations, to trace and to seize the stolen funds.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

That strike force says it has seized close to a billion dollars worth of scam proceeds. And what our investigation found is that victims aren’t getting their money back. Mom and Pop who gave away their money and mortgaged their house or even had to sell their house, that money being held by the U.S. government as a scam proceed is not making it back to the people who lost it.

NARRATOR:

We tried to talk to Jeanine Pirro and officials from the scams task force but they declined to be interviewed. A spokesperson reiterated that they are aggressively targeting scams and said they could not get into any specifics about each seizure, where the funds are held or what, if anything, has been returned to the victims.

As for the authorities in Southeast Asia, the Cambodian government recently claimed it was winning its fight against the scam industry in the country.

But our reporting has continued to find evidence of it persisting in the region, particularly in Myanmar.

ERIC HEINTZ, Global Analyst, International Justice Mission:

So this image is from April 4 of this year.

NARRATOR:

Eric Heintz researches human trafficking and cyberscams at the nonprofit International Justice Mission.

ERIC HEINTZ:

We have a compound here that’s under construction. We have a cluster of humanitarian-type tents that are probably being used to run scams. And then we have an empty field here where there’s really not even groundwork being done. And then in the span of two months, two and a half months, we have this entire complex that’s been built, and we have numerous satellite antennas on the roofs here, which indicates that people are on-site and they are running scams from this location.

NARRATOR:

Heintz has identified more than two dozen scam compounds in Myanmar that have been built or expanded in the past year.

VANTOR

ERIC HEINTZ:

So this is another example where in the beginning of April we have prep work going on, but there’s no buildings, no scam infrastructure. And then by the end of June, we have numerous buildings here that are being used for scams.

Here’s another one that is—beginning of April we have some prep work, we have some tents, and then by the end of May, we have multiple buildings here, which are consistent with the scam compounds we’ve seen in other areas.

Disruption is good, but it needs to be consistent. And going in and just closing one compound or going in and doing something for a month and then calling it a day is not enough. You need to continue to go after the compounds. We need to go after the infrastructure that they’re using.

NARRATOR:

Some of the most critical infrastructure comes from an American company.

VANTOR

ERIC HEINTZ:

So we can see this compound popped up over the span of a few months, and we can see that all these white dots on the roofs here are all satellite internet terminals.

And with some of the device data, we can actually see that they’re connecting to the internet via Starlink.

NARRATOR:

Starlink is the U.S. satellite internet service founded by Elon Musk.

ERIKA KINETZ:

You can’t scam unless you can get online. If you’re sitting in the middle of the jungle in Myanmar, how are you going to get online? Starlink is a great answer for you. We’ve seen the use of Starlink at these scam compounds.

Late last year there was this big crackdown on scam compounds in Myanmar. Starlink comes out and says, “Hey, we are here as a force for good. We’re going to cut off service at 2,500 kits around these scam compounds.” So when they want to, they can cut service to scammers.

What happened next? We saw the user base in Myanmar of Starlink fall in half. That tells you that a lot of its users are scammers.

Then it started to grow back again, and now it looks like local internet service providers and Starlink are really the biggest players.

ERIC HEINTZ:

So this is from commercially available AdSec data.

We’ve used this in various trafficking cases. This shows location, IP addresses—

VANTOR

NARRATOR:

With the help of Eric Heintz, we found that scammers at more than dozen of the new or expanded compounds in Myanmar were using Starlink last spring.

ERIC HEINTZ:

So with just commercially available information, we can see the exact coordinates and the exact IP addresses that these terminals are using. So it should be possible to go in and shut off specific devices at specific locations. We know that these compounds rely very heavily on Starlink services. And if they were able to shut these off and consistently block access to these known compounds, some of which are city-sized, we know that that would severely hamper the ability of these scams to operate.

NARRATOR:

Starlink would not respond to our requests for comment.

The company has said it works with law enforcement around the world and is committed to “detecting and preventing misuse by bad actors.”

ERIKA KINETZ:

Starlink is really the first link in this digital supply chain that links scammers in Myanmar with victims in the United States. We looked at device data from four compounds in Myanmar and found that American companies were being disproportionately used by scammers. One in five signals was being carried by a U.S. company. These are names that you would recognize. This is Cogent Communications, AT&T, Oracle, DigitalOcean. There’s other companies like the Canadian company GT Host, UpCloud, a Finnish company, that are running servers in the United States. This is all within U.S. jurisdiction, and scammers are abusing these services and technologies to scam people in the United States.

NARRATOR:

The AP reached out to all these companies. They emphasized they respond to valid abuse reports and cooperate with authorities, but due to privacy they don’t see the content their networks carry or what end users are doing online.

SEN. MAGGIE HASSAN, (D) New Hampshire:

This is a problem that is impacting Americans in every corner of the country, and it is unacceptable to continue the status quo.

NARRATOR:

The role of American technology in helping scammers victimize Americans is the subject of an ongoing congressional investigation led by Sen. Maggie Hassan.

MAGGIE HASSAN:

We began hearing from constituents about these scams. My small towns in New Hampshire, those scams that get reported to police are adding up to $2 million a year in a small town of 15,000 people. And people are losing their life savings, so it’s time to take action.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

Can they call the police and get some help?

MAGGIE HASSAN:

It depends. They can call the police. They can also report it to the FTC. But there is no centralized hub and centralized law enforcement response.

We are reaching out to the private sector. The technologies at issue are peer-to-peer payment platforms. It’s telecom, it’s satellite internet access, it’s dating apps and it’s AI. Those are all technologies that have led to this exponential increase in scams and the devastation that they’re causing. All of these technologies are ones that are being exploited to the great detriment of individuals, and ultimately they’re going to undermine the success of these companies, too, because if people become timid about using dating apps, using peer-to-peer payment platforms, that undermines these companies’ economic viability. One of the things we’re trying to do is educate consumers, but we also of course have to pull in these companies. We need to make sure that there are some guardrails in place.

BRANDON GUFFEY:

After Gavin passed, the kids come by and painted rocks out in front of the house. It was just a way of remembering. You can see there’s some that are holding up well.

NARRATOR:

In the case of Gavin Guffey’s death, the alleged scammer continued targeting his family for days after the suicide.

BRANDON GUFFEY:

This actually was something Gavin painted.

Shortly afterwards, I got a message from an aunt that her son, 14-year-old, which was Gavin’s cousin, was getting extorted online, and it was about Gavin. And whenever she sent me the images and sent me the screenshots, what was being said, I realized that this was bigger. Now, the person that was contacting him, the name was BellaJannet30. So same profile picture, looked the same, just a different name online. And as I’m showing my wife that this BellaJannet30 is sending these messages that’s talking about Gavin, my 16-year-old walks out of his room and he just picks up the phone and he says, “I don’t know who the hell you are, but quit calling me.” I look at his phone, and it’s BellaJannet30. I start looking at my messages, and I’ve got tons of messages.

NARRATOR:

The scammer was threatening to release images of Gavin if he didn’t get paid.

BRANDON GUFFEY:

This was within the week of us trying to bury Gavin.

NARRATOR:

Instagram had quickly taken down BellaJannet28, the account used to blackmail Gavin, but not BellaJannet30, even though they were registered to the same phone number.

BRANDON GUFFEY:

This person didn’t just have one profile. This person has numerous profiles, and they only pulled BellaJannet28. And I kept thinking, why didn’t they take the rest of these accounts down? At some point, the big tech companies have to be held responsible because they are providing the tools.

NARRATOR:

No one from Meta, which owns Instagram, would agree to an interview. In a statement, the company said it disabled three accounts targeting the Guffeys as soon as it became aware that its policies against child sexual exploitation were being violated. It said it works closely with industry peers and law enforcement to fight and disrupt scammers.

In July 2024, the company removed around 63,000 Nigerian Instagram accounts linked to sextortion.

And as part of a recent court settlement with attorneys general around the country, Meta has instituted new safeguards on teen accounts, along with new child protection policies.

ARTURO BÉJAR, Fmr. Dir., Engineering for Site Integrity, Facebook:

Social media, especially these big services, should be a hostile environment. Like, you shouldn’t be able to step foot in it if your mission is to scam kids, to scam other people, to hurt others.

NARRATOR:

Arturo Béjar was a safety executive at Facebook.

ARTURO BÉJAR:

My work has shown that it doesn’t need to be this way.

NARRATOR:

He has since become a vocal critic and told us that even with the new changes, the company needs to be doing more to stop scams on the platform.

ARTURO BÉJAR:

You could tell a teenager before they send something to a stranger, “OK, slow down. You sure you want to do that? Answer me three questions.” And also just acknowledge that if you don’t know, then this might happen. And if one teenager gets a post and says, “Oh yeah, I realize this is bulls— now,” then you use that information and you go scorched earth on everybody who’s using that playbook and all those things. And you use features to detect similar things and you delete all of them. And these platforms have the tools to detect them.

NARRATOR:

Zvika Krieger led a team that helped strengthen safety tools during his time at Meta.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

The scammers are so far ahead of the tech companies, it seems to me. Is there any way to catch up to that?

ZVIKA KRIEGER:

Tech companies are the most sophisticated technologists in the world right now. And so, like, there’s—I have yet to confront a challenge where if the company put the amount of resources that it put behind its core business model or its core products, if they put it behind these challenges, they would be able to resolve it. It’s a choice. But I think that at the end of the day, a lot of the solutions will introduce friction into the user experience. And that will come at a cost to the companies.

The first place that you could introduce friction is when people create an account. Put in a name, put in an email address, put in your birthday. Boom, you got an account. But if you were to require that someone has a government-issued ID, even just the act of someone reaching into their pocket, pulling out their ID, taking a photo of it and scanning it, someone might be like, “I don’t care about this product this much. This is a pain in the butt. I’m not going to do it.”

And I think that there needs to be a real reckoning when you’re looking at metrics like growth and metrics like revenue and time spent on app. Those are important. But when you’re in a company that is among the biggest companies in the world, that is minting money, making billions and billions of dollars, it’s not unreasonable to say, “Hey, slow down.” “Slow your growth a little bit in order to protect people” doesn’t feel like an unreasonable thing to ask.

NARRATOR:

In its statement to us, Meta said, “We agree more can be done—and that’s what we’re doing.”

Brandon Guffey is part of an ongoing multi-district lawsuit against Meta and other social media companies to try to force more changes, but he has also been advocating for stronger laws to prevent online scams.

BRANDON GUFFEY:

This crime is so horrific because it targets all of our shame.

MALE REPORTER:

A bittersweet celebration in downtown Rock Hill. A ceremonial bill signing for Gavin’s Law.

BRANDON GUFFEY:

After Gavin died, I felt like there was change needed on many fronts. Number one, we needed awareness about what is going on. No one was talking about this. This is your most shameful moment. Number two, we needed legislative change.

This community, our state, everyone has rallied together to get this passed. And what we have done is we have sent the message—

Whenever you lose a child, or something like this trauma happens, it’s almost like having a five-gallon bucket of water, but instead of it being able to fill up to make you happy, it’s got a bunch of holes in it. So each win fills it up temporarily, and then it drains out quickly.

NARRATOR:

After helping pass a new law in his home state of South Carolina, he took the fight to Washington.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM, (R) South Carolina:

To all those who held a photo today, if we’re able to be successful, your loved one did not die in vain.

BRANDON GUFFEY:

Sen. Graham and Sen. Durbin had me come up and participate in a press conference where I was able to tell a little bit about Gavin’s story.

I think the message was clear, and that’s these companies can either get in line or they need to get offline.

I would say that’s the first time in D.C. I’ve really been able to share my story. Since that hearing, I was able to start working with more and more senators.

BRANDON GUFFEY:

While we as lawmakers fight amongst ourselves, will it take one of your own children or grandchildren to finally get fed up enough to move? Big Tech is the Big Tobacco of this generation.

That opened up the door to work with Sen. Cruz and Sen. Klobuchar on the Take It Down Act, to work with the First Lady on the Take It Down Act.

SEN. TED CRUZ, (R) Texas:

Rep. Guffey, would you please share what happened with your son.

BRANDON GUFFEY:

Thank you, Sen. Cruz. July 27, 2022—

So the Take It Down Act is legislation that states that any images that are put up online and reported, you can demand that the platform take them down within 48 hours.

It would allow families to be able to have those images taken down and to have the voice that my son did not have. There was no recourse of being able to know, to be able to get these images down, and in his mind, no one had his back.

Take It Down Act passed in May of 2025. It was one of those moments that was, I guess, my most proud moments.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

What’s this feel like for you?

BRANDON GUFFEY:

[Laughs] Every time we hit a milestone, I feel like it’s going to make me feel great. And then it never fills that hole. So it’s great to remove the images, but until we get Big Tech to really start standing up and doing what’s right to protect our children, I don’t know that we can.

Now, I don’t think the Take It Down Act is a perfect bill by any means, but it’s a first step in many things that we can do.

MALE NEWSREADER:

More people are losing more money than ever before to scammers.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Artificial intelligence is seemingly everywhere—

MALE NEWSREADER:

AI is making it easier for people to dupe folks.

ERIKA KINETZ:

The adversary is getting harder to beat. And I think AI is also playing a big role in changing the game.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

Absolutely. Somebody used to have 15 phones—a scammer, 15 fake profiles. “Hello, Erika, how are you?” Now AI scales that to the extreme. Now they can—

NARRATOR:

Over the year FRONTLINE and the AP have been reporting on scams, the problem has continued to evolve and become even harder to combat.

ERIKA KINETZ:

Well, what AI has done is it’s made it possible for just about anyone to scam just about anyone else.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

And increasingly you may not even need to have the human bodies doing the scamming as much because of what you’re finding.

NARRATOR:

Last year, for the first time, the FBI began tracking AI-enabled fraud as a separate category of scams.

REBECCA KEITHLEY:

Artificial intelligence has supercharged the scamming ecosystem. We’ve always seen deep fakes, but artificial intelligence is making it easier for scammers to develop more convincing content at scale. That could be more grammatically accurate correspondence. It could be videos, sound bites. And so it’s definitely impacting the ecosystem.

AI-GENERATED VIDEO CLIP:

Bankers are saying that they are seeing more fraud cases.

AI-GENERATED VIDEO CLIP:

And it’s really targeting senior citizens

AI-GENERATED VIDEO CLIP:

They say the scams start off as a simple online friendship.

JULIET LINDERMAN:

AP created a quiz, like a little test to see if viewers can identify AI-generated images.

AI-GENERATED VIDEO CLIP:

This is the pill that can cure your cancer.

AI-GENERATED VIDEO CLIP:

The Senate has a special committee that works to keep older Americans informed about managing their money.

JULIET LINDERMAN:

And it’s incredibly tricky. And people who are taking this quiz are failing.

I think that the scam industry is heading like a rocket ship towards the AI universe. You can just have an army of AI avatars scamming people.

AI-GENERATED VIDEO CLIP:

Hi, Isabella. Thought I should make a video—

NARRATOR:

But that same technology can also be used against scams.

ERIKA KINETZ:

So what do we need to do?

OLIVIER BEAUDET-LABRECQUE, Institute of Economic Crime Investigation:

OK, first I think you need an idea of a profile. OK? You need a sex first. Is it a woman?

NARRATOR:

At the Institute of Economic Crime Investigation in Switzerland, we met criminologist Olivier Beaudet-Labrecque, who has been working with European banks to help shut down scams.

OLIVIER BEAUDET-LABRECQUE:

We wanted to use gen AI technologies such as very intelligent chatbots directly against scammers to collect information that could be used to prevent such problems.

NARRATOR:

He runs a team that builds autonomous chatbots that pose as victims.

ERIKA KINETZ:

So how does that work?

OLIVIER BEAUDET-LABRECQUE:

So the scammer thinks that he or she’s scamming a real person, a real victim, while in fact it’s a robot. And the robot collects information such as payment data that is used by the scammer to collect money. So our customers are banks, and with the data we share with them they can better protect their customers and also prevent money laundering related to online scams.

NARRATOR:

He showed us an active scam he was tracking, using a chatbot he named Linda.

A scammer approached “her” using the image of a prominent retired general.

OLIVIER BEAUDET-LABRECQUE:

I love this one. He’s an American, he’s a four-star general retired from the U.S. Army.

ERIKA KINETZ:

It amazes me that you can create that. It’s like an entirely false world. The scammer is fake, but also your bot is fake, and it’s just this completely fake reality.

OLIVIER BEAUDET-LABRECQUE:

Yeah, and sometimes it’s worse. It’s a chatbot against a chatbot.

ERIKA KINETZ:

It would be interesting to try to experiment with these ourselves, with these bots that you have created for your company.

NARRATOR:

With Beaudet-Labrecque’s help, we created fake victims.

OLIVIER BEAUDET-LABRECQUE:

So this is the picture we took from you, that will be used for a profile.

NARRATOR:

The first was adapted from Erika Kinetz’s image.

OLIVIER BEAUDET-LABRECQUE:

What’s her name again?

ERIKA KINETZ:

Karen Mitchell.

NARRATOR:

We called her “Karen,” a divorced woman in her 60s living in California.

ERIKA KINETZ:

Nice to meet you, Karen.

NARRATOR:

She was targeted by several suspected scammers.

ERIKA KINETZ:

Karen was meeting all of these interesting men. There was one in particular who was a doctor who would send her images of red roses all the time. You know, it was lovely. So they had this monthslong conversation that was quite romantic, and then he’s like, “Well, you can invest with my cryptocurrency adviser,” and sort of pushed her over into a crypto scam—a very common pattern that we saw widespread among the victims that we spoke with as well.

NARRATOR:

We created another chatbot called “Travis,” based on one of our producers’ images.

AI-GENERATED VIDEO CLIP:

Follow me if you want to talk.

NARRATOR:

Over nine months, a slew of AI-generated images showed up in Travis’s feed.

AI-GENERATED VIDEO CLIP:

Emily visited your profile 30 times, and she really liked you. I don’t usually do this, but your photo made me stop and pick. Can I send you a message?

NARRATOR:

Some were offering romance.

AI-GENERATED VIDEO CLIP:

Could you ever fall in love with a cute, 27-year-old U.S. girl?

NARRATOR:

Other scammers were offering easy money working from home.

ERIKA KINETZ:

The recruiter told Travis he could make hundreds of dollars a week from home on his own time. “Oh, but you have to pay a VIP membership fee in order to make more money.” And what was amazing to me, this very simple task scam, we looked at the crypto wallets that the payments were supposed to go to, and TRM Labs found that this very simple scam had pulled in hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single week.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 3:

He started telling me how much profit I could make.

MALE SCAM VICTIM 3:

Then they systematically upsold me—

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 10:

—sending him money as a business loan.

JULIET LINDERMAN:

I think that technology is going to allow this industry to balloon even further. As AI becomes ubiquitous on the internet, it’s going to be more and more difficult to discern what is a fake image and what is a real human being.

ERIKA KINETZ:

So if you look to the future, it’s only going to get harder to be able to tell what’s real, to be able to tell who’s a scammer, to be able to defend yourself on your own.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 8:

Literally fell to the floor in disbelief.

ARI REDBORD:

We’re in an epidemic stage in scams activity right now.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 4:

He took $10,000.

ARI REDBORD:

And to think about it scaling 10x, 100x, 1,000x, 24/7 type of activity, I think is really harrowing.

FEMALE SCAM VICTIM 10:

I realize now I was talking to AI.

ZVIKA KRIEGER:

This is a brave new world that we’re in right now where essentially you’re not going to know if you’re talking to another human being unless you’re in the same room as them.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

Scams have gone on as long as people have been around.

MALE SCAM VICTIM 2:

I am more skeptical of people and the content I see and hear.

MARTHA MENDOZA:

The difference what’s happening today is that this has become a global attack on human trust.

Do you sometimes have a sense of Gavin with you on this?

BRANDON GUFFEY:

Yes, all the time. Whenever I go to Gavin’s grave, I look for four-leaf clovers. I don’t know why, but I feel like if I can find a four-leaf clover, then that’s him acknowledging that I’m there. And I know that’s stupid, superstitious, but it’s one of them things. And I feel like it’s him cheering me on whenever. Like if I find a four-leaf clover, he’s like, “You’re doing good, Dad.” Like, that’s it.

WRITTEN, PRODUCED & DIRECTED BY Peter Klein

COPRODUCED BY Megan Robinson Boris Ivanov

REPORTED BY Martha Mendoza Erika Kinetz Juliet Linderman

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