How US tech powers global scam centers, AP investigation finds

At a scam compound in Myanmar, Safeer Mohammed Koorimannil was forced to pose online as a 28-year-old Singaporean woman named Ella. American platforms, cloud services and AI tools are woven into the machinery of scam compounds that traffick workers, automate fraud and push messages across borders at industrial scale. The result is a more efficient criminal economy that can target victims in dozens of countries at once while hiding behind ordinary consumer technology.

American technology inside a global fraud pipeline

Scam crews use U.S.-built tools at multiple layers of the operation. They rely on social platforms to find targets, AI models to draft polished replies and fake personas, and internet infrastructure to move traffic from remote compounds to phones and laptops around the world. That picture emerges from tens of thousands of leaked files, videos and photos, plus interviews with 58 scam victims and three dozen current and former scammers from 19 countries.

A separate analysis of 202,013 device connections made at four scam compounds in Myanmar tied to entities sanctioned by the U.S. government found that one in five signals was carried by a U.S.-registered company. The traffic passed through companies including Cogent Communications, Oracle, AT&T and DigitalOcean, while Starlink was the most widely used internet provider in Myanmar, including at known scam compounds.

How the compounds operate

The human machinery behind these scams is built on coercion. Koorimannil described chatting with more than 100 people at once across dozens of profiles while supervisors walked the desks with electric batons. Records he smuggled out showed that in a single month he targeted some 50,000 victims from at least 17 countries.

INTERPOL said that as of March 2025, victims from 66 countries had been trafficked into online scam centres, and that the centres are estimated to have drawn in hundreds of thousands of trafficking victims globally.

Myanmar’s role in the scam economy

Myanmar has become one of the best-known hubs for this trade, especially around Myawaddy, where compounds have expanded for years. Before COVID-19, many of these sites were mainly used for gambling operations. After pandemic disruptions, many shifted toward fraud schemes, especially cryptocurrency investment fraud, which are easier to scale with scripted chats, fake investment dashboards and fake identities.

In February 2025, International Justice Mission said 260 people from 19 countries were freed from scam compounds in Myawaddy, and 258 were identified as trafficking victims. Thai authorities and partners cut off electricity and internet supply to some compounds during the operation.

The role of AI and platform safeguards

AI is now part of the scam toolkit. INTERPOL has warned that fraud crews are using AI to create convincing fake job ads, profiles and deepfakes, and to lure trafficking victims into compounds in the first place. Once workers are inside, the same technology helps them produce more believable chats, more fluent multilingual messages and more convincing personas.

OpenAI’s usage policies explicitly prohibit fraud, scams, impersonation and malicious cyber activity, and the company says it monitors and enforces policy violations and can withhold access when needed. Google says it is using multi-layered defenses and enforcement to fight online fraud and impersonation networks. Even so, watchdogs say the companies have the technical ability to do more to prevent misuse, especially when fraud operators are adapting quickly and using legitimate products at scale.

The money trail and the damage

The economic harm reaches far beyond Southeast Asia. The Federal Trade Commission’s 2024 Consumer Sentinel Data Book shows consumers reported losing more than $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, and it received 6.5 million consumer reports during the year. The State Department cited a separate U.S. government estimate that put Americans’ losses at least $10 billion in 2024 to Southeast Asia-based online scam operations, and later figures put the 2025 total at more than $7.2 billion.

Those losses are only part of the damage. Victims often lose savings, retirement funds and borrowed money, then carry the shame, anxiety and distrust long after the fraud is over. For people trafficked into the compounds, the harm is compounded by confinement, violence and years of coercion.