AI-Powered Romance Scams: Global Criminals Fleece Victims in Days Using US Tech

American technology, including artificial intelligence models and vast internet infrastructure, is being extensively exploited by industrial-scale scam operations, predominantly located in Myanmar. This abuse facilitates fraud at an unprecedented speed and scale, leading to significant financial losses for victims worldwide and perpetuating severe human rights abuses, including trafficking and forced labor.

The human cost of these operations is starkly illustrated by individuals like Safeer Mohammed Koorimannil, who was trafficked to a scam center in Myanmar. Forced to impersonate a Singaporean woman named Ella, Koorimannil reported chatting with over 100 people across dozens of profiles simultaneously, under the watchful eyes of supervisors wielding electric batons. In just one month, he targeted approximately 50,000 victims from at least 17 countries, including a widowed tailor in Kurdistan and soldiers in Iraq, demonstrating the immense global reach and efficiency of these fraudulent schemes.

A key enabler of this industrial-scale fraud is specialized software built with AI models from American tech companies, primarily ChatGPT and Gemini. These tools, identified as Kongtian Intelligent Customer Acquisition (KT) and Global Social Traffic Navigation (007TG), automate replies, power role-play chatbots for character development, and embed real-time translation in over 100 languages. Blockchain analysis by TRM Labs revealed that a single crypto wallet used by 007TG received $860,000 in payments from known scam networks, which in turn generated at least $75 million in illicit profits, underscoring the lucrative nature of these AI-powered scams.

The digital supply chain for these scams also relies heavily on a sophisticated global internet infrastructure. An investigation found that one in five signals from devices at four Myanmar scam compounds linked to sanctioned entities was carried by a U.S.-registered company. Major American internet service providers like Cogent Communications, AT&T, DigitalOcean, and Oracle play an outsized role in routing this illicit traffic, with some scammers utilizing U.S.-based cloud services to mask their true locations and evade platform safety checks.

Elon Musk’s satellite internet company, Starlink, has emerged as the number one internet service provider in Myanmar, including at notorious scam centers. This dominance persists despite public pressure from Congress, a U.S. court order to seize accounts from specific scam compounds, and previous announcements of service cuts. Starlink provides a crucial bypass for local internet crackdowns, enabling scam operations to continue and even relocate after high-profile demolitions of compounds like KK Park, with new satellite imagery showing at least 25 new scam sites establishing themselves deep inside Myanmar.

Victims like Chris Colocousis, a divorced man in his 60s from Massachusetts, highlight the devastating impact. Colocousis lost $400,000 of his retirement savings to a romance scammer named