Global Scam Tech
Investigation Reveals How US Technology Fuels Global Scam Industry, Harming Victims
Anonymous
An AP/FRONTLINE investigation has exposed the hidden digital plumbing connecting two men whose lives were shattered by the same global scam machine. Chris Colocousis, a divorced man in his 60s from Massachusetts, lost $400,000 — his entire life savings — to a fake online romance. Safeer Mohammed Koorimannil, an Indian national, was trafficked to Cambodia and forced to be the person behind that fake romance. AP and FRONTLINE found that American technology companies helped make it all possible.
The scheme is called "pig butchering" — a con where criminals build trust with a victim over weeks or months before pushing them into a fake investment platform. According to AP, an estimated $75 billion was stolen globally by these syndicates between 2020 and 2024. More than 100,000 people are believed to be held in scam compounds across Southeast Asia right now, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
One Man Lost $400,000 Talking to a Ghost
Colocousis was contacted on LinkedIn by a woman named "Eliza." Over several months, she coached him to move his money into what looked like a cryptocurrency investment platform. In February 2024, he tried to withdraw his funds and discovered the platform was fake. "I have no idea where 'Eliza' is," he told AP. "I have no idea who I was actually talking to. I just know my life is ruined." He has recovered $0 through legal or banking channels.
"Eliza" was not one person. She was a persona maintained by workers like Safeer, who were forced to run dozens of fake relationships at once. Safeer said workers were coached using AI tools to write perfect English and keep victims engaged. "We were slaves to the computer," he told AP. "If we didn't meet quotas, we were threatened with physical violence." His family eventually paid a ransom to get him released in March 2024.
American Tech Companies Power the Scam Supply Chain
The AP/FRONTLINE investigation found that companies including Cloudflare and GoDaddy provided DNS services and web hosting that kept scam sites online and reachable to Western victims. AI tools from companies like OpenAI and Meta were used to generate scripts and fake personas. Watchdogs say these companies have the technical ability to detect and block abuse — but lack incentives to act. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields U.S. tech platforms from legal liability for content third parties post on their services.
Cloudflare has said it "terminates services for customers who violate terms of service when presented with actionable evidence," according to a corporate statement cited by AP. Critics call that standard too passive. Human Rights Watch argues that because these compounds rely on forced labor, tech companies providing them services are indirectly enabling modern slavery. Several U.S. Senators have called for tougher "Know Your Customer" rules for infrastructure providers after the investigation went public.
AI Makes These Scams Faster, Smarter, and Harder to Stop
Scammers are now using AI to rotate domain names and build websites that change their appearance when scanned by security bots. This breaks standard blacklist tools. Cybersecurity firm TRM Labs found that AI-generated scripts are 90% more effective at keeping victims engaged long-term compared to manually written messages. The result is an industrial-scale fraud operation that is almost impossible to police using traditional methods.
The FBI describes the problem as a "jurisdictional gap." The victims are in the U.S. The tech infrastructure is in the U.S. But the criminals are in Cambodia or Myanmar, and the stolen money is laundered through crypto exchanges in third countries. Finance professor John Griffin of the University of Texas at Austin, who tracked crypto flows linked to these scams, called tech companies the "unwitting enablers" of a multi-billion dollar criminal enterprise, according to US News.
Two Victims, Two Kinds of Damage, One Broken System
The AP/FRONTLINE report frames pig butchering as creating two classes of victims: the "financially defrauded" — mostly Westerners like Colocousis — and the "physically enslaved" — mostly South Asian and African migrants like Safeer. Both groups are left to rebuild alone. Colocousis has no savings and no legal recourse. Safeer escaped a compound but carries the psychological weight of having been forced to destroy strangers' lives, according to Yahoo News.
The investigation makes clear that no single law, company, or government is fixing this. Southeast Asian governments are accused of complicity — many compounds operate inside Special Economic Zones protected by local military. U.S. law shields tech companies from liability. And crypto makes the money nearly untraceable. Until those gaps close, experts warn, the scam factories will keep running — and more people will keep losing everything.
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