One thought he was getting to know “Eliza” and was robbed of his life savings. The other was trafficked to a scam compound, beaten and forced to become “Ella” online. Separated by thousands of miles, Chris Colocousis and Safeer Mohammed Koorimannil inhabited opposite sides of the global cyberscam industry.
An AP/“FRONTLINE” investigation has found that American technology is present all along the digital supply chains that connect people like Colocousis and Koorimannil. Most public scrutiny has focused on the social media platforms victims see. But the infrastructure exploited to commit fraud begins much farther upstream, from AI models baked into powerful new tools to optimize workflow and create more perfect fakes, to satellite dishes that enable scammers to evade internet crackdowns, to internet service providers that carry traffic from the lawless borderlands of Myanmar to the phones and computers of millions of victims.
Though these U.S. tech companies aren’t doing anything illegal themselves, watchdogs say they have the technical capacity to do more to protect against abuse – but lack the legal, regulatory and business incentives to crack down.
At first, all Colocousis saw was that the woman who reached out to him on Facebook had a New York phone number and said she worked at a well-known financial firm in Atlanta.
“Eliza” suggested a video call. And there she was – the same blond beauty as in her Facebook photos. She even had little bags under her eyes. She was too real not to be real.
Now Colocousis, a divorced man in his 60s, has no idea where “Eliza” really is, whether he was talking with her or with ChatGPT– and even if she’s a she. He does know that the $400,000 he said he “invested” under Eliza’s guidance is now gone, and with it, the secure retirement he’d spent years working for.
“I think I have a degree of PTSD from it, to be honest with you. I still wake up occasionally in the middle of the night with anxiety where it just all of a sudden hits me,” he said from his home in Massachusetts. “I really never want to leave my house.”
Colocousis said he’d planned to retire in a few years but now is going to have to keep working instead and may take out a home equity loan.
“Most people react when they find out somebody was scammed, is like, how stupid could you be? Well, I’m an educated guy. You know, what is my flaw in this? My flaw is I was looking for a companionship,” he said. “I’m at peace for now being by myself.”
All Koorimannil, 30, knew was that his computer at the Tai Chang scam compound in Myanmar ran specialized software that enabled him to target some 50,000 victims from at least 17 countries in a month, according to records he smuggled out to AP. His “clients” included a widowed tailor in Kurdistan, a pastry chef in Turkey, soldiers in Iraq, an engineer in Russia and a building painter in Germany. With the help of security non-profit C4ADS, AP found that the tools Koorimannil used were powered, in part, by American artificial intelligence models.
On a typical shift, Koorimannil said he chatted with more than 100 people across dozens of profiles at the same time, as supervisors prowled among the desks with electric batons. He said he was beaten for being bad at scamming people, and photographs show his body red and swollen with lashes.
“When they came near my computer, my hands would shake and sweat,” he told AP in his native Malayalam language from his home in southern India.
At night, he said, he and his best friend curled in the same narrow bunk, too frightened to sleep alone.
Koorimannil said he paid more than $5,000 for his freedom and now works in his family fish business. He sometimes struggles to accept the dimensions of the life he was born to, but ambition cost him too much.
“I’ve learned to stay hungry and I have learned to be patient,” he said. “I was not like this before. After coming back from Myanmar, I know how to be hungry and patient.”
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This is a documentary photo story curated by AP photo editors.
