In 2022 I interviewed a young Nigerian man outside Lagos who’d spent years working as a romance scammer, grinding one target at a time until he finally convinced a lonely widow to send him more than $200,000. The lesson of that story was never about technology. For criminals like him, the biggest cost was time.
On July 31, OpenAI disclosed a scam operation run out of Poipet, Cambodia — a border town linked to forced labor and trafficking — where a cluster of ChatGPT accounts wrote the romance pitches, translated the messages, and handled the administration: shift tracking, handoff notes between managers, the immigration status of the workers being pressed into the job. OpenAI says it found out because WhatsApp tipped them off, not through its own detection.
AI Invented a Fake Friend to Break Into a Company
The persistence and inventiveness of the scam industry is the same, but now it’s no longer held back by the limits of scale.
Bandwidth was the one thing holding scam crime back, and AI removes it. Meanwhile the transborder legal system built to prosecute fraud gets slower and harder to coordinate every year. This is what that gap looks like, and why the people supposed to stop it are already behind.
