The instructions were clear: He had four days to make each victim fall in love.
And there were a lot of victims. Online, Safeer Mohammed Koorimannil, who was trafficked to a scam center in Myanmar,
impersonated a 28-year-old Singaporean woman named Ella. On a typical
shift, he 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.
In
just a month, Koorimannil targeted some 50,000 victims from at least 17
countries, according to records he smuggled out to The Associated
Press. His “clients” included a widowed tailor in Kurdistan, a pastry
chef in Turkey, a sheep farmer in Kyrgyzstan, soldiers in Iraq, an
engineer in Russia, a building painter in Germany, a port officer in
Argentina, a student in Indonesia, a security guard in Poland and a
dairy farmer in the Republic of Georgia. And he did it using software
built with artificial intelligence models from American tech companies
that scammers are abusing to target victims at unprecedented speed and
scale. “Everyone is a robot there,” he told AP from his home in southern
India in his native Malayalam language.
Technology
from American companies is being used to power a revolution in the scam
industry, playing a key role in the industrialization and globalization
of fraud in ways that have not been clear until now, an AP/"FRONTLINE"
investigation has found. Watchdogs say these companies have the
technical capacity to do more to protect against abuse but lack the
legal, regulatory and business incentives to crack down on a crime the Federal Trade Commission estimates cost Americans nearly $200 billion in losses in 2024.
While
most public scrutiny of the technology that fuels scams has focused on
the social media platforms victims see, the infrastructure exploited to
commit fraud begins much farther upstream, the investigation showed.
American technology is present all along the digital supply chains that
connect scammers with the scammed, 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.
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The
AP found no evidence to suggest these companies were doing anything
illegal themselves. However, the abuse of their tools and tech
infrastructure at scam compounds in Myanmar, as documented by the AP and
“FRONTLINE,” raises questions about how vigorously they are enforcing
their own terms of service, which prohibit illegal activity and, in many
cases, explicitly ban fraud.
Among the AP’s findings:
— American-made AI models
— chiefly ChatGPT and Gemini — have been used to build specialized
software that allows scammers to seamlessly work across dozens of
languages, surveil workers and target victims around the world, the
investigation found with the help of C4ADS, a Washington-based nonprofit
focused on global security. Scammers who purchased these tools took in
tens of millions of dollars, according to blockchain analysis by TRM
Labs at the request of AP/"FRONTLINE."
—
A sophisticated, global internet infrastructure supports Myanmar’s scam
compound economy, which relies on services from Cogent Communications,
AT&T, DigitalOcean and Oracle, among others. One in five signals
from devices at four scam compounds linked to sanctioned entities in
Myanmar was carried by a U.S.-registered company, according to an AP
analysis of more than 200,000 device connections provided by
International Justice Mission, an anti-trafficking nonprofit.
— Elon Musk’
s satellite internet company, Starlink, is the number one internet
service provider in Myanmar, including to scam centers, according to
device data, public records and interviews — despite public pressure
from Congress and a widely publicized crackdown last fall.
—
At least 25 new scam compounds have been built deep inside Myanmar
since a high-profile crackdown along the Thai border last fall, new
satellite imagery shows. Scammers from at least 13 of these outposts
used Starlink IP addresses to get online between early March and the end
of May, an AP analysis of device and satellite data from International
Justice Mission shows.
The
AP/"FRONTLINE" investigation was based on tens of thousands of leaked
scam center files, videos and photos; an analysis with C4ADS of misuse
of AI at scam centers; an examination of more than 200,000 connections
made by devices over a year at four scam compounds in Myanmar linked to
entities sanctioned by the U.S. government; and interviews with 58 scam
victims and three dozen current and former scammers from 19 countries.
Cybersecurity
experts say internet service providers, AI companies and Starlink could
do more to prevent the abuse by scammers — but lack the legal,
regulatory and business incentives.
“If
there’s no disincentive to continuing this, if there’s no cost to
actually facilitating scamming, then why would I spend a dollar to
prevent scamming?” said Sascha Meinrath, the Palmer chair in
telecommunications at Penn State University. “This is the problem. It’s
identifiable, it’s addressable — at least somewhat — but it costs
something. And right now the cost of facilitating scamming is zero.”
Outside
the United States, that cost is starting to rise. The United Kingdom,
the European Union, Australia and Singapore have introduced new
regulations that require companies to do more to prevent scams — or face
financial penalties.
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Meanwhile,
in Washington, lawmakers and government officials have been asking
American tech companies to cooperate to cut scammers off from U.S.
infrastructure, but on a voluntary basis.
In November, District of Columbia U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro created the Scam Center Strike Force
to target scam compounds. In a four-day exercise in May, the Strike
Force worked with Meta, SpaceX, Google and others to disrupt more than
1.4 million social media and email accounts, interrupt malicious IP
address traffic, seize satellite internet terminals and decommission
servers and hosting infrastructure linked to Southeast Asian scam
networks. “We will not allow criminal organizations to weaponize our own
infrastructure against us or devastate the life savings of hardworking
families,” Pirro said in an email to AP. “Our message is clear: we will
find you, we will stop you, and we will protect the American people.”
OpenAI
and Google both said they have robust programs in place to proactively
disrupt scammers from abusing their tools. Starlink did not respond to
detailed requests for comment.
Internet
service providers emphasized that they can’t see the content their
networks carry or what end users are doing online — privacy by design
that constrains their ability to monitor for abuse. All said they
respond to valid abuse reports and cooperate with law enforcement. None
would disclose specific customer information, citing privacy rules, but
several said they had taken concrete action in response to AP’s
reporting.
OpenAI
said that based on the information AP shared, it identified and banned
three accounts that had been using its models to support online scams.
Oracle said it was “diligently working with law enforcement” on the
material shared by AP. UpCloud, a Finnish cloud services provider with
servers in the U.S., said AP’s query had prompted an internal review and
refinement of its risk assessment processes.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
has likened artificial intelligence to a utility, akin to electricity
or water. But unlike water utilities, tech and telecom companies in the
United States are generally not responsible for proactively ensuring the
safety of the content they carry.
Some people believe that should change.
“This
has to be like clean water,” said Matthew Moynahan, the CEO of GetReal
Security, a cybersecurity firm. “Anything coming out of the tap for an
end user, whether that tap is a PC, a browser somewhere, or your mobile
phone, dirty water shouldn’t get to you. This is what this is.”
The
use of AI in scams is exploding so fast that many in the cybersecurity
community fear fully-automated scams run by AI agents will soon become
commonplace.
“We’re
moving towards a world where maybe you don’t need human scammers
anymore,” said Ari Redbord, global head of policy at TRM Labs, a crypto
analytics firm. “All you need is hundreds, thousands, millions of
agentic agents who don’t need to sleep, don’t need to eat, who are 24/7
doing this.”
Already,
the basic AI-powered tools Koorimannil used required scant human
intervention. His job was to cut and paste responses from scripts his
scam bosses generated.
Koorimannil
and his best friend had answered an ad online for jobs encouraging
tourism to Thailand. From the airport in Bangkok, however, a waiting
black car sped them to the border with Myanmar, he said, and the next
morning armed men escorted them across the Moei River to Tai Chang, a
scam compound the U.S. government sanctioned last year.
Koorimannil
managed to sneak out a screenshot from his computer that AP and
security nonprofit C4ADS used to identify the key to his productivity — a
software platform called Kongtian Intelligent Customer Acquisition, or
KT for short.
AP
also identified a similar suite of software, called Global Social
Traffic Navigation, or 007TG, described by a former scammer as a
“one-stop shop” for running scams at industrial scale.
KT
and 007TG are part of a thriving gray market for tech that has both
legitimate and illegitimate uses and is widely exploited by scammers,
according to blockchain analysis, a review of Telegram channels
frequented by scammers, and interviews with scammers from three
countries. KT and 007TG were created by for-profit businesses using AI
models from leading global companies and sold to scammers — who in turn
generated tens of millions of dollars in illicit profits.
OpenAI’s
ChatGPT played the most prominent role, along with Google’s Gemini,
though the software incorporated other AI models as well, including from
Europe and China. Both KT and 007TG used ChatGPT and Gemini to generate
automated replies, power a role-play chatbot, which scammers could use
to develop convincing characters, and embed real-time translation in
over 100 languages, C4ADS found. KT and 007TG software also tracked the
performance of workers — to devastating effect, in Koorimannil’s case.
He was beaten for being bad at scamming people, leaving his body red and swollen with lashes, photographs show.
“When they came near my computer, my hands would shake and sweat,” Koorimannil told AP.
At night, he said, he and his best friend curled in the same narrow bunk, too frightened to sleep alone.
Blockchain
analysis, done for AP/"FRONTLINE" by TRM Labs, shows how powerful these
tools can be. Cryptocurrency transactions are recorded on an indelible
public ledger, or blockchain,
which can be analyzed to show the pattern and volume of cryptocurrency
transactions. TRM Labs found that a single crypto wallet used by 007TG
received $860,000 in payments between April 2024 and December 2025 —
including transfers from at least four cryptocurrency wallets associated
with known scam networks. Those scammers, in turn, raked in at least
$75 million.
Stopping
AI abuses at scale is challenging because scammers often use ChatGPT
the same way hundreds of millions of other people do — to translate,
help write messages, create content and do basic research, according to
OpenAI. The intimacy, financial pressure and manipulative language in
romance scams, for example, may be hard to distinguish from genuine
users seeking help with a divorce. And tools like KT and 007TG can have
legitimate uses, especially for Chinese businesses seeking to expand
overseas.
But
by tracking user behavior over time to surface patterns of deception and
manipulation, OpenAI said it detects scams with 95% accuracy and takes
down 100,000 scam accounts each month. The company said it has also
independently disrupted service to scam networks operating from
Cambodia, Myanmar and Nigeria.
Even
as fraud networks exploit their technology, a growing number of people
are using the same tools to fight back. OpenAI said people use ChatGPT
millions of times a month to identify and avoid scams — up to three
times more often, the company estimates, than the model is abused by
scammers. OpenAI also recently collaborated with the Global Anti-Scam
Alliance to launch scam.org, which helps users assess the risk they are
being targeted by scammers.
Google
did not respond to specific questions about AP's findings, but said the
company is “committed to developing AI responsibly” and engineers its
models with safety guardrails to filter out content that promotes scams.
007TG went dark in December but has since claimed to be back up and
running. Neither it nor KT responded to requests for comment.
In
the end, through a connection in Bahrain, Koorimannil and his friend
found a broker who oversaw ransom payments for 21 Indians from their
compound, he said.
They each had to pay 500,000 Indian rupees ($5,300) for their freedom.
It
took a long time for Chris Colocousis to understand the extent to which
scammers around the world use American technology to prey on people
like him. At first, all he saw was that the woman who reached out to him
on Facebook had a New York phone number — not too far away from his
home in Massachusetts — 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 says he “invested” under
Eliza’s guidance is now gone, robbing him of the secure retirement he’d
spent years working for.
“You
just feel like your whole world fell apart,” he said. “I’m thinking
about all this time that I invested into reaching a point where I could
retire at a certain age — and it’s just gone.”
Each
step of a fraud is a digital signal, said John Breyault, vice president
of public policy, telecommunications and fraud at the nonprofit
National Consumers League. And internet service providers are the
network on which many of these services ride.
“The ISPs are in a particularly critical place in this chain,” he said.
New
data shows that U.S. internet service providers play an outsized role
in scams run out of Myanmar. The AP analyzed a sample of 202,013
connections made by devices at four scam compounds in Myanmar — KK Park,
Tai Chang, Deko Park and a newer site near Hpakalu. One in five was
routed through U.S. internet service providers. No other nonregional
country came close.
Among them were Cogent Communications, Oracle, AT&T
and DigitalOcean. Companies outside the United States — including
UpCloud, the Finnish cloud provider, and GlobalTeleHost, a Canadian
hosting and internet infrastructure company — also used servers in the
U.S. to host high-risk traffic from scam centers, the data shows.
“They
are getting paid a lot of money to route these IP addresses,” said
Riley Kilmer, co-founder of Spur Intelligence Corporation, a
cybersecurity company. “Right now the revenue outweighs the risk. And if
you could shift that balance, the ISPs would have to act.”
Internet
service providers have access to a trove of data that could be used to
minimize illicit activity, but doing so requires significant investment,
cybersecurity analysts say.
“The
policy in much of the hosting world tends to be, we will take action
after the fact,” said Dan Winchester, co-founder of Scamalytics, a fraud
prevention company. “That’s not really very effective. What you need to
be doing is proactively stopping fraud on your servers.”
The
ad tech data was compiled by International Justice Mission between
February 2025 and January 2026. This data captures a slice of activity
from apps that share information with data brokers, which can reveal the
location and IP address a given device is using when it goes online. AP
then identified the companies those IP addresses had been allocated to
using a database maintained by Scamalytics, which also rates IP addresses for potential fraud risk.
These companies were among the most significant players in the dataset:
ORACLE
More
than 100 U.S.-geolocated IP addresses allocated to Oracle were used at
the KK Park scam compound between February and April 2025. AP shared the
detailed connection data with Oracle. “We are diligently working with
law enforcement on this matter,” an Oracle spokesperson told AP.
COGENT COMMUNICATIONS
Cogent
Communications was among the biggest players, with connections from KK
Park and Tai Chang scam compounds. Nearly 40% of the IP addresses
allocated to Cogent appeared on publicly available blacklists of
potential abuse, according to Scamalytics data. Scamalytics rated 99.6%
of them as potentially risky. Cogent says it relies on third parties to
report fraud and investigates every verified complaint, but like other
ISPs, it can’t see user traffic directly.
AT&T
IP addresses allocated to AT&T were used at three compounds between February 2025 and January 2026. AT&T
says it’s cracking down on fraud by making traffic on its network more
transparent. In September it began enforcing new rules that require
business customers to route traffic under their own network identity,
not AT&T’s, to make it harder to disguise questionable activity.
DIGITALOCEAN
Devices
from KK Park and Hpakalu used at least 41 IP addresses allocated to
DigitalOcean, a cloud infrastructure provider based in Colorado.
Scamalytics rated nearly all as potentially risky. DigitalOcean said it
reviewed the data shared by AP but declined to disclose the outcome. The
company said it does not control how customer applications are used and
works closely with them to fight abuse.
UPCLOUD
UpCloud
had a single IP address — linked to a server in New York City and rated
very high risk by Scamalytics — which connected at least 382 times
between February and April 2025 with devices inside KK Park. UpCloud
said the data AP shared “triggered a thorough internal review on our
side to ensure that the risk of similar situations is further reduced
going forward.” The company said it may have involved a VPN hosted on
its platform, but noted that it cannot access customer systems, which
are private. They declined to provide further details, citing European
data protection laws. The firm said it monitors for illegal activity as
mandated by EU law but does not rely on Scamalytics because their risk
assessments are not detailed enough.
GLOBALTELEHOST
GlobalTeleHost,
a Canadian company that provides data center equipment and network
connectivity for business customers, was allocated IP addresses used at
KK Park and Tai Chang. Two-thirds appeared on public blacklists as
potentially abusive, according to Scamalytics, which rated 99.9% as
potentially risky. GlobalTeleHost said it does not serve end users
directly and does not control its customers’ applications, traffic or
internal review processes. The company said the IPs shared by AP were
assigned to commercial VPN providers. The company said it passed AP’s
technical findings to those customers and asked them to investigate, but
some responded that their records were not detailed enough to identify
specific users. GlobalTeleHost said it does not rely on Scamalytics risk
ratings but acts on “verified abuse complaints and lawful requests from
authorities.”
___
In
many cases, scammers in Myanmar routed their internet connections
through U.S.-based cloud services to hide where they were really located
before connecting to major platforms — chiefly Meta, which owns
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, according to Kentik, a network
monitoring firm in San Francisco that mapped internet traffic from a
sample of data shared by AP. That makes it easier for scammers to appear
to be somewhere else and slip past platform safety checks.
Meta
said that kind of deliberate evasion is why collaboration — with law
enforcement and across industry, including connectivity and technology
companies — is key to disrupting bad actors at scale.
“Scammers
are determined criminals who use increasingly sophisticated tactics to
defraud people and evade detection on our platforms and across the
internet,” a spokesperson said in a statement. By analyzing behavioral
patterns of users, Meta said it has been able to disrupt millions of
accounts tied to scam centers across Southeast Asia and the United Arab
Emirates.
“This
stuff is so pervasive,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis
at Kentik. “You can successfully launder connections to your heart’s
content.”
One
way to do that is by leasing IP addresses which can be more valuable
when traffic appears to originate from a well-known provider. This
profitable loophole can be exploited to evade security controls. AT&T
began enforcing a change in September that tightened this loophole by
requiring business customers to announce their own network identity.
“It would be great if everybody did what AT&T did,” Madory said. “They probably lost some customers out of that policy, but those were pretty bad customers.”
Colocousis
said people who think scam victims like him are gullible idiots don’t
understand the sophistication of criminal organizations behind online
fraud.
On Jan.
25, 2025, Colocousis laid out $80,000 cash in neat rows on his table,
just as the customer service representative at his crypto trading app
had instructed. Eliza had told him if he just paid this last bit, he
could unlock his funds and withdraw all his money.
“I
will tell you that I feel a little uneasy but I know you keep telling
me it’s ok,” he messaged her. She responded instantly with a string of
kiss emoji.
The
next morning a young man, who Colocousis said showed up in a Jeep with
New York plates, trudged across a thin layer of snow to his doorstep.
Once inside, the man — who said his name was Vincent — told Colocousis
to put the stacks of $50 and $100 bills in a plastic shopping bag.
Vincent sent a message and the money instantly appeared in the
fraudulent crypto trading account Eliza had helped Colocousis open, he
said.
Vincent left with a big smile and a quick, amiable wave. “See you next time,” he said. “Maybe. OK. Bye-bye.”
Colocousis
believes American tech companies should do more to protect people like
him. He is still so shaken that he says he sometimes has trouble leaving
his house.
“The
greed is --,” Colocousis searched for words. “I’m all for capitalism,
but when it’s totally ruining people’s lives, people that have worked
their whole life towards a goal so that they don’t have to work anymore,
only to have it just ripped out of their chest — you know, something’s
wrong.”
Today,
Musk’s Starlink satellite service is the most widely used internet
provider in Myanmar, including at known scam compounds, AP found —
despite an ongoing congressional investigation, a November order from a
U.S. court to seize Starlink accounts from specific Myanmar scam
compounds and announcements, in October and June, that Starlink had cut
service to thousands of units around scam centers.
Sen.
Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat who is leading a bipartisan
congressional investigation into the role Starlink and other companies
play in the surging losses of scam victims in America, has pressed
SpaceX for details on Starlink’s role in transnational fraud and urged
the company to do more to prevent the criminal misuse of its devices.
“We need to do more at every level to combat the scams that are plaguing
Americans across the country,” she said in an email to the AP. “Given
that SpaceX’s Starlink is the first choice of satellite internet
technology for many scammers, cutting off scammers’ access to Starlink
is a key way to prevent scams at the source.”
To
be sure, Starlink has been a lifeline for schools, humanitarian groups,
hospitals, media and more in Myanmar, according to Amnesty
International and others. But data from the Asia Pacific Network
Information Center (APNIC), the regional internet registry, indicates
that scammers represent a disproportionate share of its user base.
Myanmar
has become a haven for industrial-scale scam compounds, which have
drafted some 300,000 people from dozens of countries, often against
their will, according to the United Nations. One of those compounds is
Deko Park, a conglomeration of big, blue-roofed buildings dotted with
white satellite dishes near the Thai border.
Data
from a sample of devices at Deko Park, provided by International
Justice Mission, shows Starlink among the top internet service providers
in use from Dec. 10, 2025, to Jan. 6, 2026, just after two regional
telecom companies.
An
Ethiopian engineer named Ebisa told AP he used Starlink at Deko Park
from December 2024 through December 2025, when he managed to escape. He
asked AP to only publish his first name because he wants to protect his
privacy. Ebisa’s job was to collect the WhatsApp numbers of rich,
vulnerable men. He said he was constantly punished — beaten, shocked,
detained and forced to exercise for hours at a time — for failing to
meet impossible performance goals.
One
day, he said, he got fed up and tried to evade a beating. He didn’t get
very far. He said the security guards at Deko Park beat him so badly he
was blinded in one eye. Photographs show his eye injuries and AP spoke
with an NGO who helped him seek medical care in Thailand.
“It was hard to survive,” he told AP. “Finally, God helped us out from that hell.”
Speaking
from a shelter for human trafficking victims in Thailand in December,
he said he wanted to get his eye fixed before going home because his
mother’s health is fragile and he worried the sight of his injury might
kill her.
“It’s very shameful,” he said. “If God helps me, if I get medication, maybe I can get back my eye.”
He
told AP on Monday from his home in Ethiopia that doctors had informed
him they could not save his eye. “It's been a tough reality to face,” he
said. “They told me that it's too late to bring back my sight.”
A
Nigerian who was also tricked into working at Deko Park, Obinna Okeadu,
never made it back home, according to three co-workers, a human rights
activist and reports from his family back in Nigeria.
On
the afternoon of Oct. 28, 2025, Okeadu and his roommate, Ogbonnaya
Tochukwu Agwu — known as Valentine — came off an unsuccessful overnight
shift and were called out for punishment.
Back
in their dorm room after the beating, Valentine watched as Okeadu began
to tremble uncontrollably. Okeadu slid to the ground with a thud, his
head lolling strangely, with sharp, anguished sounds rising from his
body.
“It’s OK,” a friend told him softly. “We’re here.”
But Okeadu was not OK.
“I’m going to die like this,” Okeadu called out, according to Valentine.
Valentine
said Okeadu was taken away — presumably to a hospital. He prayed for
his friend. But the next day, Okeadu’s computer disappeared and his name
was deleted from work chats.
Valentine never saw him again.
This
kind of abuse — and the swelling cost of cyberscams to victims around
the world — has led to periodic crackdowns. In early 2025, Thailand
temporarily cut off internet connectivity, electricity and gas supplies
to scam compounds just over its border with Myanmar.
Starlink
was a way around the blockade at the time. Satellite dishes
proliferated on the rooftops of scam centers in Myanmar, satellite
imagery showed, and Starlink usage in Myanmar surged, according to APNIC
data.
In
April 2025, as the United States prepared sanctions against foreign scam
networks in Southeast Asia, SpaceX reassigned IP addresses from
Tanzania to create a dedicated block for Myanmar. It’s not clear why,
but experts say that step is usually taken to serve growing demand or
prepare for entry into a new market.
By
June 2025, Starlink was the number one internet service provider in the
impoverished, war-torn country, with a 14% share of the market —
despite its relatively high cost, according to APNIC data.
In
October, amid another sweeping crackdown, Starlink said it cut services
to more than 2,500 units near scam compounds in Myanmar. It lost nearly
half of its users in the country and its market share plunged from 15%
to 6.5%, according to APNIC data.
But
in December, Starlink use surged back, and by February, the company was
again number one in Myanmar. Today it has a nearly 20% share of the
market, APNIC data show.
SpaceX’s
October service cuts demonstrated that the company can sever scam
centers from its satellites when it wants to — and shows just how
important the criminal networks that pay for scam center infrastructure
have been to its user base.
According
to Starlink’s own coverage map, it does not sell services in Myanmar.
AP asked Myanmar’s ruling military government whether Starlink was
legally authorized to work in the country but got no response.
Starlink
also declined to respond to detailed requests for comment. But in
public comments, Lauren Dreyer, vice president of Starlink business
operations at SpaceX, has said that Starlink has “zero tolerance” for
abuse.
“We
proactively detect and disable terminals involved in illegal activity,”
she said in a June statement about the company’s work with the Scam
Center Strike Force. “Through collaboration with law enforcement and
technology companies, we advance global anti-scam efforts and ensure
Starlink remains a force for good.”
Yet Starlink’s service cuts have not stopped scammers — not even from one of the most high-profile scam compounds in Asia, KK Park.
In
October, in response to growing international pressure, Myanmar’s
military government began demolishing the compound and broadcast images
of dozens of seized Starlink terminals. But when the scammers scattered,
they brought their tech with them.
By
January, at least seven devices used at KK Park had migrated to a new
compound some 30 kilometers to the northwest, near Hpakalu, according to
International Justice Mission, which tracked the devices using ad tech
data.
“These
new compounds are showing up in the middle of nowhere and they’re walled
multibuilding complexes with a bunch of these terminals on the roof,”
said Eric Heintz, a global analyst at IJM. “You should be able to shut
them down, and there should be a paper trail for who’s paying the
subscriptions for them.”
Heintz
has identified at least 25 new sites in Myanmar that have appeared or
grown significantly since the crackdown last fall. Satellite imagery,
verified by AP, shows empty fields transformed into industrial-scale
office parks in just a few months and new roads cut through thick trees.
White
satellite dishes dot the rooftops of some of them, and geolocated device
data shows that scammers from at least 13 are logging on just as they
did before: With Starlink.
—-
This
story is part of an ongoing collaboration between The Associated Press
and “FRONTLINE” (PBS) that includes an upcoming documentary.
—-
Kinetz
reported from Rome, Washington, London and Lisbon, Portugal. AP
journalists Juliet Linderman in Washington and Raynham, Mass, Ope
Adetayo in Lagos, Nigeria, Larry Fenn in New York, Huizhong Wu in
Bangkok and Michael Reo in Washington contributed to this story.
Freelance reporter Rejimon Kuttappan in Thiruvananthapuram, India, and
Anthony DeLorenzo, Martha Mendoza and Peter Klein from “FRONTLINE” (PBS)
also contributed.
—-
The
Associated Press receives financial support from multiple private
foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
—-
Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/
