Newscasts - Forced laborer details how AI was used for phishing scams

Zillow

15/09/2025 12:59

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Source: 'Reuters - General news videos'

Description: Duncan Okindo says he was lured to Southeast Asia in 2024 by the promise of a customer service job in Thailand. Instead, he ended up in a scam compound on the lawless Myanmar-Thai border, where he saw first-hand how criminal groups are using artificial intelligence to commit fraud at scale. Emma Jehle has more.

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Video Transcript:

So, he told me, "We're here to scam people and we're doing scamming."

Duncan Okindo was lured from Kenya to Southeast Asia in 2024. The enticing promise? A customer service job in Thailand. Instead, he says he was abducted to the lawless Myanmar-Thai border where he was forced to work in a scam call compound using ChatGPT to con American real estate agents.

I was there for like four months. The group leader took me through the work. At a certain point, I asked him, "What are we doing specifically?" So, he told me, "We're here to scam people." I felt betrayed because for me, I've never thought I could at one point be in a place where I'm scamming people.

Reuters couldn't independently verify Okindo's account.

78 Kenyans who had been trafficked to Myanmar.

But anti-trafficking group HAART Kenya confirmed he was freed from a scam compound in early 2025. And his testimony mirrors that of about a dozen other forced laborers interviewed by Reuters. The FBI says the advent of generative AI has made the problem of phishing, or tricking people into revealing sensitive information online via scam messages, much worse. Now, a Reuters investigation has revealed how some of the world's most notorious online fraud operations, the scam compounds of Southeast Asia, are embracing today's popular AI chatbots in their industrial-scale activity. Last year, 26-year-old Okindo was finding it hard to get a job in Kenya.

I was like struggling financially because I have my younger sisters that I do take care of. I had an agent who I've known for a while. She told me that she had jobs in Thailand. There were many Kenyans going to Thailand at that moment. There was a guy who went before me. When he reached there, he told me things are okay and it's a good place, the work is nice, and I should just accept and come. I didn't know he was bribed to lie to me.

Soon after landing in Thailand, Okindo says he was abducted by men in a van. The facility where he was held was typical of the region's scam centers. Mostly run by Chinese-led gangs, they are factories designed for fraud, where criminals target victims around the world. Mercy Otieno of HAART Kenya says these groups will even use AI to recruit workers.

When it comes to the cartels, like the Chinese cartels in Myanmar, communicating to Kenyans while they were here in Kenya before recruitment, they didn't understand English, but then they would use AI to do translation and to communicate with these Kenyans and convince them that these jobs are legitimate.

Okindo told Reuters that many of the workers used a free version of ChatGPT to craft messages designed to trick Americans into making fake cryptocurrency investments.

The ChatGPT was to refine your English, because most of the people there don't know English, and also to translate. And also, it helps you to get information easily.

The goal, set by the bosses, was to convince at least two real estate agents a day to open a crypto account and deposit money for non-existent investments. The funds were then stolen. Okindo, pretending to be a rich investor, would trawl property websites like Zillow.com where agents run ads. Zillow declined to comment.

ChatGPT was helping you as a person to get informed, because you see you're dealing with a real estate agent from Texas and you have to know how Texas people behave, how they talk, how they live, what are the prices of the houses there. So, you have to be informed about Texas. So that's how the ChatGPT used to help.

Okindo says he used ChatGPT to come up with new approaches that were sometimes so effective, they could even trick past fraud victims into losing more money.

The survivors will tell you that they would use AI to change their appearance so that the person they were extorting would think they are talking to a female, this beautiful woman who is into cryptocurrencies, but they are not talking to a female, and they are actually live on a video call.

A spokesperson for the company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, said it actively works to identify and disrupt scam-related misuse of ChatGPT, but declined to comment on Okindo's account. The company said the AI's underlying model refuses requests that break OpenAI's anti-fraud rules, and that company investigators look out for abuses and cut off those who commit them. Okindo managed to leave the compound in April after Thailand cut off electricity to some of the scam compounds. That forced his captors to release some of the workers. But his ordeal isn't over. Back home, Okindo is afraid of locals he thinks could have links to the Southeast Asia-based cartels. And says he has received threatening phone calls.

When I came back home, I came traumatized, broken, and without hope. People judged me. They really judged me, and I felt that stigma. So, I used to stay in my house. Until now, I got help to go through counseling, which helped me. I give out my story just to create awareness to other people so that they wouldn't fall into that trap.