AI-Powered Scams Explode in Myanmar, Fueling Global Distrust
ChatGPT won’t steal your job. But it will democratize and distribute the tools of digital disenfranchisement, ushering in an era where trust erodes faster than ever before. The story of Duncan Okindo, lured from Kenya to a scam compound on the Myanmar-Thai border, isn’t just a tale of human trafficking. It’s a warning signal flashing from the frontier of technological disruption, pointing to a future where generative AI is weaponized to supercharge old-fashioned scams with terrifying efficiency. Okindo and his colleagues, trapped in KK Park, used ChatGPT to impersonate wealthy Americans, target US real estate agents, and siphon off their money via bogus crypto investments. He told Reuters that ChatGPT was “the most-used AI tool to help scammers do their thing.”
What’s truly chilling about Okindo’s experience, as reported by Bangkok Post, is how effectively it bypassed the human element that once acted as a constraint on this kind of exploitation. The art of the con, traditionally, required finesse, intuition, and a significant investment of time and emotional labor. ChatGPT automates those very qualities.
“You need to feel familiar,” he said. “If you miss any point, the realtor will know that you are a scam."
This isn’t just about the evolution of grift; it’s about the industrialization of empathy. A Burmese man, forced to participate in "romance scams,” told Reuters that ChatGPT allowed him to woo “dozens of targets simultaneously,” lending his appeals a persuasive veneer that increased victims' trust. Think of it as the dark side of personalization, the apotheosis of what Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, calls “instrumentarianism” — the reorganization of everything around behavior modification. AI now crafts the perfect lie, not just tailored to your vulnerabilities, but optimized to them.
What allows these operations to flourish is a systemic problem as much as a technological one. Myanmar’s border regions are notorious for their weak governance and rampant corruption. For years, they have served as a safe haven for illicit activities, from drug trafficking, which fueled conflicts for decades, to the more recent explosion of online gambling. The rise of scam compounds leveraging AI is simply the latest iteration, a technologically advanced evolution in a long history of exploitation and transnational crime, a grim example of what economists call “regulatory arbitrage” on a global scale.
This also speaks to the pressures on young men in nations like Kenya who feel economic precarity. High levels of unemployment and a desperate need to provide for families create a vulnerability that makes them easy prey for deceptive recruitment agencies. These operations exploit the dreams of a better life, turning them into nightmares of forced labor and participation in criminal enterprises. In 2023, the youth unemployment rate in Sub-Saharan Africa was estimated to be around 11 percent. These statistics offer context into Okindo’s situation: a desperate job seeker became a cog in the global scam network. And it’s not just Africa. Similar patterns of vulnerability are found across the Global South, a legacy of colonialism and ongoing economic inequality that makes these populations uniquely susceptible to these schemes.
This points to an important lesson about technology’s neutrality: tools don’t have morals, people do. But as legal scholar Frank Pasquale argues in The Black Box Society, we must be vigilant about the ways in which algorithms and AI can be used to amplify existing power imbalances and vulnerabilities, not just by malicious actors, but by systems operating with a veneer of neutrality and objectivity. OpenAI might actively try to combat misuse, but the underlying technology is already out in the world. The genie is out of the bottle, and the forces of exploitation are racing to make it their own. The question isn’t whether AI will be used for nefarious purposes — it already is — but whether our institutions and regulatory frameworks can adapt quickly enough to mitigate the harm.
The deeper question is whether we’re prepared for a world where the barriers to large-scale deception have been radically lowered, where the cost of disinformation plummets, and where the line between genuine human interaction and sophisticated simulation becomes increasingly blurred. Traditional anti-fraud measures focus on individual detection and prevention. They may work in isolated incidents, but the scams are growing at an exponential rate. This requires an approach that tackles systemic weaknesses within crypto infrastructure, international policing, and most pressingly, national economic issues driving the labour behind these scams. But it also requires a deeper reckoning with the very nature of trust in a digital age, a willingness to interrogate the platforms and incentives that reward engagement at all costs, even when that engagement is rooted in deception. The story of Duncan Okindo is a disturbing glimpse into a future we are only beginning to understand, a future where the very fabric of social connection is under assault. We need to start thinking now about how to build a defense, not just against the technology itself, but against the social and economic conditions that make its weaponization so devastating.
