AI for Crime Junkies: When ChatGPT Prompts Become Evidence
Inside the operation that assigned every victim a "kill value." Updated daily, with ChatGPT's help.
I need to give you a heads-up. This story, describing the documented human-rights crisis inside Cambodia’s scam compounds, contains descriptions of human trafficking and abuse, including abuse of children. Please read with care or skip reading.
The story I have for you today is unlike anything I’ve ever covered. It’s also unlike any crime podcast I’ve listened to. Because usually, I can point at the map and say: here’s our victim, and here’s our perpetrator. Two dots. A line between them. This story has thousands of dots. Some of the dots are victims AND perpetrators, at the same time.
I’ll explain. But first I need you to meet someone.
Part 1: AI, the Villain?
The Social Ad
I need you to imagine a 27-year-old man. We’ll call him Adi. Professional, Jakarta-based.
One Friday night in 2025, he’s horizontal in bed, thumbing through Instagram, when he sees an ad. It’s good. Excellent, actually. A yacht deck glazed in sunset. A beautiful couple, roughly his age, laughing over dinner. The ad is for something called Klub Romantis: a luxury dating service.
So Adi clicks. A receptionist greets him in the chat: warm, unhurried. They type for a while and he has her undivided attention. The rarest commodity on the internet. She asks what kind of woman he’s looking for, what kind of relationship he wants. Then she sends him to Telegram with a special invite code. It feels exclusive.
Fact number one, and I need you to hold onto it for the rest of this story: that receptionist Adi is falling for is not a woman. She is not even a person. She’s an AI persona.
In OpenAI’s threat intelligence report in February 2026, its investigators called this exact scam Operation “Date Bait”. The scammers had used ChatGPT to generate the ads, design the Klub Romantis logo, even generate images of the fake women. The “receptionist” was a bot instructed to be flirtatious and route men to Telegram. OpenAI estimated this one operation was likely defrauding hundreds of victims a month.
Hundreds. A month.
The Funnel
Once Adi’s on Telegram, the machine hands him back to humans.
Ish.
They’re copy-pasting his messages into ChatGPT and pasting the answers back.
The investigators found the whole operation had an org chart like a sales department. There was a “Lead Generation” team, a receptionist, a “Supervisor Team.” The reception persona keeps things romantic (increasingly explicit, actually) and then introduces Adi to the platforms. One is called “LoveCode.” I’m not going to share the name of the other one, but trust me, subtlety was not the point.
And on LoveCode, there’s this scrolling feed of announcements. Congratulations to this member for completing a mission! Congratulations to that member for unlocking a bonus! All fake.
Adi gets handed to a “mentor.” And the mentor assigns daily tasks. Support your chosen girl in a competition. Pay a hotel deposit for your meet-up. Every task costs a tiny bit more than the last. Every nudge is generated and translated by ChatGPT; emotionally manipulative on purpose, in fluent Indonesian.
So he keeps paying. He’s already invested. But mostly because, by now, he’s in love, or something that feels enough like it.
Hey, I’m Karo Zieminski 🤗.
AI PM and builder. I write Product with Attitude, an AI newsletter for tens of thousands of readers across 146 countries, helping them develop critical AI literacy the only way it sticks: through practice.
If you’re new here, welcome! Here’s what you might have missed:
Subscribe for free, and I’ll keep bringing you deeply researched,
human-written stories like this.
And if you share this article with 3 friends or colleagues,
I’ll thank you with 3 months of a premium subscription.
The Kill Value
This is where I have to tell you the word that made me put my laptop down and walk around my house. Inside the operation, the final extraction has a name. The moment the scammers take everything they think they can get. They call it the “kill.”
Every day, ChatGPT helped the network produce a status report. Each victim had a row, an assigned staff member, and a number in Column C. They called it the “kill value”: an estimate of how much money they thought they could drain from him before they blocked him. Because eventually, they would. Until then, his kill value is updated daily in a process that got operationalized using ChatGPT.
In the report there’s also a copy of an “official” letter one of the scammers pasted into ChatGPT, telling a victim he needed to pay twenty million five hundred thousand rupiah, about $1,250, to fix a fictitious “data processing error” in the LoveCode system. And don’t worry, after he pays, he’ll get a 35% bonus back.
Which never comes. Per the scammers’ own logs: once the victim sends the maximum possible amount, they block him on Telegram and mark the case closed.
Side note: OpenAI’s report seems to contain an error. It prints “$12,000,” but Rp20.5 million worked out to roughly $1,247 using the official March 11, 2025 exchange rates. That’s a tenfold conversion error. OpenAI report, official EU exchange rates.
I learned that investigators have a name for this type of scam: pig-butchering, from the Chinese phrase sha zhu pan (杀猪盘). A pig-butchering scam fattens a victim with weeks of fake romance and rewards before the slaughter, the final extraction of everything they have. I wish I could tell you the metaphor felt excessive by this point in the report.
The Question
At this point, you’re probably starting to imagine the people on the other side of those keyboards. Some criminal mastermind. But let me show you one detail from OpenAI’s report, before you give them that much credit. At one point, one of these workers asked ChatGPT for tax advice. And when the chatbot asked for their occupation, they typed: “scammer.”
To investigators, who by now traced this operation to Cambodia, this was a clear sign that the operators were likely not the people in charge. They also noticed that ChatGPT was being used to translate messages between Chinese-speaking supervisors and Indonesian-speaking scam center workers. Supervisors and the workers didn’t speak the same language, which begs the question why. Why would you take ‘‘scale’’ an operation internationally, just to hire a few teams copying and pasting words from ChatGPT.
That question — why don’t they speak the same language? — is the door into the second half of this story.
There is a very real chance Adi’s supervisor was kidnapped.
The Workers
Many of the workers were recruited from other countries. And a staggering number of them, according to the United Nations and Amnesty International, did not choose to be there.
So how does that happen?
It starts with a job ad. The same way Adi got a too-good-to-be-true ad about luxury dating, workers get a too-good-to-be-true ad about a job. Customer service. IT. Marketing. Great salary, free accommodation, flight included. The UN Human Rights Office and Amnesty have documented this recruitment pattern over and over, and OpenAI has separately banned Cambodia-linked accounts generating exactly these kinds of recruitment messages, offering high pay for trivial tasks, translated from Chinese into English, Spanish, Swahili, Kinyarwanda, German, and Haitian Creole.
The scam compound recruits its own workforce with the same scam. Different bait, same hook.
The Job Hunt
When the job hunt is going badly, a customer service job in Thailand doesn’t sound like danger. It sounds like finally. That was the position Duncan Okindo found himself in mid 2024. He was 26, Kenyan, and desperate enough for work to board his first international flight. His story would later mirror those of about a dozen other men interviewed by Reuters.
At the airport, Duncan was effectively kidnapped, driven across the border into Myanmar, and taken to KK Park, a fortified compound guarded by heavily armed men. Inside, he said, hundreds of coerced workers sat at desktop computers, running scams assigned by their supervisors.
He’s a scam victim, and now his job is scamming.
Many of these workers were using the free version of ChatGPT to convince Americans to put money into fake crypto investments. His ‘‘campaign’’ targeted U.S. real estate agents. His quota: keep at least ten “clients” on the line and convince at least two people a day to put money in. He spent his days trawling property websites like Zillow.com, to find potential victims. If he managed to make contact, he posed as a wealthy Texas cattle rancher and an Alabama soybean farmer, with ChatGPT supplying the local slang.
You need to feel familiar. If you miss any point, the realtor will know that you are a scam.
The Escape
His eventual release began in a remarkably unremarkable way: the power went out.
Thailand cut electricity to the compounds and forced his captors to release some workers. He was among Kenyans freed from the compound.
The Scale
After eighteen months of investigation, Amnesty International found at least fifty-three scam compounds across Cambodia. The UN estimated that around 100,000 people were being held in Cambodia alone, with at least another 120,000 in Myanmar.
That’s 220,000 people.
73 of them agreed to be interviewed by Amnesty. All, without a single exception, were victims of human trafficking.
They described their life behind the perimeter walls topped with razor wire. Armed guards were everywhere. People got sold between compounds. Children as young as fourteen. “Dark rooms” were used to punish workers who missed quotas, tried to escape or contact the authorities. Electric shock batons documented in at least 19 centers.
The AI
When investigators banned one of the Myanmar scam centers and looked at how the operation used ChatGPT, it wasn’t just scam scripts. The operators were using it to run the facility. Organizing schedules, drafting internal announcements. Managing the money in and out. And assigning desk and …dormitory allocations.
Some operators must have felt guilty, or at least anxious, as they kept asking ChatGPT about the criminal penalties for people caught running scams.
Which brings me to Poipet.
The Twist in Poipet
Poipet is a casino town pressed against Cambodia’s border with Thailand. It’s also where I have to complicate the story I just told you.
In February 2025, Thai and Cambodian police raided a building there and freed 215 foreign nationals. Four more compounds in Poipet have been linked to deprivation of liberty.
In late 2025, South Korean prosecutors indicted 13 members of a fraud ring operating out of the town. Their repertoire was ambitious: from romance scams to a fake SpaceX app. They stole about $1.4 million. The ring considered ChatGPT “effective” for the work.
Except these particular scammers had prepared a cover story, in advance, for if they ever got caught.
And the cover story was: we had no choice, we were trafficked.
So how is anyone — police, courts, us — supposed to tell the difference?
Case by case. Phone log by ChatGPT log. The joint investigation unit used mobile-phone forensics and IP tracing and concluded these specific people participated voluntarily.
Trafficking is so well documented, that criminals learned to use it as a smokescreen. Real victims like Duncan get treated as criminals, and detained in immigration centers, while willing scammers were rehearsing the word “victim”.
U.S. authorities indicted Prince Group chairman Chen Zhi and seized roughly $15 billion in Bitcoin on October 14, 2025. Three months later, China secured his arrest and extradition from Cambodia.
Cambodia says it has closed nearly 200 scam operations. Its government claims hundreds of thousands of workers were rescued and repatriated. Aid workers documented the part after “rescued”: thousands of foreign workers stranded in Phnom Penh without money, shelter, free food, or water. Visa-overstay fines kept accumulating while embassies tried to get them home.
Four Rules
If you take nothing else from this story, take this.
One: the romance is the weapon. If someone you met online ushers you to Telegram or WhatsApp, and asks for money, (any amount, any reason), you’re being scammed. No exceptions. Leave.
And if a law firm later offers to recover your losses for an upfront fee, leave too. The FBI has warned that fake law firms contact victims to offer to recover their money. Surprise, surprise, they’d do it only for an upfront fee. OpenAI found one operation producing forged bar-association membership cards with ChatGPT.
Two: the job can be the weapon too. More money, a fresh start, sunshine, no paperwork. Verify it like your life depends on it. For the people in Cambodia, it did.
Three: the person scamming you could be chained to their very desk. Report the scam, but save your rage for the people who own the compound.
Four: check on your people. The lonely ones especially.
Part 2: AI, the Hero?
So far, AI has sat beside the scammers in this story. Fair enough.
But you’re only able to read my post because I could read OpenAI’s report. The police everywhere can read it too and understand the inner works of the scam groups. AI-era crime is self-documenting, and it’d be easy to see AI as the hero.
Part 3: Which one is it, then?
You tell me. What we know is that AI helped run the scam, but didn’t cause it. Cartels ran romance scams before ChatGPT. It kept producing evidence, but didn’t solve the crime. Authorities did.
The way I see it, the judgment remained, as always, human.
Where to Report Pig-Butchering Crimes
If you’re being scammed in the US: report it to the FBI at ic3.gov and the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov. File the report even if shame has you by the throat. That shame is engineered.
UK: Contact Report Fraud, the national reporting centre that replaced Action Fraud in December 2025, or call 0300 123 2040.
EU: Europol maintains a directory linking to the cybercrime reporting portal for every member state.
If you suspect trafficking, or a job offer makes your stomach tighten: in the US, call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888 or text 233733. It operates around the clock in more than 200 languages. Outside the US, contact your country’s foreign ministry and embassy first. They can act across borders.
If you’ve already lost money: the Global Anti-Scam Organization offers victim support and is run largely by former pig-butchering victims.
crazy stuff. Probably at least part of the blame rests with OpenAI, and the Ai industry in general. There's a rush to push their tools to be used with few guardrails in place. So you can add greed of another kind, beyond the scammers/slavers.
Anyone can be anyone else online is truer than it's ever been … and many people seem to be born without the intrinsic skepticism most evolved for in-person interactions let alone digital ones. Police still arrest fugitives who show up to claim fake sweepstakes prizes. Men still believe they're the one to save the poor, lonely stripper. Women still think he might propose after eight years. Hope is the chain with which we bind ourselves.