Amrita University researchers and their international collaborators interviewed insiders and more than 115 trafficking survivors to probe scam compounds that operate in Southeast Asia. They warn that artificial intelligence is making these criminal operations faster, cheaper, more persuasive and increasingly hard to detect.
The studies find it is an organised criminal industry in which people, recruited through bogus overseas job advertisements, are trafficked, locked up and made to run romance, cryptocurrency and investment scams under surveillance, threats and violence.
It cites figures between $18 billion and $37 billion of estimated losses in 2023 from scams targeting people in East and South-East Asia.
The research was conducted by Amrita’s Center For Cybersecurity Systems And Networks, in association with Ben-Gurion University, University of Melbourne, University of Venice, and Colorado State University.
“Many of these scam messages are sent by trafficked people who are forced to send them. The same technology that scales the fraud can flag the fake job advertisement that lured them in,” said Dr Krishnashree Achuthan, who took part in the studies and is Amrita’s Dean for PG Programs.
“Current protections are insufficient, so the burden still falls on the person being targeted. This means we need more awareness and research.”
Published on June 30, 2026 on United Nations World Day Against Trafficking in Persons, the project links in with this year’s theme of “Trapped Behind the Scam”, which focuses on the trafficking networks behind cyber-enabled fraud.
One Scam, Two Victims
The person who sends you a romantic message or a good investment opportunity may not be an independent cybercriminal. They might be a trafficking victim being forced to reach out to strangers for hours a day.
Research shows that scam compounds operate like organized companies with managers, human-resource departments, training manuals, daily targets, and scripted conversations.
Trafficked workers may have their passports taken and be charged for food, accommodation and other basic necessities. Missing targets can lead to violence, threats or spiraling debt. One survivor described being charged for “breathing seaside air”.
Much of this forced labour is spent cultivating friendships and emotional relationships over days or weeks before presenting a fraudulent financial opportunity. Researchers have found that artificial intelligence is increasingly helping, and perhaps automating, this process of building trust.
AI is More Persuasive than an Expert Human
Amrita’s top research project, “Love, Lies, and Language Models: Investigating AI’s Role in Romance-Baiting Scams,” will be featured at USENIX Security ’26, one of the leading global cybersecurity conferences.
The study found AI tools are already being used for translation, improving tone and drafting personalised responses to potential victims.
Participants believed they were interacting with two humans during the week-long experiment. In reality one of the conversation partners was an autonomous AI agent.
The AI complied with a request 46% of the time, compared with 18% for a trained human operator.
Commercial content filters also failed to detect the romance-baiting conversations because the messages initially appeared to be ordinary expressions of friendship, affection and emotional support.
Spotting Fake Job Offers Before Trafficking Starts
The researchers also have developed a machine-learning system capable of identifying fake job ads used to recruit trafficking victims.
The system was trained on a multilingual dataset of job postings in English, Hindi and Bengali to identify warning signs like unrealistic salaries, vague job descriptions, urgent hiring requests and suspicious overseas employment offers.
The technology could eventually be built into job portals and browser extensions to alert applicants about potentially dangerous ads, the researchers said.
Find out more in this feature article by Wired Magazine.
