In an increasingly common crime, dotting the jungles of Cambodia and Myanmar are huge, sprawling compounds, home to massive self-contained scam centers. And those scam centers are often staffed by people who have been trafficked and forced to work. Hundreds of thousands of them in fact. Now AI is literally changing the face of who is being trafficked into the compounds. Due to the improved technology, experts say increasingly traffickers are targeting women to fill the roles.  

When dying feels like the only way out 

Lily is a single mother who left home in the Philippines when she was offered a high paying job in Taiwan. Her sister Rose has been taking care of her son while she’s away. But instead of a good job, Lily found herself held captive, tortured and worse. Once behind compound walls in Cambodia, Lily was then forced to lure victims into online romance scams.  

In one of the few messages home Lily has been able to send Rose shared with CNN: 

She said she wants to die there and I told her ‘Please don’t do that…your son is always asking me when you will come home’. 

Lily’s experience mirrors a new trend in the criminal trafficking enterprise of specifically targeting women with their fake job offer trafficking trap. That’s because scammers want women’s faces and voices to use in their lucrative romance scams. Using AI altered faces and voices, traffickers force them to engage in online romance schemes with men in wealthy countries to scam them out of money.  

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