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The Independent UK
The Independent UK
National
Erika Kinetz

Four days to make victims fall in love: How global scammers use US tech to fleece people

Global Scams Technology - (Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

The instructions were clear: He had four days to make each victim fall in love.

And there were a lot of victims. Online, Safeer Mohammed Koorimannil, who was trafficked to a scam center in Myanmar, impersonated a 28-year-old Singaporean woman named Ella. On a typical shift, he said, he chatted with more than 100 people across dozens of profiles at the same time, as supervisors prowled among the desks with electric batons.

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