Kirsty, a woman in her 40s from North Yorkshire, thought she had found love online. A man on a dating site claimed to be a British businessman working in Turkey — he sent photos, seemed financially secure, and even showed her a banking website proving he had $600,000 in savings. Then came the crisis: he said he'd been mugged and needed help. Over two months, Kirsty transferred £80,000, borrowing £50,000 from family. The man turned out to be Nigerian, using a voice disguiser to deceive her. The banking website was a sophisticated fake. The phone she bought ended up in Lagos.
Kirsty's story is far from unique. Global fraud losses now exceed half a trillion dollars a year, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance. Reports of romance scams such as Kirsty's rose by 20% in the first quarter year on year between 2024 and 2025, according to Barclays, with City of London police saying £106m was lost in the UK in 2024 alone to scams like the one Kirsty fell prey to.
Experts point to Covid lockdowns as a turning point. With people spending more time online, scammers found a vast new pool of potential victims. At the same time, AI-generated voices, fake websites, and deepfake videos made fraud harder to detect. Global layoffs also created a ready supply of desperate people that criminal networks could exploit.
Bogus job adverts lure people overseas who can't find work in their home country. Once abroad, they are trafficked into scam compounds — often in lawless regions of Myanmar or Cambodia — and forced to defraud strangers under threat of violence. The BBC recently visited one such compound in Cambodia, where records tracked workers' toilet breaks and fake police uniforms were used to intimidate victims. The scammers, in other words, are sometimes victims themselves.
Governments are now pushing back. For the first time, nations have signed a joint agreement to combat scamming through international cooperation. But criminal operations are deeply embedded in regions where authorities have little control — making the fightback as complex as the scams themselves.
