OpenAI пресекла мошенническую сеть из Камбоджи, эксплуатировавшую ChatGPT

OpenAI in August 2026 publicly disclosed the disruption of a criminal group based in Cambodia: its members used ChatGPT as a tool for automating and scaling four types of fraud — investment schemes, romance fraud, illegal gambling, and impersonation.

How Scammers Used ChatGPT

The criminal network used ChatGPT to automate criminal schemes targeting victims in different countries around the world. According to a post on the OpenAI blog, the operation covered four key areas:

• Investment fraud — ChatGPT generated convincing scripts for communicating with victims and "legends" of non-existent brokers and traders
• Romance fraud — creation of fictitious dialogues on behalf of non-existent people with the aim of gaining trust and subsequently defrauding them financially
• Illegal gambling — attracting users to prohibited gambling platforms
• Impersonation — posing as real people or legitimate organizations

The combination of the first two types is the classic "pig butchering" scheme: the fraudster builds prolonged "romantic" or "friendly" relationships with the victim through messengers and social networks, then offers to invest in a fictitious cryptocurrency or investment platform. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Americans lost more than $4.5 billion to this scheme in 2024 — one of the most profitable types of modern financial fraud.

Generative AI has significantly lowered the qualification threshold for such operations: ChatGPT handles the language work, allowing operators to conduct dialogues with victims in English, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean without actually speaking those languages. A single operator, with the help of AI, can simultaneously maintain dozens of conversations.

Why Cambodia

Cambodia in recent years has become one of the largest regional centers of organized internet fraud in Southeast Asia, alongside Myanmar and Laos. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), special economic zones in these countries host "fraud farms" — closed facilities where tens of thousands of people work as operators of criminal schemes under coercion, often having themselves become victims of labor trafficking.

OpenAI identified the accounts involved in the operation that violated the acceptable use policy and blocked them. This is not the company's first public report on disrupting such schemes: since 2023, OpenAI has regularly published data on identified abuses of ChatGPT — from state influence campaigns to criminal fraud schemes. Each report describes the type of scheme and the rules violated, without disclosing technical details of the detection system.

According to the official

OpenAI blog, the company discovered the criminal operation and took measures to address violations of its service usage policies.

What This Means

The disruption of the Cambodian operation is a clear illustration of how large language models have become an infrastructure element of organized crime, on par with anonymous messengers and payment systems. Notably, the group combined four types of schemes into a single operation — this speaks to a high level of organization: AI tools are being used not by random fraudsters, but by structured criminal organizations. AI developers are being forced to build abuse monitoring systems at a scale comparable to the antivirus industry — and this demand will only grow.