When 26-year-old Duncan Okindo boarded a flight to Thailand last year, he believed he had finally secured a way to provide for his family in Kenya. He was promised a job in customer care in Bangkok by a local agent. The trip was his first abroad, a journey he was hoping would be the beginning of his greener pastures.

His dreams were, however, crushed the moment he landed.

Okindo said unknown men abducted him at the airport and smuggled him across the border into Myanmar. His destination was the notorious KK Park compound – an armed and heavily fortified complex that he described as looking “like it was meant for war.”

Okindo spent four months trapped inside KK Park, one of several compounds in the region run largely by Chinese-led criminal syndicates. He said these facilities were hubs of large-scale online fraud where forced laborers, many of them trafficked from other countries, worked at rows of desktop computers targeting victims around the world.

Okindo’s job was to pose as an investor and trick unsuspecting Americans into putting money into fake cryptocurrency platforms.

Many used a free version of ChatGPT to craft messages designed to trick Americans into making bogus cryptocurrency investments, he told Reuters.

This type of fraud, known as pig-butchering, involves cultivating trust with victims over time before swindling them out of large sums of money.

Reuters could not independently verify every detail of Okindo’s account. But HAART Kenya, an anti-trafficking organization that helped rescue him, confirmed he was among several Kenyans saved from such compounds earlier this year. His story also corroborated stories of a dozen other survivors Reuters spoke to.

Okindo explained that his specific assignment focused on U.S. real estate agents. He scoured property websites where realtors advertise their services, to find potential victims or “clients,” as the syndicate called them.

He then reached out while posing as a wealthy investor, often claiming to be a cattle rancher from Texas or a soybean farmer from Alabama who had struck it rich with cryptocurrency.

“You need to feel familiar,” Okindo said. “If you miss any point, the realtor will know that you are a scam.”

His bosses gave him strict daily targets: he had to convince at least two agents to deposit money into fake accounts while maintaining ongoing conversations with 10 more. The deposits, he explained, went straight into the syndicate’s pockets.

Okindo said ChatGPT was “the most-used AI tool to help scammers do their thing,” allowing him and others to write messages that sounded natural and distinctly American. He also used the chatbot for quick research. When victims quizzed him on cryptocurrency details or asked about housing markets in specific U.S. communities, he pasted their questions into ChatGPT to generate convincing replies.

The syndicate issued weekly scripts mapping out the fraud – when to discuss properties, when to bring up crypto, and how to pressure victims into opening crypto accounts. According to Okindo, the goal was simple: push the victim to deposit real money into what looked like a trading platform, but was actually controlled by the scammers.

Sometimes, he improvised with ChatGPT’s help, creating approaches so convincing they managed to lure even people who had previously fallen victim to fraud.

Workers who missed their targets faced brutal punishment. The bosses punished workers who didn’t meet the targets, humiliating them, beating them and shocking them with electric batons, Okindo recalled. By contrast, big wins were celebrated with drums, as the bosses forced laborers to pound them loudly in honor of a successful scam.

“My dignity was reduced to ashes,” he said.

Okindo finally escaped in April after Thai authorities cut off electricity to KK Park and other scam compounds, forcing syndicates to release some of the workers. He returned to Kenya soon after, free but scarred by his ordeal.

Back home, Okindo now faces new challenges. He said he continues to deal with stigma, financial difficulties, and fear of retribution. He believes cartel affiliates in Kenya are monitoring him and has already received threatening phone calls.