Like any transnational criminal enterprise, the global scamming industry is swathed in secrecy.
But last month, The New York Times gained access to Shunda Park, an office complex in the middle of war-torn Myanmar that was built for a single purpose: stealing money from people around the world.
The rare look at the inner workings of the multibillion-dollar scamming business occurred after a rebel militia that has been fighting the Myanmar military captured Shunda Park. Inside was a trove of materials — online chats, company documents, handwritten notebooks — that laid bare how Chinese-run criminal networks have industrialized the online scam.
More than 3,500 fraudsters from dozens of countries worked at Shunda, some trafficked into the business themselves. Every day, the lowest echelon sent out thousands of hellos to people on Facebook and other social media. Others role-played alluring men and women in online chats or impersonated crypto investors.
At Shunda, there were dedicated video-call rooms with fake backdrops of a corporate suite or tastefully decorated apartment. Deepfake images, doctored videos and actors wearing wigs completed the grifts.
The frauds often took months to unfold, with scammers playing love interests before introducing investment opportunities.
In the days before Shunda was shuttered by the rebel force, the scammers impersonated a beautiful young Asian woman named Vivian. She flattered a truck driver from Kansas and a retired deputy sheriff in New Mexico. She told a large-animal veterinarian that he was handsome, then turned her attention to an electrical engineer.
One man responded to her online missives with a smiley-face emoji.
“Age is just a number,” he wrote, according to a review of the online chats.
The piles of notebooks found at Shunda show the effort put into creating fake personas. Over dozens of pages, for instance, a Chinese man named Chen Minchen comes to life. His first love was a fellow college student, whom he mistakenly hit with a basketball, showing both his athleticism and his care in apologizing to her. His blood type is B. His zodiac sign is Leo; that’s his English first name, too. His mother loves to cook braised pork belly. He owns a Mercedes-Benz and a $1.2 million apartment in Hong Kong.
The scam manuals are subtle: Target women in China over 30, but for women in Taiwan, try 40 and older.
For the Taiwan cohort, days one to three of the scam are for getting to know the basics, like the target’s occupation, hobbies, relationship status. Days three to five are for “making up stories about childhood to appear relatable.” By days five to seven, romance enters the chat, especially in the evening when women are supposedly more receptive.
The scammer is to say that he admires women for their internal beauty, not their outward appearance. But he also should demand respect for his professional judgment. Then he should introduce an investment scheme.
“Strike precisely,” the scam manual says. “Create her dreams.”
Later, the fraudster coaches the women on how to deal with bank tellers worried about their large withdrawals. Say it’s for your upcoming wedding, a manual instructs. Different cryptocurrencies and trading platforms are discussed.
One scamming notebook ends with a chilling directive: “Induce the customer to add more money, until all her savings and loans are completely wiped out.”
Some of the scammers at Shunda directed their victims to a financial investment platform called Renaissance Technologies AI Supercomputing Hedge Capital Ltd., or RTAI for short. RTAI has a website and smartphone apps that tout mastery of global financial-market data.
RTAI claims to have executives trained at major investment houses. One has a finance degree from Harvard. The company says its New York headquarters are in a building called The Times Center, which is owned by The New York Times Company.
David, a property broker from Mexico who, like several interviewed victims, agreed to speak only if he was identified by a single name, said he was approached over the summer on Facebook by a “beautiful girl” named Marina from San Francisco. On videos, she paraded her luxurious life, funded by her investments in RTAI. She introduced David to the platform and sent him financial documents in Spanish. Marina even gave him seed money, which grew quickly. He withdrew those earnings but later invested his savings at Marina’s prodding.
In May, Oscar, a computer technician from Ecuador, met a Chinese woman named Annie. The RTAI scam that unfolded was the same. In fact, there is no company called RTAI — or any company at all — renting offices in The Times Center event space. There is no such thing as a finance major at Harvard. None of the supposed founders of RTAI have any digital footprint. No one at RTAI responded to queries from The Times.
In November, just as fighting near Shunda Park intensified, David and Oscar, along with hundreds of others from Mexico to Brazil, found they could no longer withdraw funds from their RTAI accounts. After The Times contacted RTAI, some of the apps stopped working. But on RTAI’s Telegram channel, the number of new subscribers increased by the day.
Berry Wang contributed research.
Hannah Beech is a Times reporter based in Bangkok who has been covering Asia for more than 25 years. She focuses on in-depth and investigative stories.
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