South Korean Fraud Ring Allegedly Used Deepfake Identities to Traffic Victims into Cambodia Scam Operations
August 1, 2024
Authorities in Vietnam arrested three South Korean men alleged to have used purported deepfake identities in a cross-border romance scam scheme. Victims were reportedly deceived into travel and coerced into moving to Cambodia, where they reportedly were forced into performing scam operations after their passports were taken. The network allegedly obtained about USD $1 million in 2024 before the suspects fled Cambodia and were arrested in Da Nang on October 28, 2025.
- Alleged deployer
- choi-minsu, choi-jinwoo, seo-jaeseok
- Alleged developer
- unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
- Alleged harmed parties
- general-public, victims-of-romance-scams, trafficking-victims-coerced-into-scam-operations, epistemic-integrity
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1291
Data source
Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).
When citing the database as a whole, please use:
McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.
Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide
We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.