FRONTLINE Kicks Off 45th Season with Exposé on Online Scams

In 2026, more people than ever stay “informed” by consuming bite-sized data nuggets without bothering to check the ingredients. But there are healthier ways to feed your head.

Since 1983, FRONTLINE has been about as healthy as it gets, a bastion of long-form investigative TV journalism willing to spend months or even years skillfully investigating a single topic, with no other agenda than providing facts and insight into complex, multilayered issues of the day.

That said, their season opener, Scammed, won’t be remembered as their finest work. It’s not that there’s anything amiss with their reportage, which reviews the exponential rise of online (you guessed it) scams. It’s just that ultimately there’s nothing particularly revelatory here, and none but the most uninformed viewers will come away with new knowledge you can use to keep yourself safer.

In collaboration with the Associated Press, FRONTLINE spent over a year conducting a global investigation into the “growing epidemic of online scams […] powered by organized crime, trafficked labor, American technology, and, increasingly, AI.” It is, we are told, a “global attack on human trust.”

Scammed opens with the story of 17-year-old Gavin Gaffey, who was catfished by an online scammer and sent a nude pic. In reply, he was threatened with the photo’s being posted online if he didn’t cough up enough cash. Distressed by his inability to get the scammer to relent, Gaffey committed suicide that very night.

Eventually, a Nigerian man was extradited to the U.S. to face trial for this case of “sextortion,” and we learn about a Nigerian subculture that celebrates and fosters online fraud, including via tutorials and even music videos lionizing the practice. It is here that FRONTLINE found a “Yahoo Boy” (as many of the scammers refer to themselves) named Ayomide willing to talk on camera about his trade. One of Scammed’s most affecting moments is when Ayomide hears Gaffey’s story. Despite not being an especially expressive person, clearly he’s impacted. But because there are so few ways to make ends meet in his broken nation, he may not stop. “I do feel bad; but as a man, you have to make money,” he says. “[…] Scamming is not good. But you have to make money. That is all.”

The greater part of Scammed’s 83 minutes is spent hammering home what a former Treasury Department. senior advisor calls “the scaling of fraud, the industrialization of fraud,” which has been especially enabled by the combination of social media and cryptocurrency, abetting a milieu where a single individual can be perpetrating hundreds of scams at once, as well as what are, in effect, “assembly line” scams, where different people handle various components of a single false online identity, operating from a playbook and contributing to an overall script for each scam so that dozens of people can interchangeably take part. 

The prime example of that industrialization is Myanmar, where a law-enforcement vacuum in the wake of 2021’s military coup d’etat has created an environment allowing for the rise of “scam compounds,” functional cities with tens of thousands of workers-cum-prisoners plying their trade around the clock. A terrible irony: many of them were lured there by online scammers promising legitimate jobs. 

Where Scammed comes up definitively short is in exploring why so many people fall prey to scams that are often patently ridiculous. We hear several stories of relatively wealthy people being suckered by people they’ve never met into blowing their life savings trying to make extra money they don’t actually need. “Every single person is vulnerable to scams in different ways,” we’re told — people with advanced degrees, people who work with computers, what have you. But while loneliness is clearly a factor in some cases, not once do we hear a theorist or psychologist offer insight into the phenomenon. No doubt it’s tied to the bigger issue of why people are so relatively trusting of whatever pops up on their smartphones — but to completely ignore an aspect so central to the success of online scams seems a glaring oversight.

Online scams comprise a thriving global industry, and advances in technology are tied to its growth. While Scammed will leave you generally more informed about the scale of the problem, this knowledge is unnecessary to protect yourself. What is necessary — aside from the obvious: You shouldn’t necessarily believe people are who they say they are — goes unsaid.

View Scammed online or on your local PBS station.