Scammers are becoming ever more sophisticated - this is what the fightback looks like

In 2024, Kirsty, a woman in her 40s living in North Yorkshire, met a man on a dating website who said he was an English businessman working in Turkey. He shared a picture that he claimed was of himself showing his chiselled abs on the beach and claimed to be financially secure.

He even used a banking website to persuade her he had $600,000 (£443,600) in savings. But after two weeks of chatting, he said he'd been mugged and his phone and computer had been stolen, and he asked her to buy him a phone and to pay some bills for him with her money.

What happened next perfectly illustrates the international web that scammers weave. But in fact the phone ended up in Lagos, Nigeria, and the £80,000 went to people with Nigerian, Romanian and other European names via money transfer services.

The man was not British, but Nigerian, using a voice disguiser to deceive his target. Kirsty is just one victim of what experts say has been a surge in scams since the Covid lockdowns of the early 2020s. Global fraud losses are now over half a trillion dollars a year, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance.

Kirsty's story is also an example of the increasingly internationalised nature of scamming and with the costs adding up, governments and companies are pushing for international cooperation to stop the scammers. For the first time, a joint agreement has been signed between nations to combat scamming.

But criminal techniques are becoming increasingly sophisticated and they often originate from parts of the world where the authorities struggle to operate.

And so the question is whether there is really much countries can do to turn the tables on the scammers and prevent many more people like Kirsty being conned out of their savings?

Scams are usually defined as an attempt by an individual, be it by text, on the phone or email, to get you to do something which will ultimately see you losing money, or your data.

I've spent two decades investigating fraud for the BBC and while scams come in every flavour, ultimately they're all the same – someone lying to you to get you to send money.

Meanwhile, global layoffs created a new labour force that could be recruited by criminal networks, says Ilias Chatzis, acting head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. The criminal networks are very hard to crack.

"Some of these scams are in almost lawless areas or in areas which are controlled by armed gangs… that the governments may have very little control over." Myanmar is one country that has become notorious for its scam centres. These have their roots in the 1990s, when illegal casinos were set up.

These were cracked down on, but during the pandemic these buildings were increasingly used as the operational hubs for scams. When the military junta seized power in 2021, the civil war that ensued helped criminals capitalise on the chaos within the country and scam centres flourished.

There's also another complicating factor - that the scammer could be a victim too. Bogus job adverts lure people overseas who can't find work in their home country. They are trafficked to scamming centres, where they are trapped and forced to steal people's money for their criminal bosses.

The BBC recently visited a massive vacated scam compound in a Cambodian town that people had fled after being shelled during a border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia. The scam centre revealed desperate living and working conditions.

The walls of one of the rooms in the centre were painted with motivational messages, such as "Money Coming From Everywhere" in Chinese letters.

Records showing when 'employees' went to the lavatory and how long they took were found, along with fake police uniforms and counterfeit police summons, which were designed to scare people into handing over their money. Conning people into going to the scam centres is a scam in itself.

The victim will be met at the airport, convinced they are on their way to a new job as a teacher or a customer service agent. "Everything looks normal - until they are in the compound, and they're totally in the hands of the traffickers," Chatzis says. "From then on, the nightmare starts. Passports are taken away."

The people inside these scam compounds are forced to work long, hard shifts, with targets to bring in a certain amount of money from defrauding victims around the world.

Failure to hit these targets can mean solitary confinement, beatings or the threat of being moved to a different compound where conditions are even worse. It isn't only South East Asia - scam centres also flourishing in countries such as India and the UAE.

Nick Court, a City of London police officer who is currently working as head of Interpol's financial crime and anti-corruption centre, says people from wealthy nations need to understand the reality overseas.

He describes them as "lawless areas where law enforcement officers cannot enter, except with huge military escorts, where the pay is low and the benefits of being involved in fraud are incredibly high." Gatherings like this have been taking place since 2024, but I could see this was clearly much bigger.

Government ministers, tech giants and law enforcement were all there and for the first time a joint agreement was signed between some nations at the end. The summit saw 44 countries out of 120 represented signing a pledge committing to "disrupting fraud at the source and enhancing victim support".

While it's hoped more will sign later, there are still many nations that have not committed to cooperation. Wealthier nations in attendance – European nations, South Korea, Australia – are often the victims, and they have a greater interest in solving this matter.

Meanwhile developing nations, where many of the scam operations are based – especially Myanmar, West Africa and South Asia – are being asked to do more, often without the resources to do so.

It is a stark reminder of the imbalance: of criminals exploiting impoverished communities with opportunities to make money that they wouldn't otherwise have.

And for some countries tackling things that are much more elemental to their own population's existence have to take precedence over worrying about financial crimes in wealthier countries. What really caught my ear was Xolisile Khanyile, a financial crimes prosecutor from South Africa, outlining this tension.

She argued that two-way collaboration was critical: if developing nations are to help destroy fraud networks, wealthier countries need to share their technical expertise and resources too.

She said in her experience, developed nations will complain about a lack of resources without understanding that fighting industrialised fraud needs "fit-for-purpose skills like your forensic accountants, experts on crypto, experts in open source investigations, so that we will be able to make a difference."

"What I can do is try to get international cooperation to ensure that we have outcomes which support the making of fraud harder for criminals, make their costs harder, bring them to account, and if we can freeze any assets they're making from those fraudulent activities."

"It's these multifaceted international relationships with big business that we really need to be strengthening far more than we have," he adds. Digital firms including Amazon and Meta were at the summit, signed the joint statement, and have stepped up their anti-scam protections.

Dating platform has cracked down on fake accounts, and says it now removes 50 every minute. Head says he learned laying the groundwork for successful action took time before any operational activity took place, and the same applies to cooperating with tech firms.

"That's still about creating and demonstrating that mutual benefit, and it's about building trust between the partners and mutual respect." It's not all doom and gloom. There were plenty of examples of successful operations at the Vienna summit. Alex Wood, former fraudster and part of the BBC Scam Secrets team