The perpetrators of scams are often also victims of scams that wind up as trafficked workers.
Someone responded to a post on twitter saying essentially they let off steam by guiltlessly verbally abusing scam callers on the phone, feeling morally safe since the callers are obviously career criminals. But it’s actually more likely the person on the other end is a literal prisoner of their scam job, not necessarily “career criminals” or even people who wanted to be scammers at all.
So I thought I would just make a list of the grisly reports on this, because a lot of people just don’t know about it. And I think if more people knew what’s behind scammers, there might be more propulsion for preventing it on our end.
Content warnings apply.
More than 100,000 foreign nationals, many of them Chinese, were estimated to have been lured to these scam centres, where they were effectively imprisoned and forced to work long hours running sophisticated online fraud operations targeting victims all over the world. Ming Xuechang ran one of the most notorious of these scam centres, called Crouching Tiger Villa. He also reportedly ran the local police force, which, while it donned the regular uniform of the Myanmar national police, acted as little more than a private militia, one of several which enforced the rule of the four families in Laukkaing. In September, as China ramped up pressure on all the groups running scam centres to shut them down and hand over those who worked there, the Ming family resisted. By some estimates the casinos of each family were processing several billion dollars every year. It was a huge business to give up. The families also had close ties to the Myanmar military, and the Mings may have believed they were protected, even from the demands of China, which has long had a powerful influence in this border region.
“I never understood what cryptocurrency was. I just understood I had to help sell it.” After arriving in Cambodia at the start of May last year, Rahim was taken to a compound with about 70 other people, he says. His passport was confiscated and he was taught how to scam victims online, tricking Australians, Europeans and Chinese into handing over their money. Rahim’s job was to garner the trust of victims. He would pretend to be an attractive woman, targeting men who seemed affluent as well as older Australians who often had money sitting in the bank. He would talk to them about their lives and what a great opportunity investing in crypto was. When the men he was talking to asked to video call, a model would take Rahim’s place and chat with them. When they seemed convinced, Rahim would hand them over to a supervisor who would extort money from them. Rahim says he was forced to work from 8am to 8pm and had to eat food that went against his customs as a Muslim. He was told he needed to hook three people a day – or 21 a week. When he failed to meet targets he was beaten with a belt or computer keyboard. “If I made a mistake on my job I was put in a dark room,” he says. “I couldn’t escape from the room. I wasn’t allowed to eat anything for a week.”
Most pig-butchering operations were orchestrated by Chinese gangsters based in Cambodia or Myanmar. They’d lure young people from across Southeast Asia to move abroad with the promise of well-paying jobs in customer service or online gambling. Then, when the workers arrived, they’d be held captive and forced into a criminal racket. Thousands have been tricked this way. Entire office towers are filled with floor after floor of people sending spam messages around the clock, under threat of torture or death. With the assistance of translators, I started video chatting with people who’d escaped. They described abuses that were worse than I could have imagined. Workers who missed quotas were beaten, starved, made to hit one another. One said he’d seen people forcibly injected with methamphetamine to increase productivity. Two others said they’d seen workers murdered, with the deaths passed off as suicides. They said the bosses would buy and sell captive laborers like livestock.
Caught up in a global cyber scam operation, Santos was forced to dupe and build fake relationships with unsuspecting people online in order to swindle them of their money. To do so, Santos presented himself as a young and attractive businesswoman from Thailand whose photos he stole from a random Instagram account. The Virginia real estate broker was just one of hundreds of innocent people that Santos was coerced to catfish. And Santos—a 26-year-old Filipino who requested to use a pseudonym for fear of his traffickers’ retaliation—is just one of an estimated hundreds of thousands of people, mostly spread across Southeast Asia, who have been involved in what is known in Chinese as “sha zhu pan,” or “pig-butchering.”