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Hundreds of thousands trafficked to work as online scammers in SE Asia, says UN

360 points| layer8 | 2 years ago |ohchr.org

185 comments

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[+] ConfusedDog|2 years ago|reply
Just saw a documentary interviewing escaped trafficked labors – just men, women ain't even capable of escape. They are falsely promised for "entrepreneurial opportunities," promptly got locked up and financially deprived to do scamming, prostitution, etc. One guy escaped, bystanders took him to the police and the police was part of the traffiking ring and sold him back. He finally paid off somebody with promise of ransom payment from his relatives, and upon entering Chinese border, he was fined by Chinese border control for violations. These local traffik orgs are armed with AKs and well connected politically. What a crazy, crazy world.
[+] adhesive_wombat|2 years ago|reply
> They are falsely promised for "entrepreneurial opportunities"

From what I heard, which I cannot verify, it's more sinister then that. People take completely normal-sounding jobs in normal-looking and functioning offices. After several months of being paid normally for normal work, they're invited to a team-building event in SE Asia. There, they lose their passports, are interned in huge camps and are press-ganged into being scammers, and tortured or killed if they refuse.

This isn't your usual "can't cheat an honest man" tale where you sucker in greedy rubes with a promised free lunch.

[+] renegade-otter|2 years ago|reply
Perhaps not as dramatic, but this is not uncommon.

HBO is right now running the documentary series Telemarketers, about a US operation that is clearly a fraud, but it's protected by corrupt and bribed police union management.

[+] brightball|2 years ago|reply
The well connected politically is the weird thing about this to me.

I think we can all agree that trafficking is…bad. Yet there seems to be this strange political push back against anti-trafficking efforts.

I’ve seen it for years to the point of pretending it’s not even a problem. The recent political reaction to Sound of Freedom, which was not a political movie, is just the latest example.

It’s one of the most worrisome aspects I’ve seen in general “politicize everything” trends.

[+] granshaw|2 years ago|reply
Where there is no opportunity, there will be crime
[+] boeingUH60|2 years ago|reply
I’ve had a random person contact me out of the blue on Telegram and try to build a friendship that obviously ends in a pig butchering scam.

Fortunately, I have a rule to never make online friends. If I’ve not met someone in a personal or professional setting before, I assume they’re a robot unless proven otherwise.

Some pig butchers have also tried to contact my parents, but my parents are careful, and I immediately block any such number.

Pretty sad to see that these operations could easily be stopped, but the perpetrators live in extremely corrupt places/semi-failed states where they just pay bribes to the local authorities to leave them alone.

[+] bettercallsalad|2 years ago|reply
Can relate. I was in a dating app and there were so many of them pretending “nice looking girl looking for husband” that then tried to befriend you and tried crypto scam. It’s so smooth that even as someone who is relatively well versed in the crypto world and associated scams I couldn’t tell at least in first two or three attempts. Their first few messages leading upto this would be “do you believe in financial freedom as for a happy life?” I would play along just to see what their strategy is and it would almost always end up trying to lure you into yield farming asking to deposit in some random wallet address promising 15% monthly yield.

It was so frustrating at some point, my first questions to someone matching me would be are you a crypto or onlyfan scam? Man the online dating world has turned completely shameless.

[+] apetresc|2 years ago|reply
Sorry, is "pig butchering" a euphemism for something, or am I missing out on some new scamming trend?
[+] smeyer|2 years ago|reply
That's a nice way to avoid scams, but the cost doesn't seem worth the benefits to me as someone who otherwise has good awareness about scams. I've made some nice friends off the internet and yet to fall for a scam, so it doesn't seem worth locking out that possibility of friendship just to reduce the odds of being scammed slightly more.

I could easily see giving very different advice to a friend with less scam awareness, though (like an older friend with limited knowledge of technology).

[+] shiftpgdn|2 years ago|reply
This isn’t new, but it’s good to continue to report on it. I remember even back in 2005 it was generally well known that the gold farmers in World of Warcraft were likely Chinese prison labor. There were even a few articles about it: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/chinese-pr...
[+] logicchains|2 years ago|reply
There's a big difference between prisoners (who at least in theory are locked up as punishment for committing a crime) and people who've been trafficked into slavery. Even the US uses prison labour, but it's people who committed crimes. What's happening in SEA is kidnappping innocent people, locking them in guarded compounds and forcing them to scam people, and they get raped or beaten if they refuse.
[+] mistrial9|2 years ago|reply
Labor historically in a lot of places, was built on peasant-serfs, indentured servitude with a duration, or in many cases slaves. I believe that many educated people in the West are not aware of the extent to which this is true throughout history.
[+] whimsicalism|2 years ago|reply
Sorry, but that is insufficient evidence to me for something to be "generally well known." It is well known that there are flawed incentives to testify in Western contexts to things that did not happen in East Asia, this is known among South Korean defectors (not denying that NK is objectively terrible, one of the worst countries in the world - but defectors to SK have been known to say outright false things because this is how they get paid and get media attention and many of these publications will pay for stories).

Something that is "generally well known" by contrast is that China almost certainly harvested organs from prisoners in the 90s and early 2000s.

[+] jedmeyers|2 years ago|reply
My friend in Eastern Europe ran a bot farm in WoW. He ran bots on his computers that farmed resources, then sold resources for gold and then sold the gold to Chinese for end-user resale. The only labor involved was hiring some college students and paying them for each top-level character they progress that can be used for farming. He even bought my character for $50 when I stopped playing.
[+] 1-6|2 years ago|reply
Unsure if it's related to the same region but in general, scammers are getting sophisticated with their attacks finding local churches and email phishing with unusually detailed information about church members. Posting videos asking prayers for specific individuals online is a bad practice since it exposes not only that individual but everyone around them to scam.
[+] throwaway67743|2 years ago|reply
This is not new at all, there are US companies facilitating this (see: Tinder e.g) with zero regard for the lives of the people forced into doing this. They actively ignore these things and profit off it, absolutely disgusting.
[+] logicchains|2 years ago|reply
LinkedIn and various job boards have much more responsibility than Tinder; most of the victims described in the article travel to SEA for what they've been led to believe are high-paying white-collar jobs, not because they're romance-scammed into going to meet a partner there.
[+] naillo|2 years ago|reply
What is tinder doing to facilitate this? I assumed bots on there were just financial scam bots not of the trafficking kind
[+] mithras|2 years ago|reply
My wife's niece is from Laos and works for one of these chinese scam shops in the golden triangle. She is there voluntarily because it makes 5 times more money than her best alternative. Morally repugnant of course.
[+] brap|2 years ago|reply
I wonder if low quality scams (made by humans) are still going to be a thing given advances in AI.

I bet a human sounding bot can already make a phone call and scam most of our grandparents far better than the average human scammer. Add the ability to mimic the voice of a relative and you can get pretty high success rates, even with more tech-savvy victims I bet.

[+] lr4444lr|2 years ago|reply
First it was Kenyan academic ghost writers for hire, now AI putting traffickers out or business too? What's this world coming to....
[+] slig|2 years ago|reply
Low quality and obvious scams are a feature, they filter only the most gullible.
[+] 1-6|2 years ago|reply
Eventually, it's going there but at the moment, people are mostly using low-tech methods to scam others. Oftentimes we'll overestimate/underestimate the abilities of scammers. It's important to realize that access to cloud services and sophisticated AI requires money for that infrastructure and these paltry scammers won't do that unless it's a part of a bigger org.
[+] kazanz|2 years ago|reply
> The scam centres generate revenue amounting to billions of US dollars each year. Revenue in 2021 from scamming globally amounted to USD 7.8 billion worth of stolen cryptocurrency.

Crypto has made scamming easier than ever. Ironically, it probably is making it easier to track how impactful it is too.

[+] delusional|2 years ago|reply
It's a nice honeypot. All the scammers are busy scamming each other.
[+] fortran77|2 years ago|reply
Are they scamming Westerners? (TFA wasn't clear). They'd have to be pretty fluent in idomatic English to do that.

Do the 5-10 messages I get each week "Hi! This is Irene. Are you going to the party?" come from trafficed people?

[+] em500|2 years ago|reply
I'm guessing that they're mostly targeting the richer Asian countries, including China (which is on average is poorer than the West, but in the aggregate has comparable spending power as North America).
[+] knodi123|2 years ago|reply
From what I understand, initial messages don't come from the slaves; instead, you get connected to one if you reply. So the english skills might shift drastically between the first and second message.
[+] Avicebron|2 years ago|reply
If it's not automated, it could easily be some sort of pre-defined script. I don't get many anymore, but I've definitely had mysterious text messages from different numbers supposedly across the country that were nearly identical. Usually it was "hey is this [random name], where were you last night?" I assume this was meant to draw me into some sort of dialogue. It happened enough that I can't really believe it was just a misdial.
[+] alephnerd|2 years ago|reply
They started off targeting Chinese speakers (Mainland China, Taiwan, HK, Malaysia, Singapore) but expanded into English and Thai over the past few years.
[+] magic123_|2 years ago|reply
A relative of mine got scammed for tens of thousands of dollars exactly this way. They are college educated, COO of the company they founded in the US, and thought they were just making a new friend over several months after receiving a message that was addressed to them by error.
[+] tropicaljacket|2 years ago|reply
"Many of the victims are well-educated, sometimes coming from professional jobs or with graduate or even post-graduate degrees, computer-literate and multi-lingual." (from the report)
[+] kirillzubovsky|2 years ago|reply
Hi, this is UPS. Your packages was the wherehouse due to an error in the shipping address. Please contact our customer service immediately at http://scams4you.xyz
[+] gumballindie|2 years ago|reply
Not even scam bosses allow for remote work i see. Cant they just like hire willing scam workers instead of trafficking people?
[+] blurbleblurble|2 years ago|reply
This is an extreme and poignant caricature of the labor market in general as vast numbers of people experience it. Not to minimize what's happening here: extreme financial pressure with very high stakes is not rare. It's disturbing to see the extremes because there's no hard line between normal labor and this, it's really a continuum.

Aside from enforcement and regulation, what really prevents these exploitative forms of labor from spreading?

[+] aphroz|2 years ago|reply
A good thing that soon AI will be able to scam us as good as humans so they won't need to traffick people anymore.
[+] elric|2 years ago|reply
Hundreds of thousands? That's a mind boggling scale. That's at least the size of a decent city. How do you even cope with the logistics of dealing with 100k+ scammers?
[+] lost_tourist|2 years ago|reply
The people doing this and anyone supporting it should be put away forever. Still a person's liberty and making them a slave is one of the worst possible lives for anyone and should be relegated only to the worst of criminals like murderers, rapists, and enslavers. I have zero tolerance for those types of people and think the international community shouldn't either.