The secrets of scam farms

Summary

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Click Here Podcast – "The Secrets of Scam Farms"

Date: October 14, 2025
Host: Dina Temple-Raston (Click Here, Recorded Future News), guest-hosted on NPR/WAMU’s 1A with Jen White
Topic: A deep exploration into Southeast Asian scam farms—industrial-scale operations where trafficked workers are forced to commit global online scams.

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Episode Overview

This episode draws back the curtain on the shadowy world of scam farms: sprawling, compound-like facilities, mostly in Southeast Asia, where thousands of trafficked individuals are compelled to run sophisticated online scams targeting victims around the world. Through interviews with investigators, survivors, and anti-crime officials, the episode exposes the inner workings, human cost, and global impact of these operations, while also sharing survivor stories and advice on how to spot and avoid falling prey to such scams.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Are Scam Farms? (01:46–03:07)

• Scam farms are large, organized compounds operating like high-security prisons, masquerading as call centers.

• Workers—often trafficked and held against their will—are forced to run various scams: romance, crypto investments, tech support, and more.

• Victims are lured through fake job ads, especially targeting those desperate for work. Once inside, passports are confiscated, and brutal quotas are enforced with the threat of violence.

  Quote:
  “Imagine a call center ... only instead of sending you a warranty or a timeshare, they’re trying to steal your life savings.”
  —Dina Temple-Raston (02:00)

2. Origins and Expansion of Scam Farms (03:07–03:56)

• The proliferation followed the COVID-19 pandemic, as empty casino infrastructure in Southeast Asia was repurposed by organized crime groups for scamming.
• Weak law enforcement, rampant corruption, porous borders, and abundant exploitable labor have allowed the phenomenon to thrive.

3. Human Trafficking & Scam Worker Recruitment (04:04–04:38)

• Most workers believe they’re accepting legitimate call center jobs, only to find themselves imprisoned and coerced.
• Job postings are highly sophisticated and credible-seeming, promising lucrative employment in foreign cities.
• Many workers are smuggled from nearby countries, heightening their vulnerability.

4. The Scale and Impact of Global Scamming (04:52–05:13)

• Americans lost billions of dollars to these scams in the last year alone.

• Whereas previous scams like “Nigerian prince” schemes were small-scale, scam farms industrialize fraud, making it far more pervasive and damaging.

  Quote:
  “What you have is scamming on an industrial scale.”
  —Dina Temple-Raston (05:07)

5. Regional Power Dynamics (05:13–07:21)

• Organized crime and ethnic armies compete for control of scam compounds, as their revenues rival small countries’ GDPs.

• Bribery and fear keep operations running: workers’ families are threatened, and local authorities are often complicit.

  Notable Quote:
  “If they don’t make the quotas—sometimes it’s $100,000 a month—... their families could be affected, or they could be tortured.”
  —Dina Temple-Raston (06:36)

6. Law Enforcement Obstacles & Corruption (07:21–08:13)

• Criminals feel untouchable due to close ties with transnational gangs and even local police; ransom is sometimes demanded if victims’ families intervene.

  Quote:
  “They could negotiate a ransom for the family member to buy back their child or family members.”
  —Charlene Chen, Humanity Research Consultancy (07:53)

7. Organizational & Psychological Challenges (08:18–09:12)

• Many trafficked workers are so traumatized and guilt-ridden that, during police raids, they fear arrest as criminals rather than hoping for rescue.
• Compounds compile massive dossiers on scam targets using dark web data, and workers use strict scripts to defraud victims.

8. Lack of Preventive Awareness (09:12–09:44)

• Governments are doing little to warn populations about the reality of these job scams.
• AI is making scam communications more realistic and harder to detect.

9. Personal Story: Dylan’s Ordeal (13:44–20:49)

Dylan’s Recruitment and Captivity (13:44–16:38)

• Dylan, a Chinese-speaking former call center worker, was lured to the Philippines by a friend under the guise of a holiday.

• He found himself locked in a compound, given scam scripts, and was threatened with violence if he failed to meet $100k monthly quotas.

• His daily work consisted of meticulously researched investment and romance scams (“pig butchering”).

  Quote:
  “Just copy and paste the note ... and then just write down in a new notebook.”
  —Dylan (15:35)

Dylan’s Escape Plan (16:38–20:49)

• Realizing the incentive structure, Dylan worked hard to earn a private phone, used for high-performing scammers.
• He used it to clandestinely contact police, the Malaysian embassy, and his family.
• Despite initial silence, his pleas eventually prompted a major rescue effort.

10. Law Enforcement Response: The Raid in Bamban, Philippines (21:01–29:53)

Task Force Strategy (21:01–22:16)

• Winston John Romero Cacio, from the Philippine Presidential Anti Organized Crime Commission, led the operation.

• The police and military coordinated a massive raid, involving 8,000 operatives across 36 buildings.

  Quote:
  “This is the president telling us to go all out against the scammers, wherever they may be.”
  —Winston Cacio (22:24)

Inside the Raid (27:08–29:17)

• The operation was triggered before dawn after reports that foreign workers were being moved out.

• Chaos ensued: it was hard to distinguish victims from criminals. The raid apprehended dozens of crime bosses and freed over 800 trafficked workers.

• Dylan became a key witness and now works with the task force.

  Memorable Moment:
  “My boss ... physically threw himself in the path of the oncoming car. ... I wouldn’t do that, no matter how passionate I may be with my work.”
  —Winston Cacio (28:59)

The Aftermath (29:53–30:30)

• Large-scale busts sent shockwaves through criminal networks, but surviving operations have adapted, becoming smaller and harder to locate—a “game of whack-a-mole.”

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Expert Commentary: Erin West on Crypto Scams and Prevention (31:45–38:48)

• Erin West, leader in prosecuting cryptocurrency crimes and founder of Operation Shamrock, describes scam farms as “jaw-dropping industrialized operations,” likening them to college campuses where dormitories and computer rooms are used for scamming.

• The psychological sophistication of scams is unprecedented—scripts are crafted with psychological expertise to maximize manipulation.

• She details horrific coercion: beatings, electric baton torture, prolonged deprivation.

• While high-profile Philippine police action has shut down key operations, traffickers are shifting to other nations and using ever more deceptive recruitment strategies.

  Quote:
  “In order to get regular people to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do, they’ve got to use violence ... beating people with baseball bats ... using electric batons ... deprive people of water and food.”
  —Erin West (34:14)

U.S. Domestic Scams (35:49–37:27)

• Similar scam operations are run from within U.S. prisons (e.g., Georgia prison gang), often leveraging fear tactics and payment via various apps.
• With organized crime shifting to new regions and perfecting their deception, Erin’s advice to anyone solicited for lucrative overseas jobs: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “It’s an amazingly dark blend of cybercrime and human trafficking, sort of part office, part prison.”
  —Dina Temple-Raston (02:52)

• “What’s happening inside these compounds ... is egregious and war level type coercion.”
  —Erin West (34:14)

• “I’d hate to see the Philippines that would become if we fail in this fight.”
  —Winston Cacio (30:14)

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Key Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-----------|-----------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:46 | Explaining scam farms’ structure and methods | | 03:07 | Criminal groups’ transition from casinos to scam compounds | | 04:04 | How job seekers are lured/trafficked | | 05:13 | The industrial scale and political power of scams | | 07:32 | Human trafficking, impunity, and ransom strategies | | 13:44 | Dylan’s story of being trafficked and forced to scam | | 17:31 | Threats and violence against workers | | 19:03 | Dylan’s plan to signal for help | | 21:01 | Winston Cacio and the raid coordination | | 26:12 | Largest anti-scam operation in Bamban, Philippines | | 27:23 | Armed raid details and chaos | | 29:53 | Impact on criminal operations, adaptation strategies | | 32:29 | Erin West on scale and psychology of scam farms | | 34:12 | West on extreme levels of violence | | 35:49 | U.S.-based scam operations from prisons | | 37:40 | Prevention and red flags for would-be overseas job seekers |

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Advice & Prevention

• Be extremely skeptical of overseas job offers, especially in Southeast Asia, that offer unusually high pay and require rapid relocation.
• Even in the U.S., be vigilant: scam operations can originate domestically, even from within prisons.
• Recognize that many of the people attempting to scam you may be victims themselves, forced into criminal behavior.

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Episode Tone & Style

The conversation remains clear, direct, and accessible, avoiding technical jargon and focusing on the human stories, scope of the global problem, and the urgency of intervention.

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Summary prepared by [Your Assistant Name]

Transcript

[A]

From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click here. Hey, there, it's Dena. Last week, I joined host Jen White on 1A, the daily news show from NPR and WAMU. Twice a month, we get together for something we call Cyber Monday. We talk tech. Play a little piece from Click here and then open the phones to hear what listeners think. This time, we talked about scam farms, sprawling compounds across Southeast Asia where people are held captive and forced to run online scams that reach around the world. If you missed it, we wanted to share a shorter version of that conversation. Take a Listen.

[B]

This is 1A. I'm Jen White. Unfamiliar numbers calling your phone multiple times a day. A text message warning you to pay overdue taxes or unpaid tolls. You've probably received a version of a scam call or text. But where do they come from? One answer is scam farms. They're elaborate compounds run by organized crime groups, mostly in Southeast Asia. These compounds look like call centers, but they operate more like prisons. And the ripple effects are huge. Money moving across borders, armed groups competing for control, and hundreds of thousands of trafficked workers trapped inside. Joining us in studio as part of our regular Cyber Monday series is Dena Templrestin. She's the host of the podcast Click here from Recorded Future News and prx. Dina, it's great to have you back.

[C]

Thanks so much.

[B]

So for people who may not have heard this term before, just give us more insight into what. What exactly is a scam farm?

[C]

So imagine a call center with rows of computers, people typing on multiple screens, only instead of sending you a warranty or a timeshare, they're trying to steal your life savings. That's a scam farm. It's a big organized operation where dozens, sometimes hundreds of people are working together to run these online scams. And they use fake profiles and scripts and chat templates to lure victims into romance scams, which most people have heard of. Crypto investments, tech support hoaxes. You know, hi, I'm from Microsoft. Are you experiencing some slowness in your computer? And some of the workers are actually in on it. But as you said, most of them are lured there by seeing fake job ads and answering them. And then once they're there, they can't leave. Their passports are taken. They're forced to hit particular quotas per month. And if they don't hit those quotas, then they can be tortured or beaten or even killed. So it's an amazingly dark blend of cybercrime and human trafficking, sort of part office, part prison.

[B]

I mean, what you're describing is expensive to run, I would imagine, and incredibly well organized. Who's behind these operations?

[C]

So a lot of these operations grew up in Southeast Asia because after Covid, there were all these casinos that were there, that basic, and lots of tourism and criminal networks. And they weren't able to use these buildings. They were empty. So what do you do? You need another revenue stream. Since they already had the buildings and the Internet access and in some cases local protection from powerful people, they just pivoted from gambling to scamming. And if you add to that weak law enforcement corruption, borders that are super hard to police, you've got a region where scam farms can just sort of proliferate. There's also a steady supply of labor. You know, people are desperate for work in these areas and sometimes they're smuggled in from nearby countries and end up, as you say, behind these locked doors, forced to text strangers for 12, 16 hours a day.

[B]

I mean, tell us more about the people who are lured into being trafficked at these compounds. How do they typically get there?

[C]

Typically what happens is there is a fake job ad that they answer, you know, we need somebody in a call center. Do you speak English and Chinese? We're for you. This is how much we'll pay you per hour. It looks incredibly legit. And it also is promising you, let's say you live in Malaysia. It's promising you sort of an opportunity to go to allegedly a big Asian city, very exciting, for good pay. And it's basically doing what lots of people might be doing in regular call centers wherever they live. So they travel and then they get trapped.

[B]

I can reliably depend on getting at least five calls from numbers I don't recognize in a day, at least a couple of texts. What do these large scale operations mean for the prevalence of people getting scammed in the US and elsewhere?

[C]

The US treasury estimated that last year Americans alone lost billions of dollars in Southeast Asian scams last year. So it's incredibly prevalen. And what it is is instead of these one offs or, you know, the Nigerian prince who just needs some help to give you some money, what you have is scamming on an industrial scale.

[B]

You spoke with Gary Warner. He's with Dark Tower. That's an intelligence company that tracks these scamming operations. And he explained why these scam compounds wield so much power across Southeast Asia. For some of these countries, the amount of money coming into the scam compound is equal to their entire gdp. And so in Myanmar, there have always been Ethnic armies for at least the last 40 years or so that are in constant warfare with one another. Well, now a major focus of the battles is who can gain control of the places where the scam compounds are. Because whoever that is will now have the best funded army of all the little ethnic armies in Myanmar. Tell us more about the power dynamics at play here that keep these compounds functional.

[C]

Well, sometimes it's local officials who are looking the other way or are even profiting from the operations. When raids happen, often the arrests don't really stick Inside these compounds. There are managers who control workers with threats and violence. A lot of this is done by triads, which are sort of a Chinese mafia or criminal syndicate group. They take the phones and passports away from the people inside the building so they can't get out, are told if they try to escape, we know where your family is, we'll do something to your family. They're actually given quotas. If they don't make the quotas, sometimes it's $100,000 a month. Think about that, how much money that is. If they don't make the quota, then, you know, their families could be affected or they could be tortured. And because a lot of these scam farms sit in border regions or special economic zones, they're really hard to police. And when one gets shut down, shut down, another one just pops up in another place. So it's sort of a confluence of events. Corruption, people who are desperate for money. Covid which there were all these casinos built, nobody was coming to them. A lot of the casinos were built by criminal syndicates, were run by criminal syndicates. And this is their way to get around that, that sunken cash.

[B]

You spoke with Charlene Chen. She's the deputy director, head of programs at humanity research consultancy. And that's a firm that studies human trafficking. She a lot of these scam bosses feel untouchable.

[D]

These criminals may know that they have a very good relationship with the local transnational organized groups or even the police. And they are confident that no one's going to come in and crack down or raid their operations. Or even if the victims have successfully got on hold to, for example, their embassies or their families and to the criminals, it's fine. They could either ignore it, or if the for example, the family or someone is really coming over, wanting to take the victim home, then they could negotiate a ransom for the family member to buy back their child or family members.

[B]

Terrifying scenario. Why is this so difficult to stop?

[C]

Part of it is because of where it happens in these border regions. Part of it is also a lot of the people who are inside these scam compounds don't completely understand that.

[A]

They'Re.

[C]

Not the people who are doing something illegal. The crime bosses are. If you think about it, you're being forced to scam, you're being forced to, you know, have a romance scam. They gather together all these dark web materials on people. They actually have like dossiers of people that they want to scam. So that, and they have scripts that they read from. And so the people who are actually doing it while they're being held hostage, they feel they are complicit in a crime. And I think that's why we don't see more of this happening. We had someone tell us about a particular raid that they had, and during the raid, instead of the people who were inside going, yay, you're here to save me, they were rushing out because they thought they were going to be arrested too.

[B]

How much effort are countries putting into informing people that, hey, that job notice you got about this great opportunity, it may actually put you in a position where you're being trafficked.

[C]

Not that much is the sad part of that. Sort of in the same way that we get these, you said you got at least five scams a day sort of coming in, either a phone call or a text. This looks very realistic. And then now with the introduction of AI, these messages look even more so.

[E]

Right?

[C]

Hey, you know, the main character in ours is Dylan. Dylan in his case was actually scammed by a friend of his that he had once worked for. So this friend said, hey, Dylan, come and have a holiday with me over.

[A]

The Chinese New Year.

[C]

You still have a visa to the Philippines. Come and visit me. So he thought he was going to be partying with his friend and he's sitting in this building and he's looking around, waiting for his friend to come back. His friend said, I'll be right back. And he suddenly notices there are bars on the windows and all the doors are reinforced. So in Dylan's case, it wasn't even like a, like a great email that he fell for his friend. Basically, his so called friend basically got him into the whole situation.

[B]

We got this email from Noah who says, great topic and appreciate you bringing awareness. The Economist put out an excellent podcast series called Scam Inc. I wish everyone would listen to it. Why is it important for all of us to understand not just that that email about the security of our computer might be a scam, but that the person on the other end of that scam may be someone who's being trafficked.

[C]

I think that people don't quite realize that there's a whole industry around the scamming. It always seemed like it was a one off for small gang.

[A]

It's not.

[C]

It's become industrial and because of that.

[A]

You'Re more vulnerable and the people behind it.

[C]

The screen might not be someone who's really trying to scam you, but is someone who has scammed themselves.

[B]

We're speaking to Dena Temple Rastin, host of the podcast Click here. From recorded future news and PR acts. Dina, it's always great to speak with you.

[C]

Thanks so much.

[B]

Coming up, Dylan's story, how he walked into what he thought was a holiday visit with a friend and ended up trapped inside a scam compound and how he managed to call for help. That's just ahead. This is 1A.

[F]

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[A]

You're listening to Click here.

[C]

I'm Dina Temple.

[A]

Rest Today on Click here, we're bringing you an episode from our friends at 1A, a daily talk show from NPR and WAMU. They had me on last week for a conversation about scamming compounds in Southeast Asia, along with a story we produced about how the Philippines is trying to crack down on these operations. Take a listen. When Dylan decided to fly to the Philippines for the Chinese New Year, he thought It'd be a fun way to spend the holiday. Dylan asked us just to use his first name for reasons that will become clear in a minute.

[G]

I arrived in Bamban around February. I think it's 2-11-12.

[A]

Bamban. It's a small, often overlooked city in the heart of the Philippines, north of Manila. It's one of those lush island places with oversized palms, green rolling hills, and lots of farmland. Dylan had worked in the Philippines previously. In fact, it was an acquaintance of his from that job who invited him for the week.

[G]

My colleagues. My old colleagues in Philippines.

[A]

When Dylan pulled up to the address his friend had given him, something seemed a little off. His friend wasn't standing in front of a house or apartment building. It looked more like a compound with all these buildings that looked like dorms surrounded by security gates and razor wire.

[G]

When I arrived there, I just go to my friend's dom's and waiting. After that, we will celebrate the Chinese new year.

[A]

The two caught up a little bit and talked about where they would go that night.

[G]

Okay, these are our plans.

[A]

And then his friend says he wants Dylan to wait in the room. He'll be right back.

[G]

He just left me in the compound.

[A]

And as Dylan sat there waiting, he began noticing that there were bars on the windows and reinforced doors, which started to fill him with a slow, creeping sense of dread. And just as he was about to get up to look for his friend to ask him what was going on, two strangers pushed into the room, and Dylan's heart sank. You aren't going anywhere, they said. Dylan's first four days in this compound were spent in training. He was given a script and a kind of template for the scam emails he'd be forced to write. It was a lot of copying and pasting.

[G]

Just copy and paste the note and then just write down. In a new notebook, they had racks.

[C]

Of cell phones the scammers would use.

[A]

To either text or phone their victims.

[C]

Dylan was told he'd be scamming Chinese.

[A]

Victims since he spoke Chinese.

[C]

Were these all scams online, or were these scams where you would actually speak to people, too?

[G]

I actually speak with people, like, online, and then we need to have a voice call, and then, like, maybe he gets some data.

[A]

Data? He means victim research. The scam bosses bought huge amounts of personal data from the dark web. And then people like Dylan were ordered to create intricate dossiers on their targets. What were their likes and dislikes? What could you learn from their social media posts?

[C]

So you were doing investments or love.

[G]

Scams or Both I actually include two. The options to include that. The first we were.

[A]

These kinds of complicated scams have a name. They call it pig butchering. Scammers are supposed to use all that personal data to forge a connection to gain the trust of their victims over the course of several weeks. Fattening up the pig, they say. And then they would go in for the kill and steal as much money from them as they could. Dylan was eventually taken into a room that looked like a huge call center. And he was told that he had a quota to meet. $100,000 a month. And he soon realized that in order to get to that number, he had to work the phones and tap out texts 16 hours a day. If he missed the target, there would be consequences. They'd be hit or maybe even killed.

[G]

I don't have any choice because I hear them like maybe you get hit, maybe it will kill you.

[C]

I see, so they threatened you.

[G]

Yeah. And then I just follow any instruction. Them say yeah.

[A]

So Dylan did what he was told. He kept dialing. He kept sweet talking the person. On the other hand, end of the line. But his mind was on something else entirely. He was trying to figure out how to get out of there. Dylan quietly scoped out the compound, looking for some gap in security. And he discovered that the compound was enormous. It ran the length of a few city blocks.

[G]

But it's very hard to escape because the company's security is very strong in the compound.

[C]

And that's why, remember, there were armed guards everywhere. So Dylan needed to come up with a plan to get out of there.

[A]

That his bosses wouldn't notice.

[C]

It turns out the crime bosses running.

[A]

The compound had set up a kind of incentive program so scammers would do.

[G]

Their best work when they hit the bottas. We were divided by around 10%. And then that one is your salary.

[C]

So you kind of worked on what they call commission.

[G]

Yep.

[A]

But it wasn't so much the salary or commissions that caught Dylan's eye. He was focused on one specific perk in particular. High performing scammers were given a phone that they didn't have to share with anyone else. And Dylan thought if I could earn one of those phones, maybe I'd be able to call for help.

[G]

When I get the them, provide me the phone, the working phone. I try to find a way how to contact anyone's can help.

[A]

So Dylan became a model scammer. And then finally, a few weeks in, he got that personal phone.

[G]

Actually, I just stay in the compound around one month when I get the company Phone.

[A]

Now all he had to do was pick his moment. And he was patient because it was clear to him if he could get beaten for missing a quota, trying to make a break for it could get him something much, much worse. He'd probably end up in the compound's torture room, beaten, handcuffed, maybe killed. So every day, Dylan did his work until at last, one day, he was running a scam, just making his boss's money. And he noticed his manager wasn't paying attention, so he picked up his phone. Looked like he was dutifully reading from the script in front of him. Him trying to look as normal as possible as he dialed, hoping his bosses assumed that he was just doing his job. While in reality, he wasn't calling a victim. He was calling for help. And with each call, furtively begging them to come save him.

[G]

I contact Philippines police, and then I tried to contact our Malaysia embassies, and then I tried to contact my family.

[C]

So you were basically saying, help me, I'm being held prisoner.

[G]

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

[A]

And then all he could do was wait. The waiting, of course, was the hardest part.

[G]

And then after that, maybe first few days don't have any respondings, no responses.

[A]

To his calls for help. What Dylan didn't know until much later is that his desperate calls had been received. His case landed on the desk of this guy.

[H]

Well, I'm Winston John Romero Cacio. I work for the Presidential Anti Organized Crime Commission here in the Philippines.

[A]

Before he joined the crime commission, Winston Caccio was an academic. He was an expert in the criminal mind.

[H]

I was doing a lot of research with regards to deviance and criminal sociology and criminal philosophy, and it was kind of easy for me to try to understand the motivation behind it.

[A]

He studied gang culture and criminal psychology and applied that to the transnational criminal organizations that were springing up all over the Philippines. Criminal gangs were doing everything from human trafficking to drug smuggling. So Filipino jails were full of members of large criminal syndicates. All of which gave Winston lots of opportunities to talk to them and to understand not just what they did, but why they did it, too. And then he got a call from the crime commission asking if he could put all these years of study into practice. President Bongbong Marcos wanted to clean up transnational crime in the Philippines, and Winston couldn't wait to get started.

[H]

The President gave us a marching order to go after online scams. That gave me a boost. When the president said he's going to ban this, he gave me the much needed boost. This is A presidential directive. This is the president telling us to go all out against the scammers, wherever they may be.

[A]

And it turns out where scammers were was all over southeast Asia, Including a town about an hour outside of Manila called bhanbaat. The Philippines has become a haven for online scamming for some of the same reasons that legitimate businesses set up their call centers and customer service operations there. Filipinos tend to be highly educated. They have good language skills and a good work ethic, all of which could, of course, be useful to scamming operations as well. So by 2022, scam compounds were becoming a bit of a booming industry With a whole infrastructure in place. The scam farm bosses would create job postings online or recruit people in person. And the jobs looked totally legit.

[D]

People might be invited to attend job introduction meetings where criminals or fake recruitment agencies or brokers will be introducing fake jobs.

[A]

That's Charlene Chen. She's the deputy director at humanity research consultancy, A firm that studies human trafficking. And she says it's easy to be fooled. The criminal groups promise good money, A chance to live in a bustling Asian city. The problem is, when the job seeker comes for the interview or to tour the office, they're not allowed to leave. That's a version of what happened to Dylan. Why pay benefits and salaries when you can just kidnap people and force them to work?

[D]

Quite a lot of them realize that it's more cost effective to just kidnap a group of people, force them to stay in the office, conduct online scam for.

[H]

For them.

[A]

The United nations now estimates that hundreds of thousands of people like Dylan may be held captive in scam compounds all around the world.

[D]

I have to be honest, the fact that these scam operations are still increasing, expanding in a crazy speed, It's. It's quite terrifying.

[A]

And now Winston and the commission were told to put a stop to it. All he needed was a tip. And he got that in part from Dylan and his secret phone calls.

[H]

The Malaysian embassy informed us of a Malaysian national. They were being held against their will and forced to work as scammers.

[A]

That Malaysian was Dylan. And as fate would have it, his call was the second time in the space of a week that Winston had heard that there was a scam farm hidden in the hills of Bon bon. Just a few days before Dylan's call, a man from Vietnam had managed to do the impossible. He'd escaped from the bonbon compound. He evaded his captors and even ran to local police. They, in turn, put him in touch with Winston, the Vietnamese escapee, told Winston everything. And as he spoke, what became clear to Winston was that if they were going to raid this operation, they needed a lot more than a couple of police vans and a few dozen cops.

[H]

There were 36 buildings. So if you have less than 50 people scouring through, going through the entire compound, we didn't have enough people.

[A]

So Winston began calling around for reinforcements, and he got them in full force. The military agreed to help, too.

[H]

That was the first major operation we had against an actual hub, a huge compound. Although we've had three different operations in the past, these were insignificant in terms of size compared to that in Bamban, we had almost 8,000 operatives.

[A]

The staging area the night of the raid was at a military camp not far from the Bon Bon scam compound. It had become a kind of military operation. And they talked about how they would fan out and cover the exits and where they were likely to encounter resistance. Winston said when the meeting finally broke up at about 10:30 that night, the plan was to head out at dawn.

[H]

So we went to our bunks, to our hotels, our apartels, to take a rest for the night.

[A]

And then just before Winston was about to turn out the light, he got an alarming text.

[H]

We've gotten information that a good number of the foreign nationals were starting to leave the compound.

[A]

The criminals had been tipped off. So Winston alerted the squad leaders, who woke their men, and they set out right away.

[C]

Did you go in with guns drawn?

[H]

Yeah, we had to come in with bodyguards and guns drawn, primarily because we believe that there may be people who may be armed in the area.

[A]

The actual video of the raid in Bon Bon is still under seal. What you're hearing now is from a different raid, one that Winston says gives you a real feel for what it was like that night. Battalions of officers kicked down doors and handcuffed suspects, shouting to people to get down with their hands up.

[H]

This is a legitimate operation. Don't resist. Surrender your guns.

[C]

What was the first thing you saw?

[H]

People trying to escape the compound.

[A]

A mass of humanity was trying to push past him.

[C]

The workers, the criminals.

[A]

It was hard to tell who was who. And in the midst of all of this, out of the corner of his eye, Winston saw some movement. Then he heard a car start up.

[C]

The car was full of scam bosses.

[A]

Making a break for it. And before Winston had time to react, he could see his boss at the commission sprinting across the compound. And then he physically threw himself in the path of the oncoming car. The crime bosses were so surprised, they actually stopped.

[H]

My boss is quite a hero, you know, I mean, he's a former police officer. I'm not. I'm an academic. So I am not as brave as my boss. I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't do that, no matter how passionate I may be with my work, but I won't use my body to block a moving vehicle.

[A]

In the end, they rounded up dozens of suspected scam bosses and some 800 workers who came from all over Asia. All of this happened a couple of years ago, and since then, Dylan signed on to work for Winston at the commission. He'll be a chief witness at the Bonbon trial, and he's been helping Winston gather witness statements. Winston says these high visibility busts like the one in Bon Bun are scaring scammers off. They're just leaving.

[H]

A good number are leaving for Cambodia, northern Thailand, and part of Myanmar.

[A]

The bad news is that those that stay are creating smaller compounds that are harder to find. So it's become a game of whack a mole. But even against those odds, Winston says the consequences of giving up are even higher.

[H]

I'd hate to see the Philippines that would become if we fail in this fight.

[A]

So every day, Winston heads back to the office, hoping for more tips that will lead him to more Dylan's and eventually an end to this fight.

[B]

That was the host of the Click Here podcast, Dena Temple Raston. Coming up, we hear from an expert who's fighting cryptocurrency scams about how you can protect yourself from this growing industry that's just ahead. Every day, it's getting harder to tell what's real and what's not.

[D]

Alex reassured me that he was a fully licensed and certified psychologist. But in fact, Alex is not a person.

[E]

But it is an unfeeling chatbot.

[B]

I'm Dexter Thomas, and every week on my podcast, Kill Switch, we look at the right now of living in the future to help you take back control of your life. Listen to Kill switch in the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[C]

Here's more from one of our Cyber.

[A]

Mondays, our twice weekly series with WAMU's 1A News program. Here again is host Jen White.

[B]

Now back to our discussion about scam farms. Those are elaborate compounds run by organized crime groups where people are trafficked and forced to perform scam operations. It's part of our ongoing partnership with the podcast Click Here for our Cyber Monday series. And let's bring another voice to the conversation. Erin west is a national leader in the investigation and prosecution of cryptocurrency crimes. She's also the founder and president of Operation Shamrock. That's a coalition of local, state, federal and global partners working to educate and fight against cryptocurrency scams. Erin, welcome to the program.

[E]

Hi, thank you so much for having me.

[B]

So earlier we talked about the people who run these scam farms as well as the people who are trapped in them. And you've actually been to several of these compounds. Describe what you saw there.

[E]

It's really, it's really jaw dropping in the true sense of the word. If you can imagine a college campus with seven story dormitories, and inside those dormitories you have human trafficked workers packed with bunk beds, six to a room, and then you have massive work rooms that are shoulder to shoulder desks with computers where they're doing the scamming. The scale is enormous and I think that people don't necessarily appreciate that when they, the texts that they're receiving on their phones are coming from such an industrialized situation overseas.

[B]

You prosecuted cryptocurrency crimes for years, but you'd never seen anything like these operations. What makes them not just unique but also so effective?

[E]

Well, the world hasn't seen anything like this. We were, we're familiar with the Nigerian prince, we're familiar with the idea of a group of people operating together. But what's happening here is it's being run by organized criminals in an industrialized way in that they're, they're sharing information, They've created scripts that they've worked with psychologists on, so that what is coming at the rest of the world who are unknowing about how dangerous these scams are is really a major psychological attack that gets them to do things they wouldn't ordinarily do.

[B]

What about the control being wielded over those who are being trafficked and forced to run these scams?

[E]

Honestly, I don't think we have seen the likes of the level of violence that is happening against humans very often in history. What's happening inside these compounds is that in order to get regular people to do things they wouldn't ordinarily do, they've got to use violence to make that happen. They are regularly beating people with baseball bats. They're frequently using electric batons. They will put them in dark rooms for days, deprive people of water and food. There's plenty more that is egregious and war level type coercion.

[B]

Now, the Philippines government has made efforts to crack down on scam farms. How successful have they been?

[E]

Well, they've done some massive work that should be applauded and should be replicated. And one of the things that is noteworthy about what they've done is they've taken away the very infrastructure that allows these scams to happen by going into Bonbon, which you just heard about, and taking over a 35 building complex. What they've done is they've shut down the opportunity to have that complex moving and creating money. That was a significant hit to the organized criminals behind it who put millions of dollars into building that thing. There's plenty more work that can be done, but I think we need to applaud any movement forward where countries are saying we don't want this in our country and we're going to start taking back our buildings.

[B]

We got this email from Susan who says since midsummer, I've received three to eight calls a day that I haven't answered because the caller ID shows names of people I don't know. I did pick up the phone twice because the caller ID started with initials that were the same as a local company that services a utility in my home. The voice on the other end was unaccented American English. My experience doesn't exactly match what you are describing on the program, but I wonder about widespread scam operations that originate in this country. Erin, what can you tell us?

[E]

Oh, this is definitely happening in the United States as well. In fact, I'm very familiar with the Georgia prison gang. This is happening from inside prisons in the United States where phones are being dropped with drones into the facilities and those inmates have nothing but time to be on the phone and make calls just like that. So that type of a scam is usually one that is driven by authority and fear. The idea that you haven't paid something that is owed or that your money has been somehow tainted with money that has touched child sexual assault material or that you haven't paid your taxes or it's something where you immediately must make payment. And these people will stay on the phone with victims for hours on end, directing them to move all over their area to collect cash to be either moved by Venmo or Cash App or even picked up by a courier from their homes.

[B]

As we said, the organizations running these scam compounds overseas, they wield enormous power. But what can people who might be vulnerable to being trafficked do to prevent this? What signs should they look out for?

[C]

Oh goodness.

[E]

The people that are vulnerable to being trafficked really need to take care to. I would love to say that it's as easy as vetting these these operations online. But the fact is we're dealing with an enemy that is enormously clever, enormously moneyed, and capable of making anything sound and looked real. So what I would say for victims or potential victims of human trafficking, really, I would avoid Southeast Asia right now. I would avoid anything that involves a movement to South Asia. But what we also know is that these organized crime syndicates know that Southeast Asia has been exposed as a hotspot and now they're moving to other places. They're moving to South America, they're moving to Dubai, they're moving to Africa. So the fact is, when my best advice for people looking at jobs abroad is to really look at the amount that they're willing to pay you, and if it seems completely exorbitant, there's a good chance that you're being trafficked.

[B]

That's Erin West. She's a national leader in the investigation and prosecution of cryptocurrency crimes and the founder and president of Operation Shamrock. Erin, thanks for speaking with us.

[E]

Thank you so much for having me.

[A]

You've been listening to a special edition of Click Here, an edited show we did with WAMU's One, a news magazine. You can hear the full segment with more listener responses and questions [e-mail].

[E]

Click.

[A]

Here is a production of recorded future news and PRX.

[H]

Thanks.

[A]

I'm Dena Temple Raston. Our producers are Megan Dietre, Sean Powers, Erica Gaeda, and Zach Hirsch. Special thanks today to one A producer, Hailey Blasingate. Click Here is edited by Karen Duffin, Fact checked by Darren Ancrum and contains original music by Ben Levingston with some other music from Blue Dot sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley and our illustrator is Megan Gough, Jesse Niswonger and Jake Craig Cook, our sound designers and engineers. We hope you'll tune in again on Friday for Mic Drop, which features our favorite interview of the week. We'll see you then.

[B]

Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on Click Here. Then check out our sister publication, the Record. From Recorded Future News, you'll get breaking cyber news from reporters and New York, Washington, London and Kyiv, among others. And you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month.

[A]

Just go to the Record Media.