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- [00:01]
Rich Thompson
Cadence Productions.
- [00:04]
Ava
Unheard.
- [00:08]
Erin West
DV Casino Cambodia Day.
- [00:10]
Rich Thompson
42 Micah knows that what he's about to do could get him killed. His leg twitches restlessly bumping the table, and the co worker beside him looks over with a mix of irritation and curiosity. Mica freezes, forcing himself still. Don't stand out. Don't draw attention.
- [00:39]
Micah
My heart is like beat very fast. I mean like being scared. I don't know how to. How to describe, but I just. Like my hand is shaking or something like that. Yeah.
- [00:53]
Rich Thompson
He looks around the room. This, what would it be called? A boardroom? A meeting room? It feels like a prison. 60 workers are crammed shoulder to shoulder around the large table and along the walls. Hollow eyes stare ahead, worn down by endless days of the same suffocating routine. It's 9:30 at night, long after the day's work should have ended, but no one is allowed to leave. At the front, one of the supervisors stands addressing the group. He talks about a scam that's nearing completion, a retired American businessman that they've been working on for five months. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are already in play, but they think they can squeeze some more from him. A smattering of half hearted applause follows. The meeting shifts and now the focus is on the new recruits. Micah watches as the fresh faces come into view, their expressions dazed and uneasy. He remembers that feeling all too well, being so disoriented, landing in a place that felt alien stepping into a job so far from what was described to you. Cautiously, he looks at the man standing at the back of the room. The boss. The boss is of Chinese descent. His face is deeply pocked with acne scars and his left hand is missing an index finger. Micah is seeing firsthand his capacity for unbridled violence. Up until now, Micah has survived by staying invisible, but what he's about to do will put him directly in the boss's crosshairs. His pulse quickens and for the hundredth time he considers backing out. But then his eyes land on Ava. How much longer can she survive in here? Micah raises his hand. I need to use the bathroom, he says. The boss looks at him, his gaze piercing. For a terrifying moment, Micah wonders if he suspects what Micah is about to do, but the boss nods, dismissing him. With a flick of his hand, Micah rises, his palms damp, his movements deliberate. He feels eyes on him as he walks toward the door. The moment the door closes behind him, he moves fast. He heads into the bathroom first, flips the toilet closed, and steps onto it. Reaching up, he loosens the ceiling tile fingers searching until they find the cell phone. He powers it on and wills his hands to stop shaking. The instructions were specific. They needed video evidence, proof of where he Micah starts in the sleeping quarters, a room barely 4 by 4 metres, nowhere near large enough to accommodate the six humans forced to sleep there. He angles his camera through the heavily barred window just enough to capture the movement of passersby on the street below. They drift in and out of the casino on the ground floor of this building, laughing and talking, their voices faintly audible even up here. Moving quickly, he enters the large room next door, which is the main workspace. He films the rows of desks crammed with out of date computers and the gong in the corner of the room, which the supervisors ring when a scam is successful. He stops when he sees the blood stain at his feet. The memories still make him sick, but he can't afford to revisit them now. The meeting will end soon. Micah films the remaining rooms, then hurries back to the bathroom, hiding the cell phone in the ceiling. Once more, he steps off the toilet, adjusts everything to look untouched, and steels himself to return to the meeting. As he enters the room, all eyes seem to turn his way. But nobody speaks and the meeting continues. Micah sits, his nerves still raw.
- [05:35]
Micah
It's really risky. I just like hoping if I send all of the evidence and then help me to get up. Yeah, yeah.
- [05:48]
Rich Thompson
I just hoping tonight when the others sleep, he'll send the videos. The evidence will set things in motion. But what Micah doesn't yet know is that this move, this collection of evidence, is about to send him even further down the rabbit hole of one of the most sophisticated and devastating crimes on our planet today.
- [06:20]
Ava
Open your eyes. What can you see around from Unherd.
- [06:24]
Rich Thompson
And Cadence Productions this season two of the Fight of My Life Escaping Scam City the story of love, real love, in a city built on faking it. This is the story of Micah and Ava thrown into the fight of their lives and of those who have chosen to come alongside them and make it their fight too. Venture to tell me you got the wrong guy. Episode 1 I'm coming for you well earlier this year we shared a story about the growing epidemic of overseas online scammers.
- [07:11]
Erin West
As mid year statistics from the police show the number of scam cases on.
- [07:15]
Rich Thompson
The rise again have so much anger. If you're around my age, I'm 42. By the way, you probably remember the Nigerian Prince scam which was one of the first email scams of the 90s. The prince would ask for a loan and promise to repay you with millions of dollars just as soon as they had access to their wealth again. The scam eventually became a victim of its own success. So many people lost money that public awareness grew. And now the scam is the subject of, well, jokes. You know what, Toby? When the son of the deposed king of Nigeria emails you directly asking for help, you help. His father ran the freaking country. Okay. For years, when I thought of scamming, I imagined the Nigerian prince scam. And I'll admit I wondered how anyone other than Michael Scott could fall for a scam that seemed so obvious. More recently, though, I've been hearing a lot of stories of ordinary people falling prey to increasingly sophisticated scam scams. Scams run by powerful crime syndicates. Scams evolving faster than law enforcement can keep up. And the thing these scams so often have in common is the hook that the scammers are using to trick their targets. Love the.
- [08:42]
Erin West
The basic way that it works is that the scammer is going to spend a significant amount of time and energy making the victim feel as though they are in their dream relationship.
- [08:57]
Rich Thompson
That's Erin West, a former Californian prosecutor who has spent the last several years fighting back against scams. She's one of the world's leading experts in this space.
- [09:08]
Erin West
They are scoping out exactly how much money that victim has and where it's located. So they will find out where our victims keep, whether they have a 401k, whether they have children's college accounts, whether they own their home, whether they have a vacation home, because it does not stop until they've taken. Taken every last penny. That is why this is different from a Nigerian prince scam. This is why it's different from anything we have ever seen in the history of ever.
- [09:35]
Rich Thompson
There's a name that scammers have for this type of scam. They call it pig butchering. It's a gruesome name with all its implications of fattening up a pig for the slaughter. Official estimates have it at $75 billion lost worldwide to pig butchering scams. $75 billion. That's bigger than the GDP of at least 80 countries. This is not happening to just a handful of people. In 2023 alone, over 60,000Americans fell victim to this type of scam. And that's just the scams we know about, the scams that victims actually come forward and report to police. There are likely thousands more people who are too afraid or ashamed to admit that they were scammed. Shame. That's something we're going to talk about more in later episodes. Losing money is terrible, but if that were all victims of romance scams lost, maybe more people would be talking about this issue. But instead, so many victims of romance scams don't come forward because they've lost something more than money, something even more important. They have lost what they believe to be real, meaningful relationships. In some cases, they have lost the person they believe to be the love of their life.
- [11:03]
Ava
I got scammed big time. And it hurts. It hurts financially and hurts emotionally.
- [11:10]
Rich Thompson
I lost the majority of my life savings and it's very much affected my life in a very profound way. Just the amount of shame and the amount of pain that it all brought up was overwhelming.
- [11:27]
Ava
It was humiliating, very humiliating. And I felt, I don't want to say the word stupid, but I couldn't believe I had done this. I felt that I had more intelligence than that.
- [11:45]
Rich Thompson
Why?
- [11:46]
Ava
Why did this happen?
- [11:48]
Rich Thompson
It's a particular kind of evil, isn't it? Preying upon that fundamental human need for connection and exploiting it in order to con people out of money. It makes you wonder what kind of people run these scams? Who would? Who could do something like this? And how are there so many of them? Let's be real. When we picture the scammers, we assume they are evil, operating purely out of greed and malice. But unfortunately, when it comes to pig butchering, it's just not that simple. Many of the people behind the scam aren't who we expect them to be. In fact, they hate the lies they're forced to tell. Just as much as you hate being lied to, many are, in a very real way, trapped as modern day slaves. Coerced, controlled, stripped of their choices. Since finishing season one of this podcast, we've been on the hunt for other extraordinary stories of resilience and self sacrifice and triumph. And along the way, we've come across many we would have loved to tell. But there was one such story that stood above the rest. Okay, okay.
- [13:18]
Micah
Hello. Testing, one, two, three.
- [13:21]
Rich Thompson
Okay. Yeah, great. Fantastic. Thank you. Two years ago, in a small studio room in Bangkok, Thailand, I met Micah. A soft spoken Malaysian man in his 20s, still visibly shaken from what he'd just survived. He had escaped from a pig butchering scam compound in Sianicville, Cambodia. Micah walked me through his story. What he'd seen, what he'd lived through, what he was able to break free from. And unexpectedly, woven through the heart of that story was something beautiful. A love story, fragile and real. Micah hadn't just broken Free for himself. He'd done it for someone else. For Ava, his girlfriend. Ava is from a small rural village in Thailand, the kind of place the world rarely notices. She has a quiet presence. She's petite, with almond shaped eyes and shoulder length black hair. But look closely and you'll notice something. Her jaw is slightly uneven. One side is higher than the other. It's the result of a punch to the face from an abusive existence.
- [14:51]
Ava
After he started drinking, he would wake up in the middle of the night and just hit me. Yeah.
- [15:01]
Rich Thompson
By the way, Eva doesn't speak much English, so throughout this series you'll hear her story through a translator.
- [15:10]
Ava
He hit me to the point where my gum was uneven on the two sides because he impacted one side of my face.
- [15:19]
Rich Thompson
How old is she at this point?
- [15:24]
Ava
I was just like 16 at that point.
- [15:27]
Rich Thompson
It's a small glimpse into the kind of life she's endured. Ava was raised by her grandmother after both her parents abandoned her. She started working at 14 to support herself. At 24, when she first met Micah, and just a year before this whole thing started, she had two young boys and had survived more than most people do in a lifetime. We'll share the full story of how they met in a later episode. But from the start, their relationship was wildly unlikely. They didn't speak the same language. They had to use Google Translate to get to know each other. Micah, determined to understand her, learned to speak Thai. When I asked him about his relationship recently, he just smiled and said, this.
- [16:22]
Micah
Relationship, I mean, me with her, is kind of like, you know, you know, magic. Some. Some kind of like, magic.
- [16:32]
Rich Thompson
Some kind of magic. And that relationship, when it was barely a year old, was going to be tested in a way most couples will never face. What you're about to hear is one of the most thrilling and chilling stories I've ever come across. A story of grit, courage, and the fight to reclaim freedom. And yes, a story of love. Micah and Ava want their story told. So lean in. Because in order for us, and I mean all of us, to confront this devastating crime, we need to listen to those who have been into the belly of the beast and to those who have fought to make it out. December 27, 2021. Thailand. The van rumbles through eastern Thailand, its suspension groaning with every bump. Forever. After five hours on the road, everything feels heavy. Her limbs, her thoughts, the silence around her. Through the window, the Thai countryside passes in flashes. Lush green rice paddies, the occasional roadside market. Children running barefoot along dirt paths. The van slows for a moment. A young mother steps out onto the road, guiding her barefoot child across. Ava watches them and her heart cracks yet again. Eva had said goodbye to her own children this morning, leaving them in the care of her neighbour. The boys, ages 3 and 4, were too young to understand why she had to leave, but certainly old enough to cry and cling to her.
- [18:38]
Ava
I didn't want them to take me to the bus stop because I was afraid they just would get on the bus and want to leave with me. So we said goodbyes at home.
- [18:53]
Rich Thompson
It's just for three months and it's good money. She reminds herself of this again. It's been her mantra for the past week. Their village offered little more than short term farming work, and after the pandemic that had become near impossible to find, Ava and Micah were struggling. The money was gone and Ava had two young boys depending on her. If they wanted to survive, let alone build any kind of future for themselves, they'd have to look beyond the village. The van is a public transport system service, but there are only two other passengers and Ava knows them both. Her uncle sits a few rows ahead and in the seat next to Ava, Aria, her best friend since childhood, is sleeping, her head resting on Ava's shoulder. They had both come to Ava to see if she could find work for them too. She rests her head against the window, the cool glass offering a momentary reprieve from the heat, and thinks back to the night she saw the job ad, an administrative marketing job for a thousand dollars a month. At first she thought she had misread the Facebook post. She remembers calling Micah over to have a look. His excitement matched hers. Ava smiles as she thinks of him. Never in her wildest imagination had she thought that she, a girl from rural Thailand, would fall for someone like him, a Chinese boy from Malaysia overflowing with dreams bigger and bolder than anyone she had ever met. Micah's kindness had been an unexpected blessing in a life that had taught her not to expect much from people, especially men. Ava's phone pings, pulling her from her thoughts. It's Micah. As if he knew she was thinking of him. How long to go? It reads. The message is accompanied by a yawning cat meme. Ava's smile widens. Despite the uncertainty of the future, Micah's silly humour always makes her laugh. She types back, we're close. A few minutes. The recruitment process had been rigorous, with multiple rounds of interviews, but the recruiters had been impressed by her and Micah's prior experience in marketing, as well as their language skills. Micah spoke English and Mandarin. And apparently the company wanted Thai speakers too. Getting the job offer a few days before Christmas had felt like a miracle, a lifeline for their families. Ava asks Micah how he's doing and he replies with the same yawning cat meme. Micah is still in Bangkok, waiting to join her in Cambodia, while Eva, as a Thai citizen, could apparently cross the land border. The recruiting agent had said that Malaysian born Micah would need to fly in. With flights fully booked following Christmas, the earliest he could secure wasn't for another three days. Ava glances at the driver's gps. They're one minute out. Her heart quickens as the brightly coloured hotel comes into view. A cluster of cheerful little huts with a welcoming sign out front. This is where the recruiting agent will meet them and take them across the border to their new workplace. The van slows down. The driver has hardly said a word throughout the drive, but now his demeanour changes. His shoulders stiffen and his eyes meet Eva's in the rearview mirror. Something in his face makes Ava's stomach tighten. You're stopping here? He asks, his voice low, wary. Ava nods. The driver hesitates. I know this place. People, they don't always come back from here. He pauses again, as if considering whether to say anything more. What he does say next sends chills through her.
- [23:45]
Ava
Be careful. This hotel might be where. Yeah, you might be being trafficked.
- [23:59]
Rich Thompson
All right, Jake, Elvis, get a bit of a bearing here. What's going on? What's this all about?
- [24:05]
Jake Sims
Well, fundamentally, these criminal syndicates have a human resource problem.
- [24:12]
Rich Thompson
That's the voice of Jacob Sims. Jake is one of the world leaders in fighting this growing nexus between human trafficking and and sophisticated organised crime. He's advised leading NGOs, major corporations, key governments and UN agencies working on this issue. And now he's one of the producers on this series. We're going to get to know him more throughout the episodes. But for now, I've asked Jake to help us understand some of the larger forces behind pig butchering scams. Specifically, how or why someone like Ava was deceived into stepping into that van, unknowingly set on the road to becoming a romance scammer.
- [24:58]
Jake Sims
Tricking someone into falling in love isn't easy. This takes time, it takes strategy, it takes a lot of resources. And that means you need to have a lot of people working on it. But how do you convince people to take a job that's all about conning other people? First of all, desperation is key here. Some of that desperation, we know comes from economic realities that keep enormous populations around the region and around the world, underemployed or unemployed. But even then, honestly, it's really hard to get people to want to do this at scale. And so the syndicates had to figure out another way to grow their workforce, right?
- [25:41]
Rich Thompson
So finding enough people, even desperate people, willing to perpetrate these pig butchering scams was a problem. So a whole new scam was devised to get unsuspecting people across the border and into these purpose built compounds.
- [25:59]
Jake Sims
They began by advertising attractive, seemingly legitimate jobs on major social media media platforms. So these job postings stop popping up for people making 800-900-A,000 dollars a month to go work in Cambodia or Thailand, supposedly as customer service representatives, sales reps, IT consultants, those sorts of jobs. People would see these job postings on Facebook or other platforms, they'd respond to them. They'd be going through what seemed like legitimate application processes, sometimes having multiple rounds of video interviews. And eventually someone would offer them a job and offer to purchase them a plane ticket and arrange their visa to travel to this new country. But then when they'd arrived to the country, that's when they would realize it's all a trick.
- [26:53]
Rich Thompson
It's an incredibly audacious scam, isn't it? And here's the thing. Over the past few years, it's been successfully deployed on hundreds of thousands of people, just like Ava. The operation that recruited Micah and Ava was vast and sophisticated. This was no single person behind a computer sending a Nigerian prince email. It's an enormous, lucrative enterprise, one with sufficient resources to create an entire fake recruitment process.
- [27:28]
Jake Sims
This crime didn't even exist on most people's radars five years ago. And now it's widely recognized as the fastest growing form of modern slavery anywhere in the world. The sheer scale and the speed of growth here is like nothing we've ever seen before.
- [27:48]
Rich Thompson
Ava was given a sort of advanced warning by the van driver. Afterwards, she immediately contacted her recruiter for answers.
- [27:58]
Ava
When the driver warned me, I texted the company and said that I was warned that this might be a place that people get trafficked. And the other person that replied my message said, oh, don't listen to this driver, and called me back right away.
- [28:25]
Rich Thompson
The recruiter was very reassuring. He told her it was probably just that the van driver wanted to scam her. He probably wanted to drive them home so that he could collect a return fare. It's a pretty clever response. He even went as far as to send her a video of her new workplace. The office, bright, modern, other colleagues smiling, happy in their jobs.
- [28:51]
Ava
The agent just sent me a text, a voice message that don't be scared. I've been there too.
- [29:00]
Rich Thompson
Ava spoke to Micah about the incident and they talked it all through. On reflection, they felt the recruiter had been nothing but professional this whole time. This was just a little hiccup and what had been an otherwise very ordinary process. They decide to continue on. From the hotel, Ava and her companions are quickly moved to another location.
- [29:34]
Ava
It's actually not even a house. It's like a shack. It was just a rundown shack in the middle of nowhere.
- [29:43]
Rich Thompson
The small wooden structure, the only one of its kind in a vast stretch of cornfields, looks both lonely and fragile, as if one strong gust of wind could rip it from the earth. Inside, 10 others are already waiting, strangers, all bound for the same unknown destination. Ava exchanges uneasy glances with Arya, then settles against the wall with her uncle, shifting their bags between them. It's late. Are they meant to sleep here? No one tells them anything. The man who brought them disappears into the back room. And so they wait for hours. Ava becomes increasingly unsettled. Near midnight, the man emerges. Ava stands, trying to get his attention. What's going on? She demands. His answer is clipped. It's time to go. They are moved again, this time piling into a van with the rest of the group. Group the van rattles down an unpaved road heading toward the border. Ava watches in silence as they approach a guarded gate. From inside the van she sees their.
- [31:04]
Ava
Escort step out and so the agent that we were with gave the soldier maybe 2, 300 Baht. And then without checking our documents, we were let through the border.
- [31:20]
Rich Thompson
Why is he paying them? Why are we doing this in the middle of the night? Panic stirs in her chest, but before she can dwell on it, the van lurches forward. They cross into Cambodia and her cell phone goes dead. No reception. The van rolls on for a short, short distance before turning off the road and coming to a stop beside a sugarcane field. The air is thick with the scent of cut off stalks, the ground uneven beneath their feet as they step out. Then, bizarrely, the man starts handing out oversized black clothes to the passengers.
- [32:05]
Ava
They just threw the clothes and told us to change right there.
- [32:13]
Rich Thompson
The man then starts to brief the bewildered group. If you hear soldiers or see searchlights, you'll need to immediately drop to the ground. And do you remember what was running through your mind at this time?
- [32:34]
Ava
I had questions just running through my head and I was very scared and I was wondering why we had to hide from the soldiers and not sure if I was thinking straight.
- [32:53]
Rich Thompson
Ava hesitates, her hands gripping the fabric of her clothes. Around her, the others begin pulling black shirts over their heads, swapping out anything that might stand, stand out. She follows, slipping into the dark clothing handed to her, her heart pounding. And then the command cuts through the night. Run. When she thinks of that night, it is though she is watching a scene from a film and she is seeing a woman who looks like her, running fast and scared and frantic through the wilderness. Not just running, dodging and diving, too. Pressed low on her stomach, face to the moist earth for two straight hours, over ravines and through pastures, she ran. One of them faints from exhaustion. The rest catch their breath as he is given smelling salts to revive him. And they move again. The exhaustion, the disorientation, the adrenaline, it all blurred into something unreal, like a walking hallucination. Her mind scrambled to piece it all together, grasping for clarity in the chaos.
- [34:22]
Ava
I was running and I was crying and I was wondering if I have to go work for you, why do I have to go through this? Why aren't they having me go through the normal border? I was scared, but at the same time I didn't know where else to run.
- [34:44]
Rich Thompson
At last they arrive at another building, a house in a mango farm. But there is no time to rest. A rusted Corolla sedan, a farm vehicle she supposes, is waiting there. All 10 of them are crammed inside, stacked on laps and pressed against windows. They drive down a rough, uneven road. Eventually, mercifully, they come to a stop where two SUVs await. They are split into two groups. Ava, her uncle and Aria are put together in one of the SUV's. She wasn't to know it at the time, but that was the last she would ever see of those others in the group. They were being sent to a different destination. For the next 12 hours, they head south three times. They change vehicles. At 8pm the journey finally ends. Eva has been travelling for over 24 hours without sleep. Seeing Siennickville in her new workplace is almost a relief. Maybe everything would be alright after all.
- [35:58]
Ava
You have to understand, at that point in my life I wasn't watching a lot of TV or wasn't looking at my phone. It was just working and taking care of my kids. So I didn't even have any idea of what kind of scam or what I would be tricked to do.
- [36:19]
Rich Thompson
Ava is taken up to the fourth floor. She is shepherded through a door into a lobby of sorts, a room guarded by men with guns. Here she's instructed to hand over her passport and her ID papers. Ava has a million questions for her employer, but she doesn't get to ask them. She is taken through one more door. So when did you know for sure that you'd been tricked?
- [36:50]
Ava
Once I got in, the door behind me was locked, and when I got into the room, it was locked dark, and all the windows were also locked. So I knew that I was locked up in a cage.
- [37:02]
Rich Thompson
Micah is lying on his bed in a Bangkok hotel when his phone vibrates. He answers immediately. Ava doesn't sound like herself. Her voice is strained and she is speaking fast, the words tripping over themselves. He cannot hear her very well, but when he asks her to speak up, she says she can't. She says that people are listening. He sits up straight. What's going on? She's managed to connect to the WI fi, but she must be quick. This isn't what they thought. The job is a lie. The men have guns, the doors are locked. Worse, she's just crossed the border illegally and she thinks the police are in on it. Micah's blood runs cold. Don't come here, she says. Whatever you do, don't get on that flight. He has a hundred more questions, but abruptly she ends the call. He tries to call back. No answer. And now he has a choice. He's still safe in Bangkok. He could turn back, not board his flight. Perhaps try to help her remotely. Just as quickly, he dismisses the idea. If she's in trouble, he has to be with her.
- [38:33]
Micah
She was really scared, so I must go also. I mean, I can't leave her alone, right? Yeah.
- [38:44]
Rich Thompson
But at that point he had no idea just what he was walking into.
- [38:50]
Micah
I didn't think like as much that terrible. More what I expected.
- [38:56]
Ava
Yeah, it was much, much worse.
- [38:59]
Micah
Yeah. Really worse than what I think? Yeah.
- [39:08]
Rich Thompson
The Fight of My Life is brought to you by Cadence Productions in partnership with Unherd. This series Escaping Scam City was written by Kavya Visvanathan, Nikki Florence Thompson, and me, your host, Rich Thompson. The series producers are Lydia Bowden, Jake Sims, Ben Field, Carrie Anne Tilson, Kavya Visvanathan, and Rich Thompson. Our theme song is See Me Fly by Rosa. Our incredible translator is Corinne Powell. Thank you so much, Corinne. Additional sound design by Brendan Ridley. UnHerd's advocacy and support for this project was led by Lydia Bowden, Carrie Ann Tilson, and Laura Entwistle. With a massive thanks to their generous community of supporters and with a special shout out to Wen, Dane and Val, we're so grateful for all the various contributors to this series. And of course, any views and opinions expressed by individuals are their own. This series is based on the true story of Micah and Ava, whose names have been changed to protect their identities. Every effort has been made to preserve the integrity of their experiences. In some cases, events have been edited, condensed, or reordered for clarity, safety, or narrative flow. While we've worked hard to verify details, as with all first hand testimonies, some elements can be difficult to independently confirm. We are so thankful to Micah and Ava for telling their story and elevating this issue on behalf of countless other survivors. And finally, we're thankful to you for choosing to come on this journey with us. If you get a second to rate and review the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. We'll see you on the next episode.