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- [00:01]
A
You may have seen this story in the New York Times. There was just a big story. Big one. You've almost certainly seen the texts, the scams that look harmless until they aren't new.
- [00:11]
B
At 6, a warning tonight about a costly crypto scam known as pig butchering. Scammers fatten the pot before moving in.
- [00:20]
A
She sent $1 million to a scammer, and she's not alone. Contacted ABC for a response after his.
- [00:26]
C
Life savings were nearly wiped out.
- [00:28]
D
And now he wants to warn you.
- [00:30]
A
May even have heard that in some cases, the people sending those messages are victims themselves.
- [00:36]
E
In the scam rooms themselves, people will routinely be beaten with canes, with bats.
- [00:42]
A
But that's only part of the story.
- [00:44]
C
The scale is something that we often have to recalibrate to understand because this.
- [00:52]
A
Doesn'T just happen online. It happens in real places. Places where the rules you expect to protect people don't apply. Places where entire economies are built around keeping people working, keeping money moving, and keeping accountability out.
- [01:10]
D
You're going to see what looks like a fortified city, what happens when regions.
- [01:16]
A
Are carved out of the law, when fraud becomes an industry, and when the people inside those systems can't leave even when the world finally notices. I'm Beau Friedlander, and this is what the hack, the show that asks, in a world where your data is everywhere, how do you stay safe online? Today's episode is a little different. This is one of those stories where every time we talk to someone, they'd stop us and say, okay, but you also need to talk to this person. And then that person would say the same thing. Because this isn't one clean problem with one clean explanation. It's a big thing. It's layered, and every part of it connects to something else. So we're talking to a lot of people today, and the first person we called is someone who's been helping us understand this stuff for a while. It's Gary Warner. Gary Werner studies cybercrime and human trafficking at scale around the world. Not individual scams, but the systems that make them possible. He knows a lot about a lot. Gary Warner, welcome to the show.
- [02:34]
C
I'm so happy to be back. Beau.
- [02:38]
A
I called you today because I spoke to API Tian Tong in Thailand.
- [02:43]
B
I'm from Bangkok, Thailand. Nice talking to you, Beau.
- [02:47]
A
Oh, it's wonderful to have you here. And I really appreciate you doing this first thing in the morning. And she is a person who works with human trafficking, trying to solve the problem of human trafficking in that part of the world. And API started talking to me about these places where crime seems legal. And these places have a name. They're called special economic zones. Sezs to people who are trying to put a stop to them.
- [03:14]
C
So a special economic zone is a place that is carved out from a country and given a real estate developer, if you will, the ability to set the laws within that zone. They're a little bit similar to free ports, places where there's no tax and no customs only scaled up. So many of these special economic zones that are the hosts of these scam compounds began as places where they could build casinos and high end resort hotels. And that was really the start is Chinese organized crime. Actors made partnerships with government officials both in Myanmar and in Cambodia primarily. There is one in Laos, the, the Golden Triangle economic zone in. In Laos. But each of these basically paid billions of dollars to government officials to say, hey, we would like to carve out an area where we're going to do our own economic development and we're not going to follow your rules. In fact, you will not be allowed to police these areas. We will have a private security force policing these areas.
- [04:34]
B
It looks like it is their kingdom that have their own law enforcement, their own security. It is like a big kingdom.
- [04:44]
A
Okay. So it's basically a state within a state. You cross that gate, local police, tax authorities, labor laws, all that gone, right?
- [04:53]
C
Exactly.
- [04:54]
A
They were pitched as in legitimate infrastructure projects like casinos and hotels, like you said.
- [05:00]
C
And they're not exclusive to the Mekong Peninsula. For example, in Honduras, there's a free economic zone that was created as a crypto capital and a place where people could do genetic engineering experiments without any government oversight. That has a lot of the American crypto. Bros are big investors there.
- [05:20]
A
So if someone wanted to build Jurassic park, this is probably where they would do it.
- [05:24]
C
You'd need a free economic zone for that.
- [05:36]
A
Special economic zones sound abstract. And they are. They're basically the legal and economic equivalent of a petri dish for human vice. Now, sometime during the pandemic, there was a pivot and this industrial scale scamming started. Right about when tourism died.
- [05:55]
C
Yeah. So even though gambling has been illegal in China for a very long time, there was a big crackdown on gambling in China. And so people began building these resort casinos as a place where Chinese tourists could go and do their gambling. And the organized crime people who ran Chinese gambling moved into these free economic zones. And it was believed they were going to make billions of dollars on Chinese tourists. And then the pandemic. So when the lockdown happened, basically all of these Places bankrupted themselves. They had put in huge investments into the building of a resort casino, believing it was going to be a gambling compound. And then all of a sudden, no one's allowed to travel.
- [06:42]
A
So you got to do something with those facilities.
- [06:46]
C
Right. So at the beginning, most of these were focused on online gaming targeting Chinese gamblers. And then what eventually has happened is that even the online gaming got cracked down on by China and they pivoted hard from online gaming to of running scams.
- [07:10]
A
Once the pivot happened to scamming, the underlying problem did not disappear. It just changed. The compounds were there, but the labor wasn't. What was it like to stand in those spaces knowing what happens there? What did you see that you can't unsee?
- [07:28]
E
Yeah, it just really defies words.
- [07:31]
A
This is Aaron Lest, former prosecutor and founder of Operation Shamrock and someone who's been on the front lines of prosecuting the financial side of these scams and seeing where the human cost actually lands.
- [07:44]
E
I'll start with being in Cambodia and just seeing the massive growth, the massive construction everywhere. It really takes your breath away. These incredibly large buildings that are constructed for the sole purpose of housing human trafficked workers to steal money from the rest of the world. That's one thing just to see the gravity, the breadth of it. When I was able to get inside in the Philippines, you are walking through an area the size of a Tech park with 35 buildings in it. And what I got to see inside these scam rooms are notebooks that are half filled with victims where it noted the person's name, their occupation, age, marital status, and notes about that person. It really humanized it. I think I've been talking about this crisis for a long time, but to actually see where people lived and worked and quite frankly were abused. I saw the torture rooms takes on a whole new gravity that for me is impossible to walk away from.
- [09:10]
C
Jacob Sims is a Boots on the ground in Cambodia researcher. He was instrumental in writing the Institute of Peace's expose that showed how prevalent these compounds are.
- [09:27]
A
Do you prefer Jake or Jacob?
- [09:29]
D
Jake is fine.
- [09:30]
A
I'm. If I embarrass you, I'm sorry, it's.
- [09:34]
D
Hard to embarrass me. You should. I. I'll send you what the Cambodian state media said about me this morning.
- [09:39]
A
Oh, I'll. I'm going to embarrass you. You'll see. Just wait.
- [09:44]
D
Let's give it a shot.
- [09:46]
A
Jake Sims looks like he would be more comfortable on the set of a movie doing something with Matt Damon, but he. He's actually a fellow at Harvard University Asia center and a leading expert on transnational crime and human trafficking in Southeast Asia. He previously served as a visiting expert at the US Institute of Peace and in leadership roles at International Justice Mission, where he helped spearhead the global response to Southeast Asia's scam compound crisis. He advises government agencies, think tanks and NGOs on the issue, and his analysis regularly appears in major media outlets. Jake Sims, welcome to what the Heck.
- [10:23]
D
Thanks for having me.
- [10:25]
A
You do, you do look like you belong in a movie. So that is probably, it probably works in your favor when you are going to these scam compounds. And Jake is on the show today because he has been there, he has been on the ground where these, in these special economic zones we've been talking about. And actually inside these scam compounds. What does it actually look like inside these compounds? What do you see when you walk up to one?
- [10:53]
D
Well, it looks different depending on which country you're in. So if you are walking up to one of these compounds in Myanmar, you're going to see what looks like a fortified city. Oftentimes these compounds exist primarily in Myanmar in areas that are controlled by rebel groups, usually along the Thai border. And so they have to fiercely protect both their territorial integrity and also the ability of people to escape because if they do escape and they cross the river, they're home free. In Thailand, the one scam combat I could say I was inside of would be Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in Laos. And that is actually an entire city. If you look at it from across the river in Thailand, you could be forgiven if you mistook it for Las Vegas or Atlantic City or something. There's shining lights. It's huge. It goes on for miles and miles. And there's almost no security in these compounds because the city of Golden Triangle Sec is actually a closed circuit. You know, private security, etc. If you get out of one of these compounds, you're just in a criminally controlled territory. And then Cambodia is sort of the middle zone of these things. For the most part, though, there are exceptions here. The compounds exist within single buildings and those buildings are fortified. But they don't look so much like a military outpost. They look more like penal colonies, like prisons.
- [12:12]
A
Okay?
- [12:13]
D
You barbed wire on the outside and the inside to keep people from getting out. You've got bars over the windows. And the difference in Cambodia is it's not in a war zone, it's not in a special economic zone. These are just buildings spread all over the country and owned by the prime minister. His family, his closest business partners, and the ultra, ultra ruling elite within Cambodia.
- [12:37]
A
These places are gigantic. Upwards to, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of people across Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos who are currently there against their will, human trafficked, imprisoned in these places doing scams.
- [12:51]
E
So, Beau, we don't know exactly how many. We don't have good data on this. That's one of the pieces that is definitely missing when we think about how to fight this crisis, is we don't know our baseline of how many people are enslaved right now.
- [13:05]
A
This is Aaron west again.
- [13:06]
E
And if you don't believe me, check your phone because I'm sure you've gotten a text in the past seven days inviting you to apply for a job or to pick up an Amazon package or to pay for me. Last week it was a traffic ticket to the state of California.
- [13:22]
A
I got one just this morning, actually, that just said, do you remember me?
- [13:27]
E
I like those because. Well, I don't like them. I see the utility of them because I'm getting those all the time that are like, do you have a sec? And the fact is, if you're people like you and me and you are out meeting people all the time, it's totally possible that that is someone you know and you just haven't entered them in your phone yet. These people are clever and they're getting more clever.
- [13:49]
A
These are the scams we all recognize. And it's tempting to think that wasting their time or mocking them is in some way punching up. The truth is, the person on the other side of the call isn't who we think. Okay, before we go any further, we need to backup, because at this point, you might be wondering, how do we even know who's behind this? These aren't random scammers. These are compounds. Real, basically, companies, operations, syndicates, criminal operations, real protection networks, and real government officials connected to them and protecting them and profiting off of them. So the question is, how do you trace an industry that's designed to hide itself in plain sight and is protected by the country where it's located? How do you follow the money, follow the power? Understand how trafficked workers are moved, sometimes sold contracts are sold. It's the same thing between compounds as part of a much larger system. Because this isn't one crime. It's an economy. It's a. It's. I don't even know what to call it. It's. It's gigantic and it has a lot of moving parts. Here's Jacob Sims again, for sure.
- [15:28]
D
Tons of moving parts. It's very complex, very sophisticated. And it looks different in every circumstance because this isn't, I think this is important to note, this isn't one sort of scam lord sitting over all of this. This is a, this is an industry of, of different companies, quote, unquote, syndicates trying to figure out how to do this right, how to do it in an effective way, how to gain competitive advantage over the other syndicates, how to evade law enforcement response, et cetera, et cetera. And so it looks a little bit different in every circumstance, but by and large, in terms of how we know where these places are, which within these three countries, there's between 400 and 500 of these locations. And the main way that we know where these places are is because of the victims who have been reaching out for help. And so this is the, the sheer number of people that are held against their will in these compounds has been part of the comparative advantage of this and allowing it to scale and grow. But it's also a key vulnerability because each of those people, in order to run the scam, has to have a cell phone. And that cell phone has been used repeatedly, thousands of times at this point to ask for help, to share gps coordinates with NGOs that are trying to respond, to try to get out, to try to make contact with their families as much as they are also trying to using those phones to try to scam people under duress. And so that's generally how we know, like the mappings that you'll see of where these compounds exist. We know where they exist because of human trafficking victims who are trying to get out.
- [17:06]
A
Now, you've been on the ground there and you do look the part. Have you played the part of helping people escape from these places?
- [17:15]
D
I mean, what it means to help people escape from these compounds is difficult because, no, I'm not going. And I've never been a part of, like, going and breaking somebody out, right, or, you know, facilitating a ransom payment or a bribe or whatever. But I learned about this space back in 2021. I was working for a very large counter labor trafficking organization that partners with the Cambodian government to help them, you know, fight human trafficking. And generally that is human trafficking that's happening outside of Cambodia. Cambodians that get tricked and exploited in Thailand or Malaysia or the Philippines. And how do you help those people get back? We, my team started getting requests for help back in 2021 of people saying, hey, I'm in Cambodia. And they'd send us the GPS coordinates and it'd be like A block away, not up on top of a mountain or hidden in a jungle or something. And so helping those people petition to get out of the compounds is something, yes, that I've been involved in hundreds of times. And after I left that organization continued to get outreach from people on a weekly, sometimes daily basis asking for help from within side these compounds. So yes, I've gotten to see this up close and personal and gotten to be witness to how difficult and how complicated and how broken the system is for trying to help these people get out your report.
- [18:41]
A
Policies and patterns State Abetted transnational crime in Cambodia as a Global Security Threat Name Cambodia's Interior Minister directly. Now what kind of evidence links these officials to the operations we're talking about?
- [18:55]
D
So the Deputy Prime Minister you're referring to, his name is Sar so Ka and so we can use him as an example. He is one of I think four dozen officials that I named in that, in that report. In his case in particular, if you go into Cambodia's corporate records, there is a corporate entity that has now vanished mysteriously a couple of years ago from these corporate records that showed that Sarsoka was one of the founding and as a board member of jinbei Investment Company which was one of the principal investment vehicles and likely the actual corporate entity for Jin by casino. And so like who else was involved? The other people, some of them are sitting in jail. Many of them are now sanctioned by the US and the UK and so they are, they are the other principal executives of Prince Holding Group. And again, this is the Deputy Prime Minister of the country, the Minister of Interior, the son of the former Deputy Prime Minister. And they don't stop at the Deputy Prime Minister level. They actually go all the way to the top. The most powerful family and the one most directly connected to the scam industry is actually not the Deputy Prime Minister's family, but the Prime Minister's family. So it just sort of goes on and on and on and it goes all the way to the top of the Cambodian government.
- [20:13]
A
So I mean it sounds like the corruption that, you know, we, we are used to thinking about from television, from shows like the Wire or the Sopranos. If it's almost as if that kind of corruption metastasized into, into something more akin to a Russian novel. Just everywhere you mentioned casino ownership, the scam compounds and Prince holdings being emblazoned on things that you would think might someone might want to be quiet about, they're not being quiet about. Is that because there's no accountability in this part of the world?
- [20:50]
D
Yeah, you could say there's. There's no accountability for members of the ultra elite. Cambodia isn't a totally lawless place. It's not like going to northern Afghanistan or something where there is no rule of law whatsoever. But it is a system of rule of law that is controlled entirely by the ruling elite, by the people at the very top of a corrupted system. And as you said, like you compared it to the Russian mob. This actually from, from like a parody size, like the size of Cambodia for what, what it is, what has emerged in the last few years is historically unprecedented in terms of how large of a criminal industry could be driven out of such a small country with such absolute collaboration from the highest members of the government. And so again, this is not anarchy. It's not like total lawlessness, but it is, it's law by criminals.
- [21:51]
A
How do they get their people and who are they? Are the victims of trafficking here tech savvy? Are they urban? Are they like, what are we talking about?
- [22:02]
D
Yeah, so it runs the gamut. There are people who have exited these compounds that would fit your sort of stereotypical rural, illiterate, extreme poverty. But effectively what this has done is it is broadened the aperture of who a potential trafficking victim might be in Cambodia, different from what it would have looked like years ago. So you have those that traditional profile, but you've also fundamentally expanded that to the more urban, the more well educated, the people who are more tech savvy.
- [22:33]
C
Right. So there's kind of three models of how people end up in these situations.
- [22:39]
A
Here's Gary Warner again.
- [22:41]
C
One of them is impoverished locals. Some of the people who live in Myanmar or who live in Cambodia are invited to work there and they have a gate pass. They go in and out, but they go in and out and are horribly abused. The second model then is there are telegram channels that offer wonderful jobs, overseas jobs.
- [23:07]
B
Thailand is surrounded by less competitive advantage economy.
- [23:12]
A
And here's API again.
- [23:14]
B
People perceive that Thailand offer job opportunities so many times that scammers or traffickers give wrong information for job seekers that, hey, there are jobs in Thailand. Thailand has very good airports and Thailand is a transportation hub. So people around the world traffic or.
- [23:37]
C
Come to Thailand and they market themselves to people in Indonesia and Malaysia and more often recently to African countries where they're like, we will take care of your visa. We will send you a plane ticket.
- [23:50]
D
And they started seeing ads pop up on social media saying customer service rep making, you know, three times what I can make in Jakarta, Indonesia, or in Mumbai, India, or in Bangkok Thailand, you'll.
- [24:05]
C
Make this amazing amount of money compared to your local economy and you'll be able to send money home every week.
- [24:11]
D
And so it seemed legitimate and people started coming at an enormous scale in.
- [24:17]
B
Many cases, lack of fake jobs posted by brokers or someone or like a middle person. So they come to Thailand, they even have like a interaction or conversation with them.
- [24:34]
A
Like an in person interview.
- [24:36]
B
Yes, yes.
- [24:37]
A
The targets of these scams, the people who are being trafficked, will actually meet up with the criminals who are trafficking them.
- [24:47]
B
Yes, but, but they have so many people in the process. So can be people who approach target victims and then people who accommodate transportation. There are many, many people in process, not one person. That's why persecution is very difficult. Because like a victim, they can't remember.
- [25:15]
A
Because they're meeting 10 or 20 people.
- [25:17]
B
Yes.
- [25:19]
C
But when you get there, instead of doing the job you were hired to do, you're enslaved and forced to do scams all day long. Some of them are working 16 hour shifts every day with a quota. And if they don't make their scamming quota for the day, they're physically abused, they're beaten, they're struck with electric prods, they're chained and hung from the ceiling, unable to touch the ground, they're denied food and water, they're locked into a black room with no food or water or restroom facilities for multiple days as the punishment for failing to make their quota. And this is routine. The third one is kidnapping. These resort casinos, some of them still operate as a resort casino and they're an attractive place, similar to spring break in my part of the United States, people go to the beaches, people go to the casino resorts on a spring break style trip and then are drugged and kidnapped and brought into the camp. So you have locals who are slave wage slaved into these jobs, you have people who travel there willingly believing they're going to have a great paying job. And then you have people that are just literally kidnapped out of bars, roofied and drug into a facility.
- [26:55]
A
Oppie, how is it that people in these call facilities don't just leave? I mean, do they, Are they, are they stuck there? Can they not leave? Are they, is this, is it really just a prison?
- [27:08]
B
If you imagine about Kingdom, they have their own security guard, someone carry guns, people monitor them, they are cctv, they don't know where they are. There are many frauds, right? They are in the building. There are so many buildings. That's why it is called scam compound. They can't come out because the boss the scammers, they have like a electric tool, like a beat. You, how do you call that?
- [27:51]
A
An electric prod.
- [27:52]
B
Yeah. Yes.
- [27:53]
A
Okay, so if you're listening and you're, you're feeling what I'm feeling, my shoulders are up around my ears and I am trying to picture something that is unimaginable to me here in the United States. But there's, I mean, obviously we have big prison systems in the United States and it's, but we're not talking about the same thing because these are people who thought they were going to have a job or some opportunity and then ended up through trickery, through, through a syndicate of criminals being sent around and around until they landed at a giant compound where they were held captive at gunpoint.
- [28:38]
B
Yes.
- [28:44]
D
Foreign.
- [28:58]
E
I want to talk to you about the way that you get people to do things that they do not want to do.
- [29:04]
A
Aaron west, again, if you can imagine.
- [29:07]
E
Grabbing up five people at your local target and telling them that now they're going to be scammers, in order to get them to do that work, you're either going to have to give them a carrot or a stick, and they have both. So the torture rooms are exactly that. In the scam rooms themselves, people will routinely be beaten with canes, with bats, they'll be smacked with a fist. That's what happens in the, in, just in the common areas where this is happening. But then for others where they have been disruptive or they have failed to meet coordinate quotas for days on end, they will be removed from that location and they will be handcuffed to a metal rod that goes the length of a long closet. And inside that room, they'll be left in there in the dark and they will be beaten with no way of escape. And those are known as dark rooms. They're, they're horrific. And when I saw the one in the Philippines, you could see, see where the walls had been bashed in from. What happens when people are tussling in a small area with weapons and, and, and wait.
- [30:24]
D
This is not common crime against the common poor. It's not just we need to help the justice system figure it out, act a little bit better on behalf of the vulnerable, not reform that's needed here. This industry alone, amongst the many other criminal industries that the Cambodian elite are maintaining, this is the largest, probably the largest industry that's ever existed in this country. And what we know about the profit margin and the likely rents that are being obtained by that ruling elite, this is a regime survival issue at this point. This Industry has become too big to fail in Cambodia. And if you look at the response of the government over the last five years to looks like they're looking at an existential political challenge, an existential economic challenge. The sheer volume of propaganda, the amount of repression, the number of COVID ups that we've seen there since late 2021, all point to the fact that this isn't, you know, the wool hasn't been pulled over these folks eyes by imported criminals that have run rampant across the country. This is something that they realize how valuable it is to them as a regime that is highly unpopular, has been highly predatory for a long time and needs to be paying off the people with the guns consistently if they want to hold on to power. And this is the way that they're doing it in 2026.
- [32:11]
A
Before we continue, heads up for listeners in the next section, we're going to talk about experiences shared by people who were trapped inside these compounds that includes descriptions of violence, sexual assault and suicide.
- [32:36]
C
There's an interesting story. The public origin of the term pig butchering came from a very high profile story in China.
- [32:47]
A
Gary Warner.
- [32:48]
C
A man was lured to work in one of these camps. He was recently divorced, he was having trouble paying his child support and an uncle suggested he might come and work in one of these camps. And when he got in there, he began doing these scams. And shortly after he was. The entry level role is not called pig butchering. The entry level role is called dog pushing. And the dog pusher's job is make those outreaches on social media and through text messages and begin to build the trust, relationship of romance.
- [33:23]
A
How does a dog pusher graduate into becoming what's next?
- [33:28]
C
The next role is the role that's called pig butchering. And what happened was this individual in China who was lured into one of these camps and then found himself enslaved in this work. One evening shortly after he'd arrived, they had a celebration and awarded a cash prize to one of the pig butchers because after completely stealing all of the resources of a female individual, she committed suicide. And they were celebrating that someone had managed to drain someone to the point that they committed suicide. And this young Chinese man said, I can't do that. And he stole a phone and began sending warning messages to his victims. Hey, I'm the one who was talking to you earlier. I'm scamming you. I'm being forced to scam you. And there was a dramatic police rescue where police came across the border and rescued this guy, but he stole all the manuals. And lists of victims from his camp. And then he was paraded around on Chinese television for several months telling his story of what had happened to him. And that's really when the term pig butchering became mainstream within the Chinese world.
- [34:50]
A
The call centers are huge. They can have 5 or 10,000 people in the mopy, right?
- [34:55]
B
Yes. Yep.
- [34:57]
A
Put me, put me in one of those call centers. Have. I don't know if you. Have you ever been in one of those call centers?
- [35:06]
B
Not, I don't wish to be there, but I.
- [35:12]
A
Not as a human trafficked person, but as a. As a person in law enforcement. You've never been inside?
- [35:17]
B
No, I never been there. Yeah.
- [35:19]
A
But you have seen, I'm sure you have seen video of what is going on in there.
- [35:25]
B
Video and yeah, story from survivors and survivors.
- [35:31]
A
And you say survivors, which would suggest there's people who don't survive.
- [35:39]
B
I actually in person, I know him. But then his story is published already in Reuter and also by Thomson Reuter and also by Amnesty International. So I think it is okay to tell about his story. So he's young, very innocent, naive, come from broken family, poor family. He was really young. He wanted to have some job. Right. I think that's normal for a young man. He wants to have some job, to have some money for himself and for his family. It was his first time in Bangkok. Yeah. So he was. He searched for the job and was approached by a woman. So that woman like a groom. Him report with him, invited him. Yeah. So it was his first time to come to Bangkok. The job was promised that hey, this is the job. Good job, easy job in Bangkok. But once he came to Bangkok, he was transferred and then he was kept there for one week and then was sold to another compound. He was there for around one year. His performance is not. It's not good. Yeah. So he was like instructed to do kind of like a low man scam because he's like a good looking. And then his kufman is. Was not good. He could not meet target. So he was told that hey, if you can't do the job, you either do the job or die. And then he was kept in the dark room. So he has come one day to. To think whether to do the job or to die like a buy. So he jumped from the eighth floor. But then he was like a stuck on the fifth floor. And he was helped by nurse and doctor. And this is not the normal case because in many cases people were sent back to boss or traffickers. But luckily he survived but injured of his body, he was around 17 or 18.
- [38:14]
C
There was an interview on a television program called Trafficked. Here's Gary Warner where she was speaking with one of these ladies. It was a Myanmar resident who was able to leave the compound and come and go every day. She was raped multiple times per day, but it was the only way she had to feed her family. And she was being paid a very small amount. But it was either be completely destitute, homeless with no way to feed your children, or go to a job where part of your job is being raped by the boss every day. So that's one category. It's trafficked, but it's, it's wage slave trafficking. You could say she has the choice, but the choice is starve to death or do this horrible job.
- [39:03]
B
Scam is very close to our daily life, but when we talk about online scam, scam crime, there are two types of victims. We normally talk about the first victim who lose money, but I just wanted to advocate that they are the second victims, that the victims of trafficking in persons, the false criminal victims, that they have trauma, they are beaten and they have mental health issue. And they are, they commit crimes, they commit some crimes, but they are small fish. If we arrest them, it could mean we cash the small fish and we let the big fish free. Many people experience losing money. Many people didn't report to police, but they have bad experience from the scammer. And I agree with particularly police that not all of people in scam compounds or in special economic zones are victims. Not all of them are victims. I agree. Yeah, but only, only if there is 1% of victim. We are not talking about numbers, we are talking about human beings. Right. So Even like a one of them or 1% of them, they, they are human being and they are, they deserve to be treated as human being.
- [41:04]
A
So you're going to Cambodia now?
- [41:06]
E
I'm going to Cambodia first week of February and Myanmar. I'm going back to see like what's the difference? What, what has changed? How are we going to do this better?
- [41:16]
A
Recently there have been what looked like real victories. One of the most powerful scam bosses was sanctioned, arrested and extradited. Compounds tied to his groups were raided. Gates were open. Workers, if you want to call them that, were free to leave. But those wins are narrow. Chinese nationals are sent home while non Chinese workers are quietly relocated to other compounds. Then there's the Uyghurs. The buildings get labeled, quote unquote clean. The scamming doesn't stop though, it just moves. And here's the problem in places like Cambodia, scam revenue is the majority of that country's gdp. And so you make that go away. The special economic zones, factories, they're factories. They are creating all of the revenue that country's seeing right now. The meaningful revenue. What you have is economic collapse. That's why this keeps going to this degree.
- [42:15]
D
There are very few precedents in the modern era for a country being so profoundly compromised by criminal industries and having so few alternatives. It's an amazing country. But the elites there have said, you know, we're not capturing that much rents from the tourist industries. We're better to do scams. They have sort of a low margin garment industry that causes a lot of problems for them. Nothing. They don't have anything else like this. Cambodia is a scam state. There, there's no other way of looking at it at this point.
- [42:53]
A
Jake Sims, thank you so much for joining us. You're going to be coming back to talk about something else soon and I can't wait to talk to you again. Thank you for your time.
- [43:03]
D
Happy to. Thanks for having me, Aaron.
- [43:04]
A
I feel always privileged to talk to you. Thank you so much.
- [43:08]
E
Oh, it's a pleasure. It's always a pleasure.
- [43:10]
A
Gary Warner, thank you so much for joining us. You, you are a true gift to all of us who are fighting the cyber crime around the world.
- [43:20]
C
Both, thank you for what you do to spread the message.
- [43:24]
A
I really appreciate your time and generosity.
- [43:29]
B
Thank you so much. And thank you for having me. Yeah, of course.
- [43:35]
A
Okay. And now you're stuck with me because next time I have a question about something in Thailand, I'm going to be calling you. So thank you again.
- [43:43]
B
Thank you so much.
- [43:54]
A
Okay, this was the first part in what is going to definitely be a two parter and may even be a three parter. I think it is a three parter. So stay tuned and keep listening for those. You know, usually I sort of blithely segue into the tinfoil swan, which is our paranoid takeaway to keep you safe on and offline. But this topic is so serious that I'm going to. That was the segue. That's all you get. And the advice here is really simple. Next time you get a text that says, hey, we playing tennis this weekend or dinner was so fun or whatever, you know the texts I'm talking about, the next time you get one of those, don't send something mean, don't swear, don't do anything because you just got text by a dog pusher. You got texted by a person who probably just arrived at one of these compounds and their job is to send you that text and they are discombobulated and they're not doing that great. So that's part one, part two of this tinfoil swan. My best advice for you is to remove your personal data from online. And I mean that the best way to not get got is to not be there and, and you can have your personal information removed from online. You know, there's, there are California just passed drop which, which makes it possible for you to have your data removed. But the problem with personal data and these data brokers is that it pops up over and over and over again. So like right now, if you look me up and I am pretty not there, I might be there because of some purchase I made at Christmas. And delete me is perfect for, for the real world, you know, of data scraping and, and what data brokers do with our information because it's whack a mole. Our information popped up over and over and over again. So if you want to stop those, those texts from coming your way, have your information removed from online and make sure it stays off because it's, it's repropagated all the time. Okay? That's my advice this week. I'm standing by it. Stay tuned for at least one more installment about this extremely important situation in Southeast Asia. And thanks for listening. Stay safe out there. See you next week. What the Hack is produced by Beau Friedlander. That's me and Andrew Stephen, who also edits the show. What the hack is brought to you by Deleteme. Deleteme makes it quick and easy and safe to remove your personal data online and was recently named the number one pick by a New York Times wirecutter for personal information removal. You can learn more about Deleteme if you go to joindeleteme.com WT that's joindeleteme.com WTH and if you sign up there on that landing page, you will get a 20% discount. I kid you not. A 20% discount. So, yes, color me fishing, but it's worth it.
- [47:18]
D
Hello, this is Jack Wilson, the host of the History of Literature podcast. For the past 10 years, I've been talking to novelists, biographers and scholars about the greatest books in the history of the world and the men and women who wrote them. Like our recent episodes on Dante in love, a starter pack of 10 Indian classics, the pop culture that influenced Sylvia Plath, and a talk with scientist and novelist Alan Lightman about the wonders of nature. Join us at the History of Literature podcast wherever you get your podcasts hi.
- [47:50]
B
I'm Raj Panjabi Johnson, head of identity content at HuffPost.
- [47:54]
A
And I'm Noah Michelson, head of HuffPost Personal.
- [47:56]
B
We're also the host of Am I Doing It Wrong?
- [47:58]
C
The show that explores the all too.
- [48:00]
A
Human anxieties we have about trying to.
- [48:01]
B
Get our lives right.
- [48:02]
A
Each week, we're talking to experts in their field who are definitely doing things right about the topics you could use a helping hand with, whether it's making.
- [48:09]
B
New friends, getting your protein fix, or keeping your car out of the mechanic.
- [48:13]
A
Subscribe now and listen to new episodes of Am I Doing It Wrong?
- [48:16]
D
Wherever you get your podcasts and its.
- [48:18]
A
Full video episodes on YouTube.