The internet has birthed a new form of human trafficking. Its victims are ambitious, educated and lured by the prospect of a well-paying job in distant shores. They instead find themselves trapped in vast ‘factories’ in Southeast Asia—beaten, tortured and forced to execute online scams that cheat people of their life savings.
Researched by: Nirmal Bhansali
The anatomy of a scam factory
First, a definition: A scam factory consists of large compounds spread across acres of land—with buildings that house workers. Their job is to target and cheat victims of their money. The workers are not the villains. They are slaves—trafficked to these factories from around the world:
Whereas victims were originally drawn from Chinese-speaking communities in Malaysia, Thailand, or Singapore, today people are being trafficked to the region from as far afield as South America, East Africa, and Western Europe. Other than beatings, workers are subjected to sexual assault, rape, and having their organs forcibly harvested, according to Interpol.
Initially, scam factories were located in Cambodia, but have since expanded to Laos, Philippines and Myanmar. Latest accounts suggest they may have spread as far as Ghana and the UAE.
Origin story: Scam factories were created by transnational crime syndicates in Southeast Asia. As with many other awful things, cyber slavery too is a legacy of the pandemic years. Quarantines and lockdowns shut down drug routes and casinos—and kept people at home and online. They became easy marks for online scams for traffickers looking for a new stream of revenue. On the labour side, the global economic slowdown created a large pool of workers looking for jobs. These near-perfect conditions birthed a new industry of crime that has since grown to a monstrous size.
Also helping matters: Location. Many of these scam factories are built within Special Economic Zones. These are located on loosely regulated borders and have historically been hotbeds of crime:
"Special economic zones, particularly in the Mekong, have become magnets for organised crime syndicates, at first for casinos, trafficking and related money laundering, and recently for online fraud,” said [UN Representative] Jeremy Douglas.
This is why scam factories grew alongside licensed casinos—and house prostitution and drug rackets, as well.
The numbers: The size of the global cyber scam industry is staggering: TIME magazine sums up the scale:
Aided by modern telecoms and far from law enforcement, [the region] is now the world’s unrivalled cybercrime hotspot, where armies of “dog-pushers”—as the lowly trafficked scammers are known—orchestrate romance-investment cons, crypto fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling operations at some 1,000 scam prisons, generating $75 billion over the past four years.
The UN estimates that there are 120,000 people being held as slaves in Myanmar—and another 100,000 in Cambodia and other places.
The China angle: Most of these syndicates are run by Chinese gangs—and the “managers” in these factories are typically Chinese, as well. So are the investors. In Cambodia, three of the biggest moneymen have been previously convicted in China of financial crimes totalling tens of millions of dollars.
Key point to note: The slave labour and targets of these online scams also include Chinese. And none of this would be possible without the cooperation of the gangsters’ high level local contacts. This crime occurs in plain sight:
[The] dog-pushers [cyber slaves] are constantly online and chatting with hundreds of targets, it’s relatively easy for them to contact family, law enforcement, embassy staff, and NGOs like GASO to seek help. It matters little. The Cambodian police had visited the complexes where Chin and Lim were held but “were useless,” says Chin. “They would come in for a short while and leave.”
Even the police are helpless. In one case, officers needed special permission from the Interior Ministry just to enter the compound. The reason: The building was owned by one of Cambodia’s wealthiest tycoons and a personal adviser to the prime minister.
A new kind of victim
The workers are not illiterate or desperately poor—which is the typical profile of victims of other kinds of trafficking. Scamming thousands of dollars from victims requires both education and human skills. Indian Express profiled two men from Karnataka who were trapped in Cambodia. One was struggling to get a job despite having a B.Com degree. The other was an ITI (electronics) graduate working as a delivery person—desperate for a better life.
Preying on the young: According to BBC News, traffickers have moved on to teenagers—who are “better-educated, computer-literate, and usually speak more than one regional language.” Victims are now as young as 15. But the modus operandi is the same irrespective of age:
The victims say they answered ads that they thought were legitimate, promising high salaries. Once trafficked into these scam compounds, they were held captive and forced to defraud people. Many were told to entice victims online with fraudulent investment opportunities, the promise of interest-free loans or the chance to buy items on fake e-commerce apps. If they performed badly, they were sold to another scam mill. Those caught trying to escape were often beaten.
The anatomy of ‘pig butchering’
That’s the term used for scams perfected by these factories. The original phrase is Chinese—"sha zhu pan"—which means to fatten a pig before slaughter. It was coined by the gangs when they started the online con game back in 2016. The first iteration involved grooming Chinese targets to place large, illegal bets.
When Beijing cracked down, the gangs moved on to victims in Southeast Asia—and then expanded to fake cryptocurrency investments to lure people in the West. Predictably, seduction plays a key role in many of these con jobs. Men pretend to be women—and if a target asks to see the woman “one of the few women in the compound is brought in to act as the model.”
Point to note: Men lure women as well. In Singapore, 70% of the targets were women between the ages of 25 and 40 years—and nearly 90% held a bachelor's degree or higher. In all cases, they went bankrupt and/or heavily into debt.
The bottomline: “Why doesn’t anyone rescue you? Because it’s the largest organised crime unit in the world”—that’s what an NGO worker said to a victim who wondered why no one raided the sprawling scam factories—well-known to all. But there is some hope that international pressure will force local governments to move against the gangs. China doesn’t like them—neither does the US. Mercifully, this is one thing the big boys agree on.
Reading list
CNN and Deutsche Welle report on the horrific conditions in Myanmar—while TIME Magazine offers the best big picture of the region. BBC News has two good pieces—on Indian workers who end up as slaves—and the syndicates in Cambodia. The Guardian looks at why Cambodia does so little to crack down on the scam factories. Al Jazeera explains how victims are doubly victimised—first by traffickers and then by immigration authorities. RestOfWorld has an eye-opening report on workers who accept this kind of slavery.
