[...] - [Christophe] A 2024 study estimated that since pig butchering schemes began, they've stolen more than $75 billion globally.
- And so this is happening en mass.
This is the biggest threat that nobody's talking about.
- Erin helped me understand how this scam worked.
But I still wanted to better understand who was doing the scamming, so I asked her. {an online scam expert}
- It's a convergence of crypto and COVID. Prior to COVID, Chinese organised crime was looking for a way to work in gambling. They knew that gambling was illegal in China and that crypto was illegal in China and so they were looking for ways to run their gambling empire and the right place for it was Cambodia.
So Chinese organised crime syndicates set up casino fronts with big towers in the back that could be used as hotels or could be used as live-work locations for online gambling. When COVID shut down the world, those crime syndicates couldn't fill their casino hotels with tourists, so they repurposed them for an internet-based business instead.
Pig butchering.
- It preyed upon kind-hearted victims who had time to talk during COVID. So it really was kind of a tsunami that worked in their favour.
- But scamming at an industrial scale needed a workforce.
So crime syndicates posted listings like this one for seemingly high-end jobs looking for educated bilingual applicants, and the applications flooded in - They would accept their free travel to Bangkok.
When they arrived in Bangkok, their passports would be taken, they'd be put in buses and bused to either Cambodia, where these casino towers were or Myanmar, where there were compounds set up on the other side of the river from Thailand.
And from there, they were forced to participate as the workforce for this new type of con.
- [Christophe] In 2023, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights estimated that at least 120,000 people in Myanmar and 100,000 people in Cambodia may be held in situations where they are forced to carry out online scams.
- We don't know a lot about what's really happening in there. What we know is when there are survivors who are able to get out by their families paying a ransom or they're able to escape, we've heard some really vile horror stories about what's going on inside these compounds.
- All of a sudden, I was faced with the stakes of this story, with the fact that the scammers that I had been talking to over the phone could be victims themselves. We have to be really delicate with people that we are trying to get information from who are still inside, because their lives are at risk every single day. [...]
