The Slave Labor Scam Complex
By 
When you get stupid text messages and emails attempting to scam you (“Hey, do you want to hang out tonight?”), do you ever wonder, who the hell is behind this ridiculousness? It’s especially sad given how successful this stuff is. In any case, the story of what is behind it is so, so much worse than I imagined. It’s basically slave labor run by Chinese gangs in the borderlands of upland southeast Asia.
Scam centres have appeared across the borderlands of Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos over the last decade. In Scam, Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li and Mark Bo show that the industry depends on a second layer of deception. Most scammers have themselves been scammed. The tens of thousands of Chinese, Ethiopians, Ugandans, Filipinos, Pakistanis and others who carry out the grunt work have been tricked, kidnapped and enslaved. It starts with an advert on TikTok, Douyin, LinkedIn or Jiandanwang: ‘Fantastic opportunity with Amazon Web Services. Offers competitive compensation, remote work flexibility, and opportunities to attend industry events. Interested? Let’s connect!’ Those who respond are flown to Bokeo International Airport in Laos or Kang Keng Airport in Cambodia, where they are met by a group of men, pushed into a van, then taken to a compound somewhere along the Mekong River and told they can’t leave. They are now pig butchers. Or fish butchers, tasked with luring internet shoppers into submitting prewritten reviews on spoof websites before entrapping them into pyramidal cryptocurrency investments. Or bird butchers, ordered to post fake ads – bird nets – on dating websites or shopping platforms and lure victims into sending them money.
According to USAID’s Counter-Trafficking in Persons programme, 150,000 people are enslaved in scamming compounds across Cambodia. In Myanmar the figure may be as high as 120,000; there are tens of thousands more in Laos and Thailand. They have been brought from the villages of Xinjiang, the slums of Manila and Nairobi, the secondary schools of the Czech Republic. Scamming is no less grotesque an example of globalisation than the seafood slave industry operating out of Thailand or the cargo-ship dismantling business devastating the shores of Bangladesh. One particularly striking aspect of cyber-slavery, as the authors of Scam point out, is that its victims are trapped in remote compounds, isolated from their friends and family, even as they remain constantly connected to the outside world through the internet.
What little we understand about life inside scamming compounds comes from those who have escaped them, either by jumping out of windows or as a result of military operations to free them. Scam is based on interviews with several former inmates. Stories of sexual assault and torture are common. The authors speak to a young Taiwanese woman, ‘Alice’, who was lured to Cambodia on the promise of employment at a tech firm. Within hours of her arrival at a scamming compound in the port of Sihanoukville, her new bosses threatened her with a stun gun, locked her in a room, then raped her. Over the next month she was sold from one compound to another and sexually assaulted multiple times. Eventually she was saved after she smuggled pleas for help onto an Instagram page, but her problems had not ended: like many of those who have been enslaved in fraud compounds, Alice had to prove to the Cambodian authorities that she hadn’t knowingly entered the scam industry.
Scam compounds are run according to a strict hierarchy. A department head oversees a dozen or so core managers, who are responsible for teaching butchering methods and acquiring targets. Team leaders impose discipline. On the lowest rung are the scammers, who typically number in the hundreds at any given compound, but are segregated by nationality and divided into groups of around seven to make them easier to control. Most pig butchers learn scripts from manuals. ‘You need to make the customers feel happy and comfortable,’ one manual instructs. The goal is to ‘create dependency’, ‘show solicitude’ and ‘make him fall for you.’ Scammers are told not to use too many emojis – they don’t invite a response – and to locate problems in their interlocutors’ lives and ‘provide support’. Butchers who fail to memorise or stick to the scripts are ordered to copy out their contents by hand ten or twenty times, while those who reply too slowly are sometimes forced to stand in the sun for hours on end. In February, one of more than a hundred Ethiopians rescued from a compound on the border between Myanmar and Thailand told the Guardian that those who failed to meet their daily quotas were shocked with electric probes. In Cambodia’s Kampot Province, the bodies of tortured scammers have been found stuffed into dumpsters, wrapped in blankets. The authors of Scam interviewed a Chinese man who was sold to three different scam factories in northern Myanmar. He claims that bounties are placed on the heads of recent escapees; they are captured by locals who carry out patrols and delivered back to their former masters. ‘It is not possible to escape,’ he says.
As with the rest of the 21st century, it’s always worse than you think.