14 ms·

The elaborate set-up of a scam HQ, staffed by people forced to scam

145 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

gsatic 4y ago
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Well, no, not really. Many of these scams explicitly target the elderly and aim to steal retirement savings that are not huge by Western standards (tens of thousands), but can be devastating to the victims and their families.
  - lupire 4y ago
    That's rich compared to the employees of the scammers, if not the bosses. People who aren't globally rich don't have retirement savings to lose, they have a pension.
rippercushions 4y ago
These have been big news in SE Asia recently and with reason: there are credible reports of kidnapped people being tortured to death. In desperately poor Cambodia and Laos, the regional police are on the syndicates' payroll, and in the lawless border regions of Myanmar the central government has no sway whatsoever. A corollary to this are the infamous fish processing boats of Thailand, where illegal immigrants (mostly from Myanmar) are held as slaves and simply pushed into the sea once they outlive their usefulness. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/jul/20/thai-fishing-industry-implicated-enslavement-deaths-rohingya https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/jul/20/t...
- luckylion 4y ago
  Hard to imagine it happening at that scale in the West. Is it just wealth that keeps most people here from becoming slavers and murderers? Is it the fear of the law coming down on them? Cultural norms? How "accepted" is that trade in the wider community, do the owners of these scams (or the Thai fishermen) get respected, or do they live in constant fear that someone takes justice in their own hands and ends them?
  - qubex 4y ago
    You’d be surprised. I’ve chanced upon operations of this kind in Malta, Bulgaria, and Israel.
    - AlmostAnyone 4y ago
      Just today there was an article about police operation in UK with Czech people being slaved for sex work.
    - roey2009 4y ago
      As an Israeli former soldier, could you elaborate? I remember our commanders telling us that there used to be a trafficking route through the border of Egypt, but it stopped when the border patrol improved, couple years back. They were smuggling Eastern European girls to prostitute. Did something change to your knowledge? Or are you talking about another route?
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    It's the same basic model as any criminal enterprise: people who value money above all else self-select into these roles, and the owners insulate themselves from the guy wielding the cattle prod with layers of underlings. See also drug cartels, extortion rackets, etc.
    - lupire 4y ago
      And the leaders are supported by huge throngs of people who need or want money and are willing to ignore their role (wittingly or unwittingly) or are blackmailed into compliance.
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    A) The west just has fewer people. The most populous country in Europe - Germany - would be only the 10th most populous country in Asia. B) A substantial amount of people in Asia live in rural areas. In India, nearly 920M people live in rural areas. The lack of infrastructure in rural areas means that things can happen that never ever reach the local authorities. People can simply slip away without a trace. C) State power is weak outside of major population centers. Corruption is rife. Povery is rampant. Earning opportunities are limited. Combined, it means that criminals know they can get away with anything as long as they bribe the right people. D) A substantial percentage of Asian population lives under failed states (same for Africa). State power isn't just weak; it's absent. E) Asia is just way too large and geographically diverse. Easy to hide away illicit activity in a dense rainforest or deserted mountain than in wide open plains and farmland.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Reports like these make me so jaded and cynical about technology and all the supposed ills it cures. So much money goes into solving non-problems like 15-minute delivery or cryptocurrencies when such a huge swathe of the world still struggles with energy, security, and access to basic dignity.
  - barterr 4y ago
    I’d say that’s more of a capitalism problem than a technology problem
    - soggylaundry 4y ago
      well if you look at world history, it always has been like this -- look at all those proudly-written enslavements, crimes and massacres. But we're starting to grow out of it, and tech is helping us track down crimes that were near-impossible to track down.
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        Very often tech is enabling these crimes. Monitoring and punishment of millions of people was much more difficult before.
        lotsofpulp 4y ago
        And exposure and transparency was much more difficult before too. A tool is a tool, how it is used is the important part.
        WalterBright 4y ago
        The Soviet Union had no trouble at all monitoring and punishing tens of millions of people. It also operated forced labor camps (gulags) on a vast scale.
    - reitanqild 4y ago
      Actually, on average the rich countries that has diverged most from capitalism has been significantly worse. I'm leaving out the developing countries on purpose here: they may have had it even worse but it doesn't feel fair to blame them. Nazi Germany and Soviet/USSR (the whole time more or less) can't blame anyone else for the insane scale of human suffering that they created. Both are representatives of centrally planned economies where companies either don't exist in a western sense (Soviet), or only exist to serve the country (Germany).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
zamalek 4y ago
I have my suspicions that fighting this would be the best way to fight terrorism. It may not be true for all the syndicates, but colluding with terrorists does come with some great criminal perks; especially if you're looking at human trafficking.
- duxup 4y ago
  What would fighting this look like? These operations are often in failed / significantly less free states and ignored or otherwise protected by them. Regime change?
  - zamalek 4y ago
    Arrest the cops who are accepting bribes. The rest would topple pretty quickly.
    - duxup 4y ago
      Who does that, the locals who are working in a failed or corrupt state? Just arrest them seems like a very simplistic idea here...
      - zamalek 4y ago
        I have no idea in that case. I never indicated I had any idea on how to tackle the problem specifically, only that solving it might solve larger problems. I never claimed to be an expert at unrooting syndicates, so I really don't get the justification for this discussion.
        duxup 4y ago
        I kinda figured there was more of an idea there if you're suggesting fighting it in some specific way.
coconut_crab 4y ago
Several of my friends were targeted by these scammers, and one of them even lost 10000 USD (a big sum in Vietnam) to a fake prosecutor. They even cloned the website of the Ministry of Public Security to scam him. Out of curiousity I took a look at their website source code, found an url to some kinds of a gateway for scammer where they have tools for scamming people, and also an android app that aid them. After finding that the whole operation is based abroad I told my friend that there is zero chance he will get his money back.
- lupire 4y ago
  By natural selection, there is nearly no scam that will refund your money after you've given it away.
  - TrackerFF 4y ago
    If you use credit card(s), the card provider MAY be able to help with chargeback, but that depends entirely on their policy.
otikik 4y ago
This is horrible. Thanks for the investigative effort, I feel I want to step out of internet for a while now.
from 4y ago
This is pretty terrible. I still don’t get whey they need to enslave their workers though. Looking at average loss numbers per victim it seems even if the typical victim loss was $10,000 and the average employee got one victim a week that is still substantially over the average wage in Cambodia and is almost entirely pure profit. Even if you account for governments seizing funds a third of the time it seems like they’d be more successful operating on a commission model for employees.
- sorokod 4y ago
  One possibility is that some have a higher moral standard then you.
  - stavros 4y ago
    Oh man, if we've exhausted the pool of people willing to work for scammers so much that you can't pay people to scam any more, that's the best news I've heard this year.
    - sorokod 4y ago
      It is a "stick and carrot" situation, that is the way I read the article. The higher the moral and emotional barriers there are, the more furniture and vegetables are required. To your comment, that stick is required at all is kinda +1 for humanity.
  - from 4y ago
    Why so personal? I’m not saying I would do it. After reading victim stories I don’t think I’d have the heart to take a nickel from these people. I’m just saying that there are enough people out there with no morals who would do it and would probably be pretty good at it. Go on Nigerian twitter and you’ll find people bragging about these kind of scams all the time. Even America in the late 90s had all those stock pump and dump call centers (see Boiler Room) so I don’t think there’s a society where there aren’t people willing to do pretty terrible things.
quacked 4y ago
This reminds me of a point I feel progressives (usually steeped in several generations of western living) tend to miss. The underwritten currency of human society is violence. Using it, you can take what you want and the only way to stop you is more violence. If you are part of an ideological tribe that wants to protect humans from each others' petty brutality you must seize land, establish the rule of law, and murder or expel people who challenge your regime. Organized crime like gangs, cartels, the mafia, corrupt cops--these are not "unfortunate byproducts of imperialism and capitalism", they are the basest, fundamental expression of human dominance. If they central government weakens, they will take over. I deeply hate people who violate the safety and freedom of civilized society, and it sometimes frustrates me that so many westerners who believe in "human rights" are convinced these problems can be solved with a light touch.
- duxup 4y ago
  I’m not sure what that has to do with “progressives”.
  - quacked 4y ago
    The majority of people in the US who bother to care about human rights abuses and exploitation of vulnerable populations are "progressives".
    - duxup 4y ago
      But what does that mean? Isn't that just people who care generally? And if they do what should they do differently?
      - quacked 4y ago
        Did you read my first comment with intent to understand my point or just to nitpick me? I said pretty clearly: > If you are part of an ideological tribe that wants to protect humans from each others' petty brutality you must seize land, establish the rule of law, and murder or expel people who challenge your regime. If people care about human rights abuses, they need to seize land, establish the rule of law, and murder or expel people who challenge their regime. For instance: there are known sex traffickers inside the United States who are sent to prison for years when they're caught and then they get out. If you want to curtail that practice to a greater degree than it is, you need to murder or expel people who do it, not just give them an official time-out and then make life more difficult for them afterwards by reducing their employment options and curtailing their right to vote. Another option is indefinite containment, but that's a large drain on resources and extremely difficult to operate without simply ending up with a prison system like the US has, which is low-status and overtly corrupt and underfunded (in the sense that the funding goes to profit rather than to the effective operations of the prisons). In short: the safety of civilized people who participate in society in good faith needs to be violently protected from people who take advantage of them. This is obviously not the case in the US, and it's certainly not the case in outlying rural regions in Asia and Africa, where people are forced to scam under threat of punishment.
bigbacaloa 4y ago
Scams like this, selling get rich quick, often depend on the poor ethics of the victim. A lot of the work of the scammers amounts to filtering out the skeptical and the honest.
- walaueh 4y ago
  This statement can only come from someone born in a 1st world country and have no sense of what its like to be poor. The desperation and clinging on to a hope no matter how slim of earning a wage higher than what they already have.
  - bigbacaloa 4y ago
    The victims mostly come from the first world or the rich in the rest of the world ... No one poor gets scammed for 20000 in fake investments ...
    - antifa 4y ago
      As your average westerner, if I found a scam convincing enough to fall for, I still have no way of producing 20,000 USD for it.
Tangurena2 4y ago
The amount of effort that these groups have put into their "pig butchering" operations is impressive. My experience with online dating and the catfishing that I received (is that even the correct verb?) ranged between poor and mediocre (if I drank as much alcohol as I did in my 30s, I suspect that I could have been scammed out of lots of money - I am a bit too cynical and analytical these days). What I see on videos about "pig butchering" is orders of magnitude more intense. What the article documents is frightening.
- rolph 4y ago
  these people are preying on sorrow and loneliness, and the victim is not only robbed, but emotionally assaulted, some dont surive that.
sohkamyung 4y ago
That is Part I of the investigation, looking at the scammers. Part II [1] looks at the victims [1] https://www.channelnewsasia.com/cna-insider/online-love-investment-crypto-scam-victim-why-effective-psychology-3018926 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/cna-insider/online-love-inve...
- owlninja 4y ago
  Thank you! I was curious what some of the actual scams were.

145 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

rippercushions 4y ago
Well, no, not really. Many of these scams explicitly target the elderly and aim to steal retirement savings that are not huge by Western standards (tens of thousands), but can be devastating to the victims and their families.
- lupire 4y ago
  That's rich compared to the employees of the scammers, if not the bosses. People who aren't globally rich don't have retirement savings to lose, they have a pension.

These have been big news in SE Asia recently and with reason: there are credible reports of kidnapped people being tortured to death. In desperately poor Cambodia and Laos, the regional police are on the syndicates' payroll, and in the lawless border regions of Myanmar the central government has no sway whatsoever. A corollary to this are the infamous fish processing boats of Thailand, where illegal immigrants (mostly from Myanmar) are held as slaves and simply pushed into the sea once they outlive their usefulness. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/jul/20/thai-fishing-industry-implicated-enslavement-deaths-rohingya https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/jul/20/t...

luckylion 4y ago
Hard to imagine it happening at that scale in the West. Is it just wealth that keeps most people here from becoming slavers and murderers? Is it the fear of the law coming down on them? Cultural norms? How "accepted" is that trade in the wider community, do the owners of these scams (or the Thai fishermen) get respected, or do they live in constant fear that someone takes justice in their own hands and ends them?
- qubex 4y ago
  You’d be surprised. I’ve chanced upon operations of this kind in Malta, Bulgaria, and Israel.
  - AlmostAnyone 4y ago
    Just today there was an article about police operation in UK with Czech people being slaved for sex work.
  - roey2009 4y ago
    As an Israeli former soldier, could you elaborate? I remember our commanders telling us that there used to be a trafficking route through the border of Egypt, but it stopped when the border patrol improved, couple years back. They were smuggling Eastern European girls to prostitute. Did something change to your knowledge? Or are you talking about another route?
- rippercushions 4y ago
  It's the same basic model as any criminal enterprise: people who value money above all else self-select into these roles, and the owners insulate themselves from the guy wielding the cattle prod with layers of underlings. See also drug cartels, extortion rackets, etc.
  - lupire 4y ago
    And the leaders are supported by huge throngs of people who need or want money and are willing to ignore their role (wittingly or unwittingly) or are blackmailed into compliance.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  A) The west just has fewer people. The most populous country in Europe - Germany - would be only the 10th most populous country in Asia. B) A substantial amount of people in Asia live in rural areas. In India, nearly 920M people live in rural areas. The lack of infrastructure in rural areas means that things can happen that never ever reach the local authorities. People can simply slip away without a trace. C) State power is weak outside of major population centers. Corruption is rife. Povery is rampant. Earning opportunities are limited. Combined, it means that criminals know they can get away with anything as long as they bribe the right people. D) A substantial percentage of Asian population lives under failed states (same for Africa). State power isn't just weak; it's absent. E) Asia is just way too large and geographically diverse. Easy to hide away illicit activity in a dense rainforest or deserted mountain than in wide open plains and farmland.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Reports like these make me so jaded and cynical about technology and all the supposed ills it cures. So much money goes into solving non-problems like 15-minute delivery or cryptocurrencies when such a huge swathe of the world still struggles with energy, security, and access to basic dignity.
- barterr 4y ago
  I’d say that’s more of a capitalism problem than a technology problem
  - soggylaundry 4y ago
    well if you look at world history, it always has been like this -- look at all those proudly-written enslavements, crimes and massacres. But we're starting to grow out of it, and tech is helping us track down crimes that were near-impossible to track down.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      Very often tech is enabling these crimes. Monitoring and punishment of millions of people was much more difficult before.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        And exposure and transparency was much more difficult before too. A tool is a tool, how it is used is the important part.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        The Soviet Union had no trouble at all monitoring and punishing tens of millions of people. It also operated forced labor camps (gulags) on a vast scale.
  - reitanqild 4y ago
    Actually, on average the rich countries that has diverged most from capitalism has been significantly worse. I'm leaving out the developing countries on purpose here: they may have had it even worse but it doesn't feel fair to blame them. Nazi Germany and Soviet/USSR (the whole time more or less) can't blame anyone else for the insane scale of human suffering that they created. Both are representatives of centrally planned economies where companies either don't exist in a western sense (Soviet), or only exist to serve the country (Germany).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

zamalek 4y ago

I have my suspicions that fighting this would be the best way to fight terrorism. It may not be true for all the syndicates, but colluding with terrorists does come with some great criminal perks; especially if you're looking at human trafficking.

duxup 4y ago
What would fighting this look like? These operations are often in failed / significantly less free states and ignored or otherwise protected by them. Regime change?
- zamalek 4y ago
  Arrest the cops who are accepting bribes. The rest would topple pretty quickly.
  - duxup 4y ago
    Who does that, the locals who are working in a failed or corrupt state? Just arrest them seems like a very simplistic idea here...
    - zamalek 4y ago
      I have no idea in that case. I never indicated I had any idea on how to tackle the problem specifically, only that solving it might solve larger problems. I never claimed to be an expert at unrooting syndicates, so I really don't get the justification for this discussion.
      - duxup 4y ago
        I kinda figured there was more of an idea there if you're suggesting fighting it in some specific way.

coconut_crab 4y ago

Several of my friends were targeted by these scammers, and one of them even lost 10000 USD (a big sum in Vietnam) to a fake prosecutor. They even cloned the website of the Ministry of Public Security to scam him. Out of curiousity I took a look at their website source code, found an url to some kinds of a gateway for scammer where they have tools for scamming people, and also an android app that aid them. After finding that the whole operation is based abroad I told my friend that there is zero chance he will get his money back.

lupire 4y ago
By natural selection, there is nearly no scam that will refund your money after you've given it away.
- TrackerFF 4y ago
  If you use credit card(s), the card provider MAY be able to help with chargeback, but that depends entirely on their policy.

otikik 4y ago

This is horrible. Thanks for the investigative effort, I feel I want to step out of internet for a while now.

from 4y ago

This is pretty terrible. I still don’t get whey they need to enslave their workers though. Looking at average loss numbers per victim it seems even if the typical victim loss was $10,000 and the average employee got one victim a week that is still substantially over the average wage in Cambodia and is almost entirely pure profit. Even if you account for governments seizing funds a third of the time it seems like they’d be more successful operating on a commission model for employees.

sorokod 4y ago
One possibility is that some have a higher moral standard then you.
- stavros 4y ago
  Oh man, if we've exhausted the pool of people willing to work for scammers so much that you can't pay people to scam any more, that's the best news I've heard this year.
  - sorokod 4y ago
    It is a "stick and carrot" situation, that is the way I read the article. The higher the moral and emotional barriers there are, the more furniture and vegetables are required. To your comment, that stick is required at all is kinda +1 for humanity.
- from 4y ago
  Why so personal? I’m not saying I would do it. After reading victim stories I don’t think I’d have the heart to take a nickel from these people. I’m just saying that there are enough people out there with no morals who would do it and would probably be pretty good at it. Go on Nigerian twitter and you’ll find people bragging about these kind of scams all the time. Even America in the late 90s had all those stock pump and dump call centers (see Boiler Room) so I don’t think there’s a society where there aren’t people willing to do pretty terrible things.

quacked 4y ago

This reminds me of a point I feel progressives (usually steeped in several generations of western living) tend to miss. The underwritten currency of human society is violence. Using it, you can take what you want and the only way to stop you is more violence. If you are part of an ideological tribe that wants to protect humans from each others' petty brutality you must seize land, establish the rule of law, and murder or expel people who challenge your regime. Organized crime like gangs, cartels, the mafia, corrupt cops--these are not "unfortunate byproducts of imperialism and capitalism", they are the basest, fundamental expression of human dominance. If they central government weakens, they will take over. I deeply hate people who violate the safety and freedom of civilized society, and it sometimes frustrates me that so many westerners who believe in "human rights" are convinced these problems can be solved with a light touch.

duxup 4y ago
I’m not sure what that has to do with “progressives”.
- quacked 4y ago
  The majority of people in the US who bother to care about human rights abuses and exploitation of vulnerable populations are "progressives".
  - duxup 4y ago
    But what does that mean? Isn't that just people who care generally? And if they do what should they do differently?
    - quacked 4y ago
      Did you read my first comment with intent to understand my point or just to nitpick me? I said pretty clearly: > If you are part of an ideological tribe that wants to protect humans from each others' petty brutality you must seize land, establish the rule of law, and murder or expel people who challenge your regime. If people care about human rights abuses, they need to seize land, establish the rule of law, and murder or expel people who challenge their regime. For instance: there are known sex traffickers inside the United States who are sent to prison for years when they're caught and then they get out. If you want to curtail that practice to a greater degree than it is, you need to murder or expel people who do it, not just give them an official time-out and then make life more difficult for them afterwards by reducing their employment options and curtailing their right to vote. Another option is indefinite containment, but that's a large drain on resources and extremely difficult to operate without simply ending up with a prison system like the US has, which is low-status and overtly corrupt and underfunded (in the sense that the funding goes to profit rather than to the effective operations of the prisons). In short: the safety of civilized people who participate in society in good faith needs to be violently protected from people who take advantage of them. This is obviously not the case in the US, and it's certainly not the case in outlying rural regions in Asia and Africa, where people are forced to scam under threat of punishment.

bigbacaloa 4y ago

Scams like this, selling get rich quick, often depend on the poor ethics of the victim. A lot of the work of the scammers amounts to filtering out the skeptical and the honest.

walaueh 4y ago
This statement can only come from someone born in a 1st world country and have no sense of what its like to be poor. The desperation and clinging on to a hope no matter how slim of earning a wage higher than what they already have.
- bigbacaloa 4y ago
  The victims mostly come from the first world or the rich in the rest of the world ... No one poor gets scammed for 20000 in fake investments ...
  - antifa 4y ago
    As your average westerner, if I found a scam convincing enough to fall for, I still have no way of producing 20,000 USD for it.

Tangurena2 4y ago

The amount of effort that these groups have put into their "pig butchering" operations is impressive. My experience with online dating and the catfishing that I received (is that even the correct verb?) ranged between poor and mediocre (if I drank as much alcohol as I did in my 30s, I suspect that I could have been scammed out of lots of money - I am a bit too cynical and analytical these days). What I see on videos about "pig butchering" is orders of magnitude more intense. What the article documents is frightening.

rolph 4y ago
these people are preying on sorrow and loneliness, and the victim is not only robbed, but emotionally assaulted, some dont surive that.

sohkamyung 4y ago

That is Part I of the investigation, looking at the scammers. Part II [1] looks at the victims [1] https://www.channelnewsasia.com/cna-insider/online-love-investment-crypto-scam-victim-why-effective-psychology-3018926 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/cna-insider/online-love-inve...

owlninja 4y ago
Thank you! I was curious what some of the actual scams were.