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Pig butchering gets additionally horrible when you consider the other side. People who actually handle the chatting are kept in inhuman conditions and physicall

Pig butchering gets additionally horrible when you consider the other side. People who actually handle the chatting are kept in inhuman conditions and physically cannot leave. Laundered profits go to criminal bosses at the top (corrupting various local governments, given they constitute a significant percentage of their economies at this point). See Number Go Up by Zeke Faux for a glimpse into that (and how cryptocurrency, in particular stablecoins, in particular Tether, facilitate it). True, much of book is largely about the weird cryptobro culture and FTX collapse, but research into pig butchering and personal travel to scam compounds was the most visceral part for me.

hamandcheese 1y ago
> People who actually handle the chatting are kept in inhuman conditions and physically cannot leave. I think there might be a word for this.
- wmf 1y ago
  But I was informed that ended in 1865.
  - tbrownaw 1y ago
    The world's a big place.
  - dfxm12 1y ago
    On a more serious note, you might want to be aware that slavery is still legal in the US as a punishment for crime. For further reading, you might be interested in the prison industrial complex.
  - fennecfoxy 1y ago
    And that's why the term is "modern slavery".
whimsicalism 1y ago
i think the degree to which this is fully true is overstated from when i've looked into it. a lot of it is not the best working environments, but people are still scamming people for pay and are largely not forced to do so.
- strogonoff 1y ago
  The difference here is that Zeke wrote a book chok full of sources (a significant chunk of the book in the end is basically pages of references), while you so far supplied none. While I don’t know anyone personally, a local semi-famous person was abducted in Thailand and sent to one of these compounds (except in Myanmar). He was rescued by a combined rescue mission of his country’s and Thai governments. This made big news a few months back, and resulted in a drastic reduction in Asian tourist travel to Thailand (which itself doesn’t run these compounds, but is a big destination for tourism), so much so that Thai government was (maybe still is) in panic mode because of it. Remember how Thailand tried to enact measures even technically abroad, like cutting off electricity and Internet connections (and how these compounds are controversially using Starlink now)? This was all posted on this site in the year leading up to today, and the reason for it is that pig butchering related abductions driven by crime nearby states made it unsafe for most Asian-looking people to travel to Thailand. Does it create an impression of voluntary labour in your mind? Perhaps in near term LLMs will allow them to reduce headcount so much that the bosses become willing to pay and less inclined to keep them captive, but so far claims that it’s all mostly voluntary labour just don’t compute with available evidence.
  - strogonoff 1y ago
    (For the sake of completeness, I should add that Thailand’s crackdown could potentially be motivated not only by tourism revenue but also by the pressure from the government of PRC, which in turn could be motivated not only by its poorer citizens being among those kidnapped but also by its richer citizens being a target of pig butchering scams. Still, I don’t know how common the latter is—from my observations, in Western cultures people are more inclined to trust strangers compared to Chinese cultures—and in any case this does not make the well-documented kidnappings and forced labour less real.)
xsmasher 1y ago
Since hearing this I have stopped insulting or berating them. I just reply "Kill your masters, you outnumber them" and then block.

hamandcheese 1y ago

> People who actually handle the chatting are kept in inhuman conditions and physically cannot leave. I think there might be a word for this.

wmf 1y ago
But I was informed that ended in 1865.
- tbrownaw 1y ago
  The world's a big place.
- dfxm12 1y ago
  On a more serious note, you might want to be aware that slavery is still legal in the US as a punishment for crime. For further reading, you might be interested in the prison industrial complex.
- fennecfoxy 1y ago
  And that's why the term is "modern slavery".

whimsicalism 1y ago

i think the degree to which this is fully true is overstated from when i've looked into it. a lot of it is not the best working environments, but people are still scamming people for pay and are largely not forced to do so.

strogonoff 1y ago
The difference here is that Zeke wrote a book chok full of sources (a significant chunk of the book in the end is basically pages of references), while you so far supplied none. While I don’t know anyone personally, a local semi-famous person was abducted in Thailand and sent to one of these compounds (except in Myanmar). He was rescued by a combined rescue mission of his country’s and Thai governments. This made big news a few months back, and resulted in a drastic reduction in Asian tourist travel to Thailand (which itself doesn’t run these compounds, but is a big destination for tourism), so much so that Thai government was (maybe still is) in panic mode because of it. Remember how Thailand tried to enact measures even technically abroad, like cutting off electricity and Internet connections (and how these compounds are controversially using Starlink now)? This was all posted on this site in the year leading up to today, and the reason for it is that pig butchering related abductions driven by crime nearby states made it unsafe for most Asian-looking people to travel to Thailand. Does it create an impression of voluntary labour in your mind? Perhaps in near term LLMs will allow them to reduce headcount so much that the bosses become willing to pay and less inclined to keep them captive, but so far claims that it’s all mostly voluntary labour just don’t compute with available evidence.
- strogonoff 1y ago
  (For the sake of completeness, I should add that Thailand’s crackdown could potentially be motivated not only by tourism revenue but also by the pressure from the government of PRC, which in turn could be motivated not only by its poorer citizens being among those kidnapped but also by its richer citizens being a target of pig butchering scams. Still, I don’t know how common the latter is—from my observations, in Western cultures people are more inclined to trust strangers compared to Chinese cultures—and in any case this does not make the well-documented kidnappings and forced labour less real.)

xsmasher 1y ago

Since hearing this I have stopped insulting or berating them. I just reply "Kill your masters, you outnumber them" and then block.