The pig-butchering scam. It's a criminal industry that targets the vulnerable, engages in human trafficking, and exploits weaknesses in digital currency. How does it work?
Messages that Shreya Datta, a tech professional who was a victim of an online scam known as"pig butchering," exchanged with a person who would turn out to be a scammer. assistant professor at the Joseph Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Faculty affiliate at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.And a few weeks ago, our live broadcast got off to its normal start.
CHAKRABARTI: They call him half a dozen times. On every phone number we have for him. In the past, we’ve even called people’s neighbors, or office mates to help find them.CHAKRABARTI: They send emails. Texts.CHAKRABARTI: They call every number we have for Professor Camba again. All the way to the end of the broadcast.
CHAKRABARTI: Scam compounds, Chinese organized crime, international law enforcement. Despite all that, Alvin Camba is able to join us today. He's assistant professor at the Joseph Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Professor Camba, I am so very grateful that you're here with us today. Welcome.CHAKRABARTI: I'm well.
And of course, I shrug it off. I'm like, okay, I'm in Indonesia. It happens, internet, et cetera. Eventually I realized that wasn't really the case. The most creepy, the creepiest like experience I've had was when in January I started to have conversations with my father, supposedly. Same phone number, same name, same voice, same, I would say, accent.
My aunt called me and my aunt is my dad's spouse. Because my mom passed away when I was like 18. Then my aunt said, your dad's been worried. You haven't been able to like, talk to him. And then I was like, what do you mean? We've been talking quite a bit. So folks have a little bit of background about where we're moving with this conversation. But I also just want to reiterate what you just said. So this is an area of research for you because of the activities that are going on in the Philippines and other places in Asia. You're doing research on this.
Then he had a Zoom call with the board of the company. And then in the Zoom call, these people look like the board, they sounded like the board, and they acted like people in the board. And people in the board told him to transfer I don't know, $50 million, $100 million dollars. And then he was like, sure.
CAMBA: So they're mostly, all of the harassment is like online in nature. I've just, the reason why, the reason I missed the show, it was because I had to come in for a series of, I had to come in for a series of meetings and I had to bring my computers. Because they had to be scrubbed when it comes to like potential like malware. And potentially I'm not like illiterate when it comes to like computers.
What it is, what it's all about, who's doing it, and who's being terribly exploited in the process. All of that when we come back. This is On Point.CHAKRABARTI: Today we're talking about pig-butchering. It is a multi-billion-dollar series of online scams that generates tens of billions of dollars for groups like Chinese organized crime. It involves cryptocurrency, it involves unwitting long-term victims around the world, and it involves human trafficking as well.
It'll be days where they're just sending you texts saying,"Good morning." And they'll send you pictures that often show they're an attractive Asian person of the opposite sex. And they will eventually invite you to download a crypto app and to send them money via crypto. So they'll tell you, Hey. They'll even walk you, if you don't trade crypto, they'll walk you through signing up for an account at Coinbase or another mainstream crypto exchange.
CHAKRABARTI: So this really is a long con. It's a very deceitful form of relationship building that ends in completely bankrupting folks.CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So we actually spoke with someone who was a victim of pig-butchering. This is Brian Bruce. It happened to him in 2021. Once they show up, they're told that they can't leave, their passports are taken, and they're forced to run these scams, and beaten or tortured if they don't comply.
CHAKRABARTI: Ah, okay, all the activities coming together. And then, as you both said, in recent years, post COVID, a lot of that activity is being done by forced labor. People have essentially been enslaved to work at these scam compounds, as they're called. Neo took the job. When he landed at the Bangkok airport, a driver picked him up to take him to his new employer's headquarters. After the long flight, Neo took a nap in the van. A couple of hours later, he woke up.
CHAKRABARTI: Neo and the other two passengers were forced to walk down a shrubby hillside toward a river. LU: And in my head is like spinning. Okay, I can't breathe. And it was, I don't know, another one hour or half an hour to the destination: Dongmei Camp.Go to Google Maps and search Dongmei Zone in Myanmar. That's D-O-N-G-M E I, Dongmei Zone. And in satellite view, you'll find a huge complex of red roofed buildings, completely out of place amid the surrounding farmland. Neo also has pictures of the compound. The tan and rust colored buildings look desolate.
CHAKRABARTI: Play along until he could figure a way out. Thanks in part to his computer skills, Neo's captors soon moved him into a bookkeeping role. The promotion came with an upgrade in lodging. He moved into a new room with just one other roommate. But the real perk of becoming a bookkeeper is that he was able to learn more about exactly how the operation worked.
LU: And I am more than happy they torture me and record me. They torture me because it is so vital.CHAKRABARTI: Neo's parents didn't pay the ransom. They couldn't afford it. Plus, there was no guarantee it would actually result in Neo's release. But they did share the video with a well-connected businessman in Southeast Asia. And that man reached out to a local armed force aligned with Myanmar's ruling military junta.
You will get beaten up. You will get chained. You will get electrocuted. It's a slave trade. It is slavery.CHAKRABARTI: When we come back, we'll talk more about who's behind the pig-butchering scams, who's benefiting from it, and if anything can be done to stop the scams.CHAKRABARTI: The exploitation that happens on both ends of these terrible scams, in terms of the people who are being held hostage, to make the initial contacts to victims, and then also the victims themselves.
ELIZABETH WARREN: Crypto is the way this stuff is financed, and it's helping rogue states, it's helping terrorists. It's helping criminal organizations fund their operations on a scale like we have never seen before. Many of this are historically embedded criminal organizations that have been around East-Southeast Asia for the longest time, the so-called triads. Now, the members of these organizations, that's like another question, we do have answers to them. So people have done research on the specific activities you mentioned in the show, we mentioned like one of them.
I spoke with a Vietnamese law enforcement, a Taiwanese law enforcement official who'd come there to rescue people. And what he said was that even though they had evidence of torture, of scamming going on in there, Cambodian law enforcement was willing to cooperate to the extent of helping get out specific people who had been making us think about it, but they made no effort to actually shut down the compound.
FAUX: So what I think Senator Warren is talking about is why crypto is so good for these scammers and for other criminals like terrorists. Because someone like Brian, the victim you spoke to before, if they wanted to send money to a Chinese gang in Cambodia, their bank, if they asked their bank to do it, their bank would ask a lot of questions.
So it sounds international pressure can only go so far. You, however, have been trying, you mentioned this at the top of the show, to raise awareness, for example, in places, the Philippines. Can you tell me just a little bit about that? And if you feel like you've been heard by Filipino officials? Some of the top bosses have been deported to China where they're facing criminal charges. But this is a business that can operate anywhere. So the surviving gangsters have shifted to other parts of Myanmar that are still controlled by the ruling junta, with the bulk of the country. Or gone back to Cambodia, which I've been hearing is still hospitable for these scammers.
CHAKRABARTI: This is an odd moment because I'm looking at notes that came from you, Zeke. Am I wrong? Am I wrong? Just tell me if I'm wrong.I'm so sorry about that. Do you know which one I might be talking about then? Because the notes here must be wrong.CHAKRABARTI: Okay. All right. Moving on from there, I will try and fix that up.
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