Scam Inc 2: Opportunity of a lifetime

0:28The Economist Do you know anything about her? No, not at all. Not at all. I mean, for the real person, no.

0:40How long did it take you until you had your first successful scam? One and a half months. This woman I'll call Rita is from the Philippines. She's a single mother in her early 30s. So in total, how much money did he put in? $78 ,000. $78 ,000 US dollars. Yes. That's a lot of money. Yes. Remember Edgar from the last episode? The guy in Canada who got scammed over LinkedIn? He had no idea who was really behind the messages he received. But that$78 ,000 Rita was talking about a moment ago? Well, that was Edgar's money. Rita isn't the Singaporean marketing executive she told Edgar she was. Rita is short, with braces and hair dyed golden brown.

1:33The day I meet her, she's in a peach-coloured t-shirt and jeans with big pockets. She lives with her parents. They're helping her raise her daughter. I played as a professional individual. In my part, on our team, we will act as a professional and successful businesswoman. She told me that to become a successful scammer, she had to play a role, carefully following a detailed script. On the first week, the foreigner will need to ask, what are you doing in your life? Why you are so rich? She'd built a fake profile, bolstered with photos. of good food, that you are in a Louis Vuitton shop, like you are having a nice home like that.

2:21But Rita wasn't eating good food and shopping at Louis Vuitton, not even after hitting the jackpot with Edgar's 78 grand. That's because Rita isn't the hardened criminal you might expect.

2:41You see a crime, then you identify a criminal. That's how things normally work. But in the underworld of scamming, everything is more complicated. And to understand just how complicated, and who the scammers really are, you have to go back to the beginning of Rita's story. From The Economist, this is Scam Inc. Episode 2, An Opportunity of a Lifetime.

3:14Rita told me that her story of becoming a pig butchering scammer started in July of 2022. She was looking for a new job. So I searched on Facebook. Then there I saw a post like hiring CSR agent bound to Thailand. It was a customer service job and a pretty well-paid one at a call centre in Thailand. The ad looked legit. There was certainly no mention of cyber fraud. Rita had been a kindergarten teacher and then worked in customer service. But this job abroad would be a chance to make more money for her family. And what caught my attention is that free lodging, free food, and all travel expenses will be shouldered by the employer.

4:05She applied, and she got the job. The company asked for a copy of her passport. Within days, they sent her a plane ticket. I asked how many months or years is the contract and she said six months so that's wow six months only then I will come back to Philippines that's great so I said yes so it's like hypnotizing me that I want to travel now I want to see the elephants there like that that's the thing inside my mind that I can go to the airplane I can go to Thailand I can see scenery plus the work It was exciting because I knew I'd landed on an opportunity of a lifetime and I was travelling to another country and the first time getting on a plane.

4:54That was a big deal for me. Jaleel Mouyeke is from Uganda. He also got a job offer in Thailand. His story started a year later, but it was remarkably similar. He found work through an old friend, someone he'd gone to school with. The friend had moved to Thailand and told Jalil the company was recruiting. And if you can come, they would love to have you because you speak good English and they want people who speak English. What we shall basically be doing is data entry and online marketing. Jalil's girlfriend was pregnant, and this would be a chance to spend a few months making extra money for the family.

5:35So we arrived in Bangkok. After landing in Thailand, Jalil breezed through immigration. They didn't ask any questions. Jalil had travelled down with another Ugandan guy, another recruit. A driver would be meeting them at the airport. When the driver saw us, he also came towards us. He had our pictures, but then he didn't speak any English at all. Just showed us our picture and then took our bags, put them in the car and asked us to get in. The driver told them through a translation app, We'll drive for an hour before stopping for food. So in my head, I'm a little confused because I had done some little research before we left and I had read that from the airport to Bangkok was approximately 20 minutes.

6:20So now this guy was saying we would drive for approximately one hour and get something to eat. I just gave it the benefit of doubt and thought that, yeah, maybe he's taking a longer route. Maybe we're fast passing somewhere.

6:36After an hour, they pulled over to eat at a KFC. And then after that, we got back into the car. So the guy says, still on his phone, he says, we're going to drive for about eight hours to get to our destination. So that scared me. It scared me like real bad. We were already five hours inland travel. Oh my God, this is already five hours. I'm asking, I'm still in Thailand? Am I still in Thailand? But I cannot communicate with them because they cannot speak in English. They are Thailander. So what were you thinking during that time? I want to escape. I want to escape already because I cannot contact my recruiter already.

7:22I didn't know where I was. I didn't know where I was going. Even if someone told me, okay, fine, go back to where you've come from, I could not find my way. After a day of driving, Jalil and his companion were taken to a remote hotel for the night. At one point I thought maybe I should just run away. But then I also remembered as we were going there, I was seeing a lot of ponds and rice fields and I thought maybe if I run away I could die out there anyway. So let me just wait for this and if it's dying, it's okay. I've accepted my fate. I messed up because there were red flags in the start and I should have been intelligent enough to see them, but then I didn't see, so it's already bad, so it is what it is.

8:07In his hotel room, Jalil pushed the bed against the door and spent a sleepless night. The next day, someone came to pick him up. They put our bags in the back and then they asked us to get in. And then we start driving. We travelled for one hour again. When we arrived, there were civilians who had a gun. They all have guns. Then we are not allowed to open our flashlight, but it's so dark. And the grass at our tolls, then we were asked to dock, to crawl, to go down behind the river. Behind a river? Yeah, we will go to the river because we will cross that river. Oh, you had to crawl down to the riverbank?

8:56Yes. And then wait to get on a boat? Yes. And then when we stopped, there was like, you know, row boats. Sarah was hired from South Africa. She'd been a tutor until the COVID pandemic disrupted her business. She too had responded to an ad for a customer service job in Thailand. Sarah's not her real name, and she's asked that we alter her voice. On the other side of the river, they were armament with like huge guns. That's when I knew that, OK, this is not going to go down the way. I hope so. I remember I was so scared and I froze that my knees got weak. I couldn't move. One of the other recruits, an Ethiopian guy, had to pick her up and help her into the boat.

9:40At first, I remember my friend saying to me, they're going to sell our kidneys. They're going to make us soldiers. I told him, just keep quiet. Just keep quiet. Just keep quiet. So I knew from then that, okay, it's either they're going to cut me open and sound my organs, or I'm going to be a sex slave. You know, I didn't know what was going to happen, but I knew it was something bad. From then, I just went to a survivor mode. Like, how am I going to get myself out of the situation?

10:14I'm just saying to myself, this is the last time. This is the last time I will go abroad. like that. After this, enough. I will not dream of bigger dreams. I will just stay on my country like that. Because if you go abroad, something bad could happen. Yeah, I like that. On the other side of the river, they were told to get into another vehicle. And then when we got to this place, it looked like a prison because it had guards everywhere. It has towers where they could stand and see with guns. It had gates. It was really secure. They went through our staff. They took our laptops and took our phone and they took our passport.

10:54We entered the gate. And inside the gate, immediately you enter the gate, you see it's a whole town. They have flats where we could stay. They had companies where they built where we were going to work. They had a shopping center, a supermarket. They had clothing shops. The full compound was protected by, I think, like a 20-feet hole. Gavesh, also not his real name, is from South Asia. He had a job in the hotel industry until COVID. So he responded to a job out on Facebook, and now here he was. When he stepped inside the walls, he saw big office blocks. And then they have buildings with cafeterias, restaurants, bakeries, saloons, clothes shops.

11:48They had everything inside. The compound was, in many ways, like a conventional company town. It took us to a supermarket. They bought us some basic necessities. They bought a one-inch mattress, bed sheet and a blanket. toothpaste, toothbrush, some sandals, and then took us to the dormitory. Jalil was brought to a small room with four bunk beds. There was one Indian, there was one Nepali, and there was one guy from Indonesia. He encountered people from all over the world, dormitories full of them. Each building has four floors. One floor has around 16 rooms, and each room has four bunk beds. And those dormitories, they were like more than 10 buildings just for the dormitories.

12:53Then within like around 10 minutes, my friend, who I knew, came. Jalil finally saw his friend, the one who'd gotten him the job.

13:17Jalil was relieved to see him, but angry.

13:31So that's when he told me, we are in Myanmar. My heart skipped. Rita, Jalil, Sarah and Gavesh had all taken the same journey. They'd been driven north from Bangkok to a town called Mesot, and they'd been put on boats and ferried across the Moy River. That river forms the border between Thailand and Myanmar.

14:01Myanmar's a dangerous place. There's been an almost continuous civil war waging for decades, especially in its border regions. Warlords rule their little fiefdoms. A military junta controls the capital and a few other major cities. It has been trying, with little success, to impose its rule across the rest of the country. And among that instability, criminal industries have flourished. Gambling, drugs, prostitution. The whole place is a war zone. When we're in there, sometimes you would hear gunshots and blasts of what seemed to be like bombs. Sometimes the bomb was like really close, like we shook a bit.

14:44Yeah, that's how scary it was. Resistance groups were battling the ruling junta. And in those lawless border areas, criminal conglomerates carried on as usual. though not quite as usual. There was another complication, COVID. If you run a casino, a pandemic is bad for business. That accelerated investment in a new revenue stream and it turned out to be an incredibly lucrative one. The guy said to us, do you know what you're going to do here? Then I said, yes, I'm going to be a customer service in English, you know. for a tech and gold trading company. That's what they told us. Then the guy said, no, that's not what you're going to do.

15:32So on the first day, I had nothing to do. They just gave a computer and there were four word documents and I had to read and go through those four word documents. I had to read them carefully again and again and again. And when I was reading it, what I understood is like, it's just a normal chat between two people. They got in to know each other online. Hi, how are you? I saw your photo. I like that color. How is the weather? Blah, blah. This initial conversations, which is moving on to flirting and the love stage. Okay, you are my this one. You are my sunshine. You are my love. My team leader told me to observe first the two Filipinos who were working already.

16:27I saw already that they are into love scam. Love scams? Yeah. They were here to perpetrate pig butchering scams. The same kind of fraud that had ensnared Shane, the Kansas Bank CEO, and Edgar in Canada, who Rita scammed. I said to him, what do you mean I'm going to scam people? then it's you know you need to convince people and to invest into crypto they had these slogans they would always chant before we start to work every day and it was something like crypto the US and the European economy and then I don't know if it is what he said or it's just a translator who added it but then he said this is world war 3

17:23Hello, I'm Zannie Minton-Bedos, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist. Thanks so much for listening to Scam Inc. I hope you're enjoying it as much as I am. One of the reasons I think this podcast is really terrific is that it's the best kind of economist journalism. Su Lin and her colleagues are joining the dots across geographies, between business and politics. And that's what we do at The Economist more broadly. Whether it's the impact of President Trump's policies or of artificial intelligence, what my colleagues do is to try and join the dots. And then we give our subscribers the results of that thinking and that reporting in whatever form they want.

18:03Whether it's The Weekly Economist, whether it's daily analysis or short-form video, or indeed subscriber events. And of course, access to all of our podcasts. And we've done a lot of award-winning, superb podcasts. I'm really proud of all of this journalism. I hope we're taking the best of what The Economist has done now for more than 180 years and are translating it into the mediums of today. So sign up, search for The Economist. Now back to the story.

18:44Over the past few years, gangs in Myanmar have been scamming foreigners on an industrial scale. I've seen satellite images of these compounds. You look at an image from a few years ago, and there's almost nothing. A couple of shacks and some fields. Now, there are neat clusters of hundreds of warehouses, offices and apartment blocks.

19:12On his first day of work, Jalil was led into a large office. It looked like a call centre. There were long tables with banks of computers lined up. Employees sat quietly, looking straight ahead. He was shown to his seat and handed four iPhones. So they gave us a script, they gave us pictures of this beautiful lady, pictures of her in nice hotels, beaches, driving fancy cars. And then they asked us to get as many dating sites as possible. He was told to create profiles on dating sites, using this woman's photos. And then, to my surprise, in like about one hour or two, the lady walks in and it's the very lady I'm seeing in the pictures.

20:06And she's right there. These weren't photos stolen from social media. They were of this woman. She was working at the compound, there in case the so-called customer wanted a video chat. Most of the people who were scammed was because of that video call. They would get excited and then after the call, everything they are asked is just, they would be open to anything. In the meantime, Jalil would be the one at the keyboard playing a character. He was given a script, a backstory, for this woman he'd pretend to be. She was supposedly from Belarus. She had moved to the US five years back. She had one daughter who she had left back in Belarus with her parents.

20:51She had recently gotten divorced before she moved to the US. And she had an uncle who worked in Wall Street. And she was a fashion designer who doubles in crypto. So that was the script. Everything else, we were allowed to be creative. Like Jalil, Sarah was made to create profiles. But hers were on social media, Facebook, X and Instagram. They gave me a script that I had to act like an Asian woman that's very rich. An Asian woman that stays in Chicago or California. I need to know everything that happens in California. I need to know the grocery store. I need to know the nearest hospital. I need to know the nearest service station.

21:36It was changing your whole life, change your whole thinking. So you need to be in that woman's shoes. It was too much that you start forgetting your own life. You know, you're just living in this dream world, like in an entirely different world. We go to that person's profile. And if the profile is open, then we can see all the details of him. If he's a rich guy, if he has money or what is his job. Givesh found his targets over social media too. Then only we send you the friend request and then we go through your photos. We say, OK, that is lovely. Oh my God, are you single? You look handsome, blah, blah, blah.

22:19Gavesh says they sometimes hijacked real profiles, ones that wouldn't seem suspicious to Facebook's anti-fraud algorithm. They don't want us to send friend request as soon as possible. First, we have to create a chat. So, for example, if you have put a photo of you with the headphone on, so if I'm pretending as a girl, then I would comment as like, oh my God, are you into recording stuff? Something like that. The next job was to mine the internet for particular emotions. Longly people spend a lot of time on social media. What ties together everyone I spoke to who got scammed is something very simple.

23:06A stranger made a connection with them. Not necessarily a romantic or sexual one, but something that made them feel seen, understood. So we had to find people that were vulnerable, people that didn't have a support system, someone that was actually lonely, you know. And we needed to find someone from the age of 40 to 65. life. You're chatting with someone and they are telling you everything about their life. You're chatting with someone, he's telling you, I have cancer, I may not live for long. You're chatting with someone, he's telling you, I lost my wife just a few weeks ago. You're chatting with someone, he tells you, my wife left me and she took everything.

23:47And you really see that a person has some money and they are willing to do anything to multiply that money. So if you bring for them an investment opportunity, they will most definitely jump into it. And it is the only money they have. We are not allowed to speak in Black Americans. We were not allowed. Not allowed to speak to Black Americans? Yes, we were not allowed. I don't know why. It's not hard to guess why. This is racism, an assumption that Black Americans will have less money. Racial profiling was part of the playbook. Only white Americans? Yes, white Americans only. Rita sent me documents, Word docs and spreadsheets.

24:32They were training materials she'd been given. One had conversation prompts on books, music, gardening, football. Some topics were more pointed. What profession do you work in? Do you like to travel? They were questions designed to discern a target's wealth. Ask about their house, their car, where they went to university. They should be rich, but not too good-looking. This type of man will be very attentive when meeting a woman, the instructions said. It was a complete playbook for how to connect with others. There's guidance on how to establish intimacy, like pay compliments to the customer, mirror their tone, greet them every morning, Say goodnight when they go to sleep.

25:20Learn about them. Find out what's lacking in their life. What's the emotional hole you can fill? And relate your own sad stories. Maybe about a former spouse who cheated on you. Create sympathy. I'm thinking here of Karina in California, whose scammer would shower her with attention while spinning a web of lies about his own difficult past. Finally, project an image of sophistication. Reveal hints of your own lavish lifestyle. And be classy. Rita's instruction said, if you're running a scam in which you found your victims on LinkedIn, like she did, don't send nude selfies until after they've invested.

26:08Another document is a primer on cryptocurrency. Yet another is a step-by-step guide on how to prevent your Facebook or LinkedIn account from getting flagged and taken down, and what to do if it does get scrubbed.

26:25You must get their Telegram number or WhatsApp number because our account in LinkedIn can be blocked because it's a dummy account. These techniques have been honed, and they're accompanied by a suite of high tech. I even had to be a voice caller because we had guys as well, so they couldn't call their customers. So I had to call for their customers and all that. Sarah would talk on the phone to men her male colleagues were messaging with. They have a computer system that I can make a video call. I would look exactly like an Asian woman, which I'm not. She could deepfake herself on video calls, changing her appearance with a filter.

27:08One thing I tried to do was to try and warn people, you know, in a way that they wouldn't be suspicious. I would write those long sentences and I would even tell to them, you know, before you go on with this, you need to just investigate, just check if it's something you would like to do. So to them, they thought I was building more trust, but for me, I was trying to warn this person that, please, don't do this. We are praying that don't invest, don't invest, but they keep investing because they see that they are winning. We can't say anything to them because everything is monitored. Bosses were watching their WhatsApp chats.

27:50So I would always go back to the dating app and send them a message. This is a scam. Just disconnect on WhatsApp. But then if you show any sign, if you say anything on WhatsApp that I've told you about this, I'll be in trouble. There were cambrows everywhere. So you never had a privacy. So even if you're working, we had an armed guard that was walking around to see what you do on your computer. The work was relentless. Initially, we were working for 12 hours a day. If we were not able to find any customers, they can ask us to work extra. So there were times that we actually worked for like 16 hours a day, more than 16 hours a day.

28:33That was for seven days a week. Even on Christmas Day, we were working. New Year's Day, we were working. When we asked to leave from that place, they gave us a big bill saying, this is what we cost for you to take here. So you pay this bill and then you can go. I started telling them, guys, I want to go back home. I told them I want to go back home and they told me, if you want to go back home, you have to pay a fine of$30 ,000 ransom. Bosses demanded a ransom to release them, ransoms they couldn't possibly afford. Workers did receive a salary, but it was nothing close to the wage they'd been promised.

29:16And even that would get whittled away. Every time they will tell some stories saying the dollar rate is up or we had to pay for your food, we had to pay for your this, we had to pay for your Facebook account, we had to pay for your Instagram account, we had to pay for your dating apps, blah, blah, blah, and they will cut our salaries. Sometimes they don't even give you anything because there have been so many deductions. Fail to perform and the consequences could be severe. If you mistakenly tell something to the customer and the customer doesn't talk to you, they say you've killed the customer, you get punished.

29:55My productivity went low. That is when the punishment started coming in. There was a parking lot outside. And that place, it's really hot there. So they would make you run around the parking lot with a scorching sun. There was a lot of punishments in there. Like you don't hit your targets. They electrocute you. They had these tasers that would come and electrocute you. We have colleagues there that we just didn't see them. They just disappeared? Yes. Ethiopian, Chinese, and one Vietnamese. We just woke up one day, they didn't go to work. And they weren't scamming enough money? They cannot scam.

30:42The three of them weren't able to scam? Yes. And so do you think they were killed? Some of them telling us that their kidneys were sold because we have one Ethiopian there, he's still there. His one kidney lost already. One of your colleagues... Yes, Ethiopian. ..is Ethiopian and he didn't have a kidney. Yes, because he said it was sold because he cannot scam. There were some people that disappeared. A few break roads. They said if you make them really angry, they'll kill you and throw in your river. And no one knows where you are. Inside that compound is every day we sleep, every day we wake up.

31:32We think to ourselves, OK, this might be my last day. In the fifth month, we're all sold. Jalil wasn't having any success. The friend who'd recruited him had left a couple of months into Jalil's time there. Jalil doesn't know how he got out. I've heard that the criminals sometimes let people leave if they're able to recruit others to replace them. Jalil was demoralised. He was self-sabotaging. In fact, his whole company seemed to be struggling. We're sold to another company. Well, in there people are sold. You are slaves in there. They were sold to another company within the same compound. So was Gavesh.

32:20I was sold three times. If we do not work properly, the office that I'm working can sell me to a different office. So we just have to take our stuff, go to the other building. Gavesh says different companies were running different scams. One ran fake shopping websites. Another ran a fraudulent online job scheme. But pig butchering was at the centre. So as time goes on, they say to me, I really need to add the numbers of customer because if I don't, they're going to send me to the second floor. So we knew that the second floor is where they send all the ladies to be sex workers. These businesses comprised entirely different sorts of criminal operations, sometimes side by side with scamming.

33:08There were bosses, there were HR guys, there were drivers. Everyone was made to wear a tag. Your tag's colour denoted your role. Low-level workers like Gavesh wore blue. Translators were in yellow. Team leaders were in red. And then one level up, they were wearing black tags and then ash colour tags. In his many months inside, Gavesh only saw the ash-coloured tags a few times. But even those people had bosses. Jalil would hear rumours about the kingpins at the top of the pyramid. The compound can be owned by some tycoon somewhere who is not even in Myanmar or not even in Thailand. Over their months in the compounds, Rita, Gavesh, Jalil and Sarah got occasional peeks behind the curtain.

34:00They would learn that this operation extended well beyond their office, or even the compound it occupied. There wasn't one scam town in Myanmar, but several. It was only afterwards that each of them would learn which they had been in. They were at the lowest level of this network. They'd been lured to Myanmar, trafficked, and in some cases, sold. In a sense, they were as much a victim of all this as the scam targets abroad, like Shane Haynes, the Kansas Bank's CEO. And these low-level scammers were left mostly in the dark about who was really in charge. But to them, there was one thing about this murky, sprawling business that was clear.

34:45The place was run by Chinese. The bosses were Chinese. And for the bosses, the scam compounds were a very different kind of place. It's incredibly debaucherous, bright lights, luxury, over-the-top decadence. It's that kind of hellhole. So what's going on in the rest of the scam complex? And who had tricked Rita, Gavesh, Jalil and Sarah into becoming scammers in the first place? That's on the next episode.

35:27Scam Inc. is reported, produced and written by Sam Colbert and me. Our senior producer is Alizé-Jean-Baptiste. Our sound designer is Weidong Lin. And the music is composed by Darren Ng. Editing is by Claire Reid and Rosie Bloor, with help from Heidi Pett. Our executive producer is John Shields. To get in touch, email podcasts at economist.com and put Scam Inc. in the subject line. I'm Su Lin Wong. This is The Economist.