833: Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy | Sourcing Cyber-Slavery - The Jordan Harbinger Show: Summary & Transcript

In short

Podcast Episode Notes: The Jordan Harbinger Show - Episode 833: Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy | Sourcing Cyber-Slavery

Episode Overview In this episode, investigative journalists Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy discuss the alarming issue of cyber-slavery in Southeast Asia. They shed light on how organized criminals exploit thousands of victims through cyber scams, often with the explicit assistance of corrupt government and law enforcement agencies.

Key Topics Discussed

Cyber-Slavery in Southeast Asia:
Organized criminals, particularly Chinese triads, are holding thousands of people in slavery.
Victims are coerced into running sophisticated cyber scams that target individuals worldwide.

Recruitment and Exploitation:
Victims are often lured with job offers for lucrative online positions but find themselves captured and forced to work as cyber-slaves.
Many are subjected to extreme violence, including beatings and torture, if they fail to meet financial quotas or attempt to escape.

Government and Law Enforcement Complicity:
There is evidence linking organized crime to local government officials, including the Cambodian Prime Minister's nephew.
Corruption leads to law enforcement agencies ignoring pleas for intervention from embassies and victims alike.

Escaping the Cycle of Slavery:
The podcast discusses the difficulties faced by victims trying to escape these operations.
Abduction and control tactics, such as taking passports and using debt bondage, are common.

Western Involvement and Awareness:
The episode emphasizes the importance of recognizing the issue in Western countries and understanding how individuals can fight back against these organized crime syndicates.

Important Quotes

*"You cannot have tens and tens of thousands of slaves and enormous slavery scam compounds just on the countries bordering China right next door without some form of permission from the Chinese state."*
*"The scams initially targeted Chinese speakers but now increasingly target English speakers to attract higher-value marks."*

Actionable Takeaways

Awareness and Communication: Those who receive scam messages can inquire about the well-being of the sender, potentially uncovering victims of trafficking.
Support Organizations: Listeners are encouraged to check for resources like the Global Anti-Scam organization and to provide hotline numbers to victims when possible.
Collective Action: Individuals can advocate for governmental pressure on regions complicit in human trafficking and cyber-slavery practices.

Conclusion This episode highlights a critical and often overlooked humanitarian crisis involving cyber-slavery and exploitation. The conversation serves as a wake-up call to become informed and involved in combating these crimes, emphasizing that the issue is not just a regional problem but a global concern that requires collective awareness and action.

Further Resources

[Global Anti-Scam Organization](https://www.globalantiscam.org)
[Full Show Notes and Resources](https://jordanharbinger.com/833)
For those interested in networking and relationship building, check out [Six-Minute Networking](https://jordanharbinger.com/course).

Final Thoughts The fight against cyber-slavery requires consistent advocacy and education. By sharing knowledge and supporting victims, we can contribute to dismantling these criminal operations and fostering a safer global community.

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Transcript

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0:28This episode is sponsored in part by LinkedIn. compared that to the cost of a bad hire. Training time, salary, lost opportunities, stress on your existing team, and then the emotional fun of letting them go and starting all over again. When you add that up, spending a bit of energy up front to find the right person is a no-brainer. That's exactly where LinkedIn Jobs shines, helping you get it right the first time so you're growing your business instead of constantly cleaning up hiring mistakes. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash harbinger. Then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates.

1:00That's linkedin.com slash harbinger to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. You cannot have tens and tens of thousands of slaves and enormous slavery scam compounds just on the countries bordering China right next door. You cannot have that without some form of permission from the Chinese state. There's a strong relationship there, but it does change and it's complicated to understand. And there are Chinese police trying to stop it in Chinese government, but there are ties with the government to these organized crime groups that are incredibly strong.

1:42Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists, entrepreneurs, spies, psychologists, even the occasional investigative journalist, war correspondent, drug trafficker, or neuroscientist. And each episode turns our guests wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show, or you want to tell your friends about the show, our episode starter packs are a great place to begin.

2:13These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show topics like persuasion and influence disinformation and cyber warfare, crime and cults and more, just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Don't forget, you can also search for any episode or anything we've ever done on the show by checking out our AI chatbot at jordanharbinger.com slash AI. Today on the show, no kids in the car for this one. Got some very graphic and disturbing stories of human trafficking, suicide, violence.

2:46This is a heavy duty one. I'm not going to lie, guys. The growing issue here is of essentially cyber slavery in Southeast Asia being run by Chinese triads with links to government and police in the region. Wait, what? Yes. So this is about the pig butchering scam. If you remember, we did a show about that a while ago. Those texts you get where people are talking to you. They try to be your friend and then they dot dot dot cryptocurrency scam. Well, turns out that the people running the scam are actually victims many times themselves. Thousands of people, possibly hundreds of thousands of people, are currently being held across Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and other countries in a modern-day slavery situation.

3:25They're being forced to operate sophisticated cyber scams throughout the world. And these scams take place essentially in closed casinos, casinos that close due to the pandemic. Gambling operators quickly repurpose these for online criminal activities. So these folks throughout Asia and beyond, they're offered lucrative online trading jobs or service jobs. And then when they arrive, they're held against their will for upwards of six months, sometimes years at a time. Captives are beaten, electrically shocked, tortured if they try to escape or they don't make enough money. People have killed themselves in these situations.

3:57Victims have jumped from balconies or out of windows to their own death. It's not that uncommon. These operations are run by Chinese organized crime groups known as triads many a time. Local police and governments, they turn a blind eye. There's essentially a high-rise building that looks like an apartment block, but it's got a fence around it. You can't get out. It's really, really insane. Sometimes they arrest people who try to speak out, who escape. They treat them as people who've overstayed their visa. The scams initially targeted Chinese speakers both in mainland China and elsewhere. Now they increasingly recruit English speakers to target higher-value marks in the United States, India, Europe, Australia, the UK.

4:34My guests today, Nathan and Lindsay, good friends of mine, actually. They've been to the centers. They've spoken to the victims. They've been threatened by the guards and the security. This isn't just an organized crime trend, but it's an enormous humanitarian disaster that pretty much nobody outside the Southeast Asia region really seems interested in. They've been writing investigative journalism all over, but I wanted to help them spread this message to as many people as possible. And that's what we're going to chat about today. Really, really a wild tale. Come and get a load of what the scam texters are really living like behind barbed wire walls.

5:06and you'll look at these scams in a completely different way. Here we go with Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy.

5:15When I first heard of the pig butchering scam, which was essentially, it's like a scam call, somebody bilks you out of money. I mean, I really thought scam calls and fraud that bilk people out of their life savings were bad. But I had no idea that it just gets so much worse. And I did an episode on the pig butchering scam. It's episode 737 to refresh people's memory. That was it's like these you'll get a text from somebody and they're like, oh, hi, Tom. Can I come get my dog? And you're like, oh, wrong number. And then they try to make friends with you a dot dot dot cryptocurrency investment scam or romance scam.

5:51And I wanted to teach my audience how to fight back against this. And the more I researched this after the show, the more I found that actually all parties on both sides essentially are victims. so can you speak to this a little bit because i didn't realize it just got so much worse than stealing someone's life savings like that's just you're just scratching the surface there yeah so i'm like pig butchering is in itself has been going on for a long time right it's just a really really horrible type of scam where you just like build up that relationship usually through that romance angle like you said get really really close and then you start bringing in something like crypto or it can be something like investing in gold but you know you build up this close relationship people get close and then all the life savings go in and you never get that cash back again that's nothing new that's just a development of scams you would expect to see right especially if like growth the internet and how easy it is to contact people on social media but what changed around about the time of covid was the forced aspect of it the people who were forced to do the scams themselves so you had in cambodia for instance you had an enormous amount of unused real estate used by Chinese gangsters normally for casinos or online betting venues, which were just sitting there empty.

7:05So that kind of led to this natural progression of, oh, wait a minute, we could really maximize our profits if we just force people into this work, force them to get in touch with people all around the world and do this pig butchering, but they're also not getting paid. So then you have this massive modern slavery aspect to it, but you can just keep churning out a bigger and bigger workforce and not worry about having to get a decent pay or conditions for these people as well. I think a lot of people that have been scammed quite rightly think what kind of person could have done this to me like how could someone do that when I've pulled my heart to them or I've told them I've got like a you know a terminal illness or all these awful stories that you hear that that's the thing it is very hard to find people who will do that willingly so increasingly people are forced into it under threat of beatings or torture or being sold to on the companies that might be even worse.

7:51And that's kind of something to bear in mind is that someone doing that to you won't let go of that attempt to get money out of you because their life is also on the line at the other end. Initially, I was so surprised that there were enough sociopaths that you could recruit that would do this. Like that was one of the questions I had is I just thought, gosh, there's so many more evil people out there than I thought because I get these by the dozen. And so does everybody that you know, all over essentially the whole world. There must be tens of millions of psychopathic people doing this as a job.

8:24And that was disturbing. But now with what you're telling me, and we're going to unpack all this. So for people who are confused, we're going to get we're going to just sort of start from square one on each one of these categories, because we heard Chinese gangsters, casinos, special economics. I mean, it's just there's a whole lot going on. These people, one of the reasons they get good at it and they're so aggressive and they pursue it and they have so much time is because they are literally going to die in captivity or at least be beaten and tortured if they don't do this to somebody that they don't know.

8:53So it's like being in, I hate using this analogy because it's really horrible, but it's almost like when you hear about concentration camps and you think, how could people do this to each other? They were prisoners too. Well, exactly. They were prisoners too. And it's like, are you going to steal food from somebody else who's starving to death? Yeah, because you're starving to death. You are too. And your choice is to either get shot in the next morning's roundup or collaborate. I mean, that's really those are your choices. And these people are in a very similar kind of situation, even if it's not wartime here.

9:23So this is the other side of the scam. It's even more horrifying than the scam itself, but by a wide margin. So first of all, how are these people lured into where is it Cambodia and Laos and Vietnam in the first place? I mean, how do you find yourself in a place where you can't get away? There's a few different ways this can happen, right? But there are some people that do kind of broadly know what kind of work they're getting themselves into. They might not quite realize quite how bad it is, but they have an inkling. But a lot of people, they see a job for, it might be a job in sort of admin or in customer services or just basically anything that's computer-based.

9:58They're basically told, as long as you can use a computer and you can talk to people and you know how to use a bit of social media, you'll have got a job basically with us. And then when they say, well, why is the money so high? It seems like it's so much higher than it would normally be in Cambodia or Laos or Myanmar. They're told, oh, well, it's in a casino complex or it's in a special economic zone. And these places have their own kinds of rules. So don't worry about that. There's lots of really well-paid people. Current victims are encouraged to recruit from their own network of friends under duress and tell them they've got this great job.

10:25And, you know, don't worry about all these reports you hear about scams and things. This isn't one of them. So there are lots of different ways people are tricked. we actually spoke to really recently we were coming back from the golden triangle special economic zone in laos which is also called king's romans which is basically this bizarre place that's a kind of lawless zone of its own um that's built around a casino a couple of casinos owned by this chinese gangster called xiawei as we were leaving um we went in because you can go in kind of as a tourist and lead back into taiwan which is across the border as we were leaving um we met a couple of people who'd just been released for various reasons.

11:00They'd finally been released after three or four months of being told they couldn't leave. And they were just so desperate to get out of there. And we kind of helped them get across the river and get to safety in the next town over. Well, one of the women told us that she had been told that she had a job in Thailand. There's very little evidence that there's any scam compounds in Thailand. And Thailand was generally seen as a safe place to go for work. So she was like, okay, that's great. She was told me if she'd been told it was in Cambodia or Laos, no way would she have gone. But when she landed in Bangkok, she was immediately taken to the north of the country to Chiang Mai, and then to Chiang Rai, which is right on the border across the river from Laos.

11:31And then they were told, oh, your job is actually just in that building over there, like across the river. And then they're taken into Laos that way. So by the time all this is happening, you're so confused about where you're going and what country you're in and why you're crossing the border into another country. And you've already spent all your money getting there or taking out loans or allowed them to pay for your flight. So you're already in debt to these people, that it's very frightening. So all of this can just happen and get out of hand very, very quickly, I think. I took from one of your articles, I'm just going to quote it verbatim here.

11:56It's a trafficking account. And you wrote, one of you wrote, it quickly became clear that this was not a normal employer. The agency are gangsters and have people working every step of the way. Every checkpoint, they pay a bribe, she explained via an interpreter. They gave me a fake Burmese identity card, and I had to pretend I couldn't speak. Once in Mong La, which is another sort of casino area, I guess. A mafia enclave in Myanmar, yeah. A mafia enclave? Wow, that's a, okay, we're gonna unpack that in a second. Her excitement at the big city lights evaporated when she discovered the agent had fled with her first month's paycheck and she was not allowed to leave the club, which doubled as her accommodation unless accompanied by an armed guard.

12:37They were afraid we would run away, she says. The PR girls, because I guess they said you're gonna be working in PR, like social media marketing or something. The PR girls were mostly Thai, says Apple, which is a very sort of on-the-nose nickname, but almost all the sex workers were local girls from the Thai-Yai ethnic minority, most of them children as young as 13, who had been sold by their parents and were forced to sleep with Chinese, Burmese, and ethnic Wa men who visited the club looking specifically for little girls, some of whom were so mentally damaged by the ordeal that they would cut themselves.

13:10To keep them skinny for the weekly bikini show, the women and girls were only allowed to eat twice a day, but a cabinet of methamphetamine, cocaine, and ketamine were provided free of charge. The drug stopped us getting hungry, she says. I mean, barf is the only reaction any reasonable person can have to this kind of thing. And I know people were like, wait a minute, I thought we were talking about scams. What is going on? Sex trafficking. That escalated way too quickly for me. This is kind of where there's a smoke, there's fire kind of thing, right? Where you have scam call centers that are already breaking a law and you have illegal gambling or legal in these zones gambling, it's kind of like, why not have wildlife trafficking, illegal walking, sex trafficking of minors?

13:53These places where this is going on are seemingly totally lawless. Can we talk about why these places aren't having the fear of God put into them by the governments in the area? So a few things. So first of all, you know, sex trafficking, I think that's something that more people have heard of, right? The idea that you get lured into a job when you think you're going to be a waitress and it could, you know, whether you're from Eastern Europe or you're from Thailand and you end up as a forced sex worker, right? That is something that's quite known now. Basically, that laid the foundation for what we're looking at now, where they use the same tactics to recruit people.

14:26But in so many of these villages and say Vietnam, where they have historically got these sex workers from, people are starting to get wise to that after decades of education saying, hey, listen, these jobs as waitresses, you're probably going to end up in forced sex work, right? So they're like, oh, no, no, I know what to look out for with that. And now it's changed. And now it's changed and it's grown to this just terrifying scale where these organized crime groups dotted mostly around Southeast Asia, but other places that me and Lindsay have documented as well, which we can go into, have found ways that you can just be completely above the law.

15:00So it's all really, really kicked off in Cambodia. And Cambodia is in a way a safe and stable country for a lot of people or you know people go backpacking and have nice holidays there and the worst thing will probably happen to you is having your phone stolen out of your hand in a tuk-tuk right and it's safe so people don't expect it to be a you know like organized crime run hellhole but at the same time it really really is and there's so much to that and a lot of it is basically from this kind of post-war country that fought the Cameroon and the Vietnamese for decades and one of the ways that he tried to maintain stability when Hun Sen, his longest-running prime minister in the world, took over in the 1990s, was he created something called the patronage system in the country, which essentially means that any government worker at all has to pay a certain percentage of their income to the next in the chain of command.

15:56So that goes from teachers to soldiers to police officers. So police officers will be speaking to, say they get paid$160 a month. they will be expected to pay half of that to their sergeant and their sergeant needs to pay half of their salary to the next person up so yeah you can try to take on a few extra shifts and if you work in the traffic department then obviously you'll pull a few more motorbikes or cars over for some bribes but if you're really if you're really really struggling to make rent and pay your boss then what you're going to do is you're going to let the trucks full of of luxury timber go through you're going to let the trucks full of meth and heroin go through, or you're going to start getting involved more directly in things.

16:36And that's why we know police and military that are directly involved in selling weapons and so on. This is a natural progression of that, where you're able to have huge compounds where the landlords are paid off and that money trickles down. Rather than it being an act of corruption from some bad apples, they say, it's an inherently corrupted criminal system. And at the same time as that, similar kind of networks operate in different places. Myanmar is different because it's in a full-scale conflict, so you can get away with even more there. But one thing that we've looked a lot at is how the Chinese have their Berlin Road Initiative, right?

17:14It's a massive infrastructure project where they're spending billions and billions of dollars around the world to build railways, bridges, roads, and huge, huge development. I mean, a lot of that means that minerals in Africa, Latin America and Asia are just put on a train and sent straight to Beijing. But there's a lot of money coming into these different countries. But at the same time, a lot of organized crime groups have piggybacked off that, especially in Southeast Asia, and have made themselves sound like a legitimate organization that you can trust. And they get in there through places like special economic zones where the Chinese government organizes a unique deal with the host government where you don't pay tax, you don't have too much oversight.

17:52So these criminal groups can come in and just set up enormous compounds where thousands and thousands of people can be held against our will and barbed wire. And you can see it from the road and no one stops it because the entire system has been criminalized as in essence what a true mafia state is. OK, so the special economic zones, I want to sort of highlight this because I think people are still like, but wait, why doesn't the government of Thailand go in and get their people or Vietnam? or is it just because of corruption? The special economic zones, they're kind of like these self-governing statelets.

18:27They're conduits for human trafficking and all this other illegal activity for the reasons that you mentioned, but they're deliberately in many times between the border. So like you leave, let's say, Laos to go to Thailand and there's, I don't know, 400 yards or meters or whatever. And in that, or 1 ,400, what do I know? And in that little space, there's a couple of buildings and they just happen to be casinos and they're not governed by the law of those countries because they're not actually in those countries. Am I close? Yeah, it varies from country to country and yeah, how corrupt the government of that country is, right?

19:05The worst one is the one we were talking about that's in Laos that is run by a Chinese gangster and he has leased that land for 99 years. Now, in most places or most places in Southeast Asia, there's a little bit of uncertainty about how much oversight the local authorities or police have whether they can go in whether they can exercise any kind of authority and power there but this one in laos this is complete wild west territory it's it the guy runs it like his personal playground we saw what we what we're pretty sure were laos soldiers that he had hired as his personal bodyguards um guarding the place like guarding the outskirts but also him we saw why walked past us up um in front of one of his casinos when we were there last time which was wow gave us a bit of a fright because we're writing about him they kind of just don't do what they want and when you speak to people in Laos or police officers, authorities, they'll say, oh, we're not allowed to go in there because that's China.

19:53And it's on your territory. It's in your country. There's absolutely no international legal precedent for you not being able to go in there. That's insane. But enough people believe it and there's enough uncertainty that he gets away with it. So in Thailand, again, in this particular SEZ, a bunch of Thai people, some of them children, were tricked into going to work in this SEZ and they were kept against their will. They were tortured. And some of the girls were basically threatened that if they didn't make enough money, they'd be sold into sex work. And the authorities in Thailand weren't influential enough to talk directly to Zawai and his people.

20:27They had to go and find someone on the Laos side who had enough connections with the business people who run this place, or the gangster really who runs this place, that they could go and ask as a personal favour, can we possibly just retrieve this one girl because it's making such a massive scene back in Thailand over the border? That is the kind of power these individual gangsters have. Wow. Technically, the Lao government and police have complete authority over this place. But it doesn't matter if that's technically the rule under international law. If you are scared of these gangsters because you know they're a lot more powerful than you, and you know that the government has such strong links with them that they have given the land of the country to them for 99 years, it doesn't matter what is technically correct.

21:09It matters what you feel. And when you're a Lao cop on$190 a month, are you really going to risk walking up to these armed guards to try to make an arrest? And you wouldn't get the warrant from the, you know, the higher ups in your district anyway. So it's really not in anyone's interest to push this. They're too scared. They're not powerful enough. And they know that these guys have considerably more sway than the local government or even the centralized government. You wrote that Laos can't do anything here. If Lao police go inside, they need to leave their guns. This is a quote from somebody who I think worked nearby.

21:42Even if they kill someone, the Lao government has to ask permission to come into King's Romans. They have their own law. And again, King's Romans is a casino complex inside one of these special economic zones, SEZ. But they're casinos, right? So people are going, wait, wait, wait. I thought you said scams. This is a casino. Were these casinos? And why is it now a scam center? That's a little confusing. A lot of these places followed the same process, especially in Cambodia. Cambodians aren't actually legally allowed to gamble. So most casinos get set up along border areas or in areas designed primarily for Chinese tourism, right?

22:16So you have these places that either serve Chinese tourists or they're along the Thai border to serve Thai tourists or the Vietnamese border to serve Vietnamese tourists. Especially Sinekville, which is the really, really famous, famous, infamous, I guess, on the coast in Cambodia, which serves mostly Chinese tourists. There was a huge amount of investment in that place. So it went from being a quite a sleepy little town to suddenly being completely overrun with like something. I think it was like 200 casinos or something completely crazy. And these are mega casinos as well, a lot of them. So you suddenly had all this investment and that was meant to attract all of this tourism.

22:48A lot of it just became sort of like a way of laundering money and then attracted all this other kind of vice as well. So, you know, all this kind of a new prostitution industry and then inevitably like drugs and wildlife trafficking and everything else that springs up around these places. But then very quickly during Covid, there wasn't any tourism coming in. Cambodia closed its borders really quickly. I mean, China has only just opened its borders at all to incoming or outgoing tourism. So there weren't really any Chinese tourists coming in. There weren't even any Thai or Vietnamese tourists really coming across the border.

23:16So you suddenly had all these enormous casino complexes that didn't have any way of making money. So they dabbled with different things. They tried sort of illegal online gambling. They tried video link gambling. And then they basically realised that the best way of making a ton of money would be to repurpose these huge buildings that have enormous dormitories for all the staff into scam centres that are very and casinos have incredible security right as well so it's very easy to lock people inside and have people outside not noticed for a long period of time especially if they're not any visitors to some places that are relatively remote so that's how it began really but now it's got to the point where scam centres make so much more money than anything else you know we've heard about um construction companies that have pre-designed replicable designs for scam centres.

24:01They roll out all over the country where you have things like the base level of the compound is a kind of small casino for appearances sake. And then you have eight floors of dorms and scam centre rooms for people to work and sleep in. The second top floor is a complete blackout room with no windows because that's your torture room where you take people when they're failing at their jobs. And then the very top floor is like a luxury apartment for the scam boss owner, basically. And you make a lot more money designing these places than designing any other kind of building in Cambodia, which is just insane.

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24:32That is crazy. And you see this, it's not like it's hidden away. I mean, some of them are a little bit more difficult to find. And so some of these scam compounds are enormous skyscrapers that look like huge apartment blocks. And there's maybe 13 or 14 of them. And you can have several thousand people in there. And we can kind of spot them because the barbed wire, the clothes hanging on the balconies, and we can know, oh, that's a huge, huge scam compound, right? And we'll go in, we'll try and get as close as we can, try and talk to people and see what's going on. But then the ones that Lindsay are talking about, these new purpose-built ones are a lot smaller that are just popping up everywhere, not just in Cambodia.

25:07The same model has been replicated in the Philippines, in Myanmar, and in Laos as well. And you go to, there's one city on the Thai border in Cambodia called Poipet, where we seen no police last time we were there at all. Absolutely no police. and we were up all night going around the different streets that we thought might have scam centres and you just see them and it's the entire city is just run by these places and you look up and the black windows just signify every single one that's a scam centre and some are full streets of just that and you see the barbed wire, you see the blacked out windows and you know it's exactly that.

25:44There's no police around, the only police are Thai and Chinese gangsters they're the only people that are running the entire city And it's calm, right? It's not like there's shootouts every day. Sometimes that stuff happens, but it's usually actually quite calm. And you talk to the local people and they know exactly what's happening. They're scared, but there's nowhere that you can turn to. There's nothing you can do because the amount of money these places make is just absolutely insane. It's like a narco state, but it's a scam state. Yeah. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guests, Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsay Kennedy.

26:17We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks for the show, I've got a crazy network, folks, and I've been building it for years. Yes, I use it to book guests for the show, but man, this network has come in handy many, many times for business reasons, personal reasons. I've used it to rescue people out of crazy situations. I'm teaching you how to build your network for free in our course, Six Minute Networking. It's free over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. This is about improving your relationship building skills in a non-cringy, down-to-earth way.

26:46It's not awkward. It's not cheesy. It's going to make you a better colleague. It's going to make you better at work. It's going to make you a better friend. In just a few minutes a day, that's the whole idea. Again, the course is free, and many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company. You can find the course at jordanharbinger.com slash course. Now, back to Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy. Instead of producing drugs and them owning the whole local government and all the authorities, it's just a scam state where it's like, yeah, we know your daughter got kidnapped or killed or somebody got shot here, but we're not going to send cops because those are the gangster's territory.

27:23We're not going to rock that boat because they kick up a million dollars a week to whatever governor is in the area who kicks that up to the president's kid. And nobody's interested in your kid's death or the insecurity that you find yourself with the forced labor jobs or the human trafficking. It's just wildly insane. That's the benefit of trafficking people in from other countries as well. No one's going to kick that much of a fuss up for like a foreign national so they don't know in that centre. There was more of a fuss when briefly some of these places tried to use local people and then obviously, then it was like, well, no, there's way too much attention.

27:56There's going to be people protesting outside. But when you start just bringing people in from abroad, no one's fighting their corner in the country and they don't have any power in that country. The same kind of thing happened with sex work trafficking like in the early days as well and it still does in certain countries where they tell you, you can try and leave this brothel if you want, but bear in mind, you don't have a passport. You're not legally in this country. you will be arrested for illegally being here and that is what happens especially in cambodia i mean we were trying to help one girl that was um taken into one of the compounds um a little while back and a few weeks ago she got in touch with me to see if there's anything i could do and i was asking around different kind of ngos different international police organizations that are involved in the country like is there anything we can do here asking some police contacts are like no no we know that compound um there's no getting anyone out of that and then she messages me saying they're going to traffic me to Myanmar at 10 o 'clock tomorrow night and once you go to Myanmar the chances of getting you are just so so much smaller because you're you're in a full you know conflict zone at that point and I'm phoned up every possible contact we had so we just thought like lost a few people who'd been in contact you know and just trying to do what you could to get her out and everyone like loads of people pulled together i even i put it on twitter like look she's going to get sent out tomorrow can people please just rally can we just get us one girl out of this compound so like drove out to the compounds middle of nowhere like terrifying little border town of just one casino right on the thai border where it's just a dirt track that leads over into thailand with absolutely like you know no border patrol whatsoever other than in one certain point and And when I was phoned up trying to help, she messaged me saying, cancel whatever rescue you have going on.

29:42I said, what do you mean? I didn't even say I was going to do it. She went, they know a journalist has been speaking to the police and the authorities. They know that you've been trying to push for my release. And they said they'll beat me again. They'll torture me again if you come tonight. And she explained that it was just a few weeks back, one person escaped from the compound. and when they did, the police dragged the person back into the compound and they then tortured that person in front of everyone else who's been trapped inside this scam centre. But we got really, really lucky and I think it's just because it went quite up the chain and we had the Thai authorities and we had Thai police and we had a local militia who, in a weird sense, kind of befriended near the Myanmar border and they were waiting with guns and there's a Thai police officer called.

30:32Literally, his name is Big Joke. And he was waiting because he's looking to raise his profile and he wanted to arrest these guys from across the island. And something happened where I went senior enough up in the Cambodian police where someone made a decision, she leaves. So they came in and they got her just a few hours before I got there. And then when she gets sent back to the safe house, I'm thinking, okay, she's finally safe. But no, then the police invite in the people who had been holding her captive to the police station to continue to threaten her, say that you owe us money, and then the police would say, well, it sounds like you owe them money.

31:06It sounds like we've got a situation here where you're going to have to pay them back the money. And they were denying her the right to speak to her embassy. Then they started saying they were going to charge her for illegally working in the country. And then they wanted a drug tester and all of these different threats. Eventually enough pressure again from international agencies. Some were really helpful, others less so. And then got her to Phnom Penh. Now she's stuck in a different police station. And we don't know how long she'll be there, but at least she's kind of safe right now. But it goes through each stage of government bureaucracy and police, where either they want a payment to let this one person go, or they know that the biggest employers in town is the huge scam compounds, and you don't want to piss them off.

31:47So even though it's just one person, that's enough to bring the human traffickers into the police station and allow them to continue to threaten the person that you just rescued. The only reason that you rescued her is because someone big enough just said, right, take her out. She's causing a bit of a problem. That's so, so sad. And it makes it seem really hopeless. I mean, your articles have a lot of examples of Malaysian nationals who say they paid a broker to go work in a casino. And now they're stuck in these scam jobs. Children as young as 13 and 14. Girls mostly, obviously, for the sex trade, which is disgusting.

32:23and they're relying on, or I should say they're using and leveraging the fact that there's the pandemic, there's increased job insecurity, financial desperation, weakened enforcement, kids are on the internet learning, using the internet to talk to each other. So they've got recruiters on there as well. They're falsely recruiting these people, but then they're stripping them of their passports. They're taking their identity documents. They're moving them from country to country. They're putting them in debt bondage, like you mentioned, forced labor, beating sexual abuse. I mean, it's crazy. And I know that you've seen a lot of this stuff firsthand.

32:55How did you even get wind of this? And then how did you, frankly, get the stones to go out there yourselves? I don't think I would do that. It seems dangerous. So we've been based, both of us have been based in Cambodia for quite a long time. And then Cambodia did this, it was kind of incredible. Cambodia didn't really get a COVID outbreak until a year into the rest of the world's COVID outbreak, basically. So it was about April 2021 when they had their first community outbreak. And we started being really confused by the fact that there seemed to be many outbreaks around the same time at all these different casino towns.

33:29And we couldn't put our finger on why there were outbreaks at all these casino towns at first. We'd figured out as much as we're pretty sure people are being trafficked illegally and they're not going through all the normal entry points and not being tested for COVID on entry. And we think that's why there'd been a few kind of outbreaks, right? But around the same time, a couple of other really amazing journalists that we know and we're friends with, were also looking at specific compounds where they'd got murmurs that there were people inside being kept there against their will and then it just all kind of exploded we realized that yeah these all of these um casino places have been repurposed as scam centers and then one by one it just turned out there were just more and more of them all over the country and but at this point everyone's attention had been on cambodia um not there was like masses of attention outside cambodia but all the attention that there had been had been on cambodia we then happened to be traveling around Southeast Asia, working on an unrelated project.

34:17It was to do with wildlife traffic and environmental crime. And we realized that a lot of places we were visiting, like Laos, like the Thai-Miyama border, a lot of these places were also having the same things happen. And not only were they also having these big scam centers emerge, but people seemed to be being moved and being sold from place to place, from scam center to scam center in this kind of network within Southeast Asia. So we kind of realized that a lot of these places were linked. And a few of the same names get coming up so some of the investors there's a couple of dodgy people like um like broken tooth his name comes up a lot wangkok koi is a um a chinese gangster he's a member of the 14k triads he's already been in trouble enough times in china that he'd left macau where he originally had interest in casinos and then ended up in cambodia with interest in casinos and is now a chief investor in shuikoko which is an absolute hellhole of a casino lawless gambling town angst town in minmar so we saw all these things kind of starting to connect up around this time in cambodia the cambodian government had had enough pressure from enough different people that it was quite embarrassed it'd also been downgraded in this report called the tip report which is um trafficking in persons report and if you get downgraded to a certain point then you start actually losing access to international funding and things so they were downgraded because they were doing absolutely nothing about this modern slavery crisis and so they panicked they'd made a big show of um closing down a few of the most notorious places like this place called kyber in syneville but then it became really obvious really quickly that actually people were just being sold to other companies or moved around and moved out of the country we then also we were trying to figure out how money was being laundered from because a lot of it ends up in cryptocurrency okay but we were trying to figure out where else how else it might be being laundered and we we did a visit to a few places in the balkans um We'd had a few hints that there might be connections.

36:04But when we got to Croatia and Montenegro, we found out that it didn't seem to be that the money was necessarily the only thing moving through these areas. There'd also been a few cases before COVID had even started of small scale scam compounds inside private houses that had been busted and where like sort of just like 90 people rather than the thousands of people you get in Cambodia, like 90 Taiwanese people have been held against their will doing these kind of online scams. and they seem to kind of match up with where casino owners with serious gangster connections in Southeast Asia had opened new casinos in Europe.

36:38So there seem to be all these connections around the world with the same kind of people doing the same kind of scams or online gambling, illegal activity, and running their money through casinos. And it's just insane, the scale of this, basically. Did I hear that there's illegal scam sites running in Europe that had illegally trafficked Taiwanese people that were transported from Taiwan, tricked by an influencer or a job ad or whatever, to go to Eastern Europe, held there against their will in Eastern Europe. Yeah, in the Balkans, in Croatia, which is obviously, again, a big, beautiful country that people go on fancy holidays, right?

37:13It doesn't feel like somewhere this would happen. But also, to make that even more mental, the Taiwanese police had done a joint raid with the Croatians to get to release, I think it was in 2019. to release some of these Taiwanese people that were being held against their will, they were then supposedly brought back to safety in Taiwan. What actually happened is a few years later, a few of them turned up on the Vietnamese border being trafficked into Cambodia to clearly work in a different scam centre. So we don't know what happened to them in the interim. The Taiwanese police have not been helpful talking to us about their case.

37:45But clearly they weren't looked after and they were able to be sold on or re-tricked into this industry, which is just completely insane. Wow. It was in Croatia and in Montenegro. So we went out to the sites in both that it had happened. And it was maybe only about four locations or so. But like Lindsay was saying, there's certain key figures and their names keep popping up all around us. And it's usually within the casino or the gaming industry or something similar. And the guy that we were looking at there and we can't find a definitive link. We're just, you know, he's just near everything at the right time is a guy called Paul Foer.

38:18a kind of triad-linked guy who is now living in Malaysia and owns an enormous casino. And we talk about this scary level of corruption and how could you possibly have thousands of people stuck in a compound? And people are like, oh, that's in Cambodia and that's in Myanmar. That's different. But hey, you still had 93 people in just one place in Croatia, maybe 100 in the other place in Montenegro. And it just so turns out that you can also, there's also a place where people like Palfour can develop such close relationships with the government of Montenegro that they end up getting offered positions like ambassador to San Marino.

38:55So even though you're not a Montenegro citizen and you're a triad-linked clear gangster that owns casinos, you can just come in, create new relationships with the government, and then it explains pretty easily how these places can set up essentially anywhere. So we've seen it in the Balkans, we've seen it in Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos. I think there are some now developing in Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia. It's not just something that's popped up and then there'll be a bit of attention and go away again. This is a new, enormous crime type that I don't think is going anywhere. I don't think there's enough international attention and really, really addressing it.

39:32I mean, like we were saying, these big raids happened last year when enough international attention was put on Cambodia. But it took us a long time of pushing stories and articles about this it took a long time for ngos different journalists all pushing this in the world just weren't really clenching to it and maybe it's because it sounds quite unbelievable because of the scale of it or maybe it's just a part of the world that it's in is never going to be more important than the people who are being scammed in the developed world right and there's there's a disparity there yeah but when that happened cambodia shut down a few places made a big song advance about it and then it's all just grown massively again since so there's no sign of this stopping and since they did their little sham raids where actually a bunch of people were arrested for labour and immigration offences rather than the actual traffickers since they've done that they've been bumped back up again on financial regulation awards so Cambodia's kind of out of the woods of getting financially blacklisted because of a few different sham raids so they just did enough box ticking that everyone can kind of go back but the thing is though like going back to your question though like why we do it is because I mean yeah a lot of it has been really scary and the short answer is probably that we're idiots but like there have been a lot of times when you know you you push and you push and you push to try and get people to care about some of this stuff and you meet with enough agencies in Cambodia or internationally um or you put enough stuff you don't know if it's making any difference and then suddenly something will happen that shows you that it's like when um Cambodia was downgraded in this tip report right which actually had a big impact on their policies internally at the time like these governments are worried enough like something can hurt them, whether it's financial, whether it's reputational, like something can bother them enough that they will at least try to perform as if they're adjusting their behavior.

41:12And so you always have this little dangling bit of hope that something will be the magic bullet that will change this industry in some way. It does make sense. It's man, it's just so it is shocking. And I think you're right that it doesn't get as much attention because this is a part of the world where people are like, where is this? How many people could it possibly be. But yeah, they're scamming us. They're still criminals. You know, in looking at some of the numbers, the largest cohorts of victims appear to be from Vietnam and Taiwan. So Taiwan says about 5 ,000 citizens have been recorded as traveling to Cambodia and not returning.

41:485 ,000. Police said they've identified at least 370 as it like confirmed being held against their will. But of course, victims say the number is likely a lot higher. There's one escaped woman who says, in fact, she swam across the river to safety in Thailand. She said over 300 other women were still trapped in the one building where she was and had been forced into prostitution after responding to a job advertised by an Instagram influencer. So how many people do we think are actually trapped here? Because if there's 5 ,000 just from Taiwan that the government has confirmed and then there's 300 in the one building where the one person escaped, Has anyone done the math on this?

42:28I mean, even the Cambodian government admits there must be at least hundreds of thousands of people in Cambodia alone. Hundreds of thousands? 100 ,000 is what they roughly estimated last year. The Global Anti-Scam Organization, which is tracking a lot of this, thinks there's about half a million people in Southeast Asia. Half a million? Yeah. And again, just like emphasizing that thing, you can just see it. You know, there's so, so many cities now, there's this growing issue, you just see it like absolutely everywhere. And even the countries that you expect to be a bit better, like a bit more, maybe slightly less corrupt, maybe a little bit more organized places like Thailand, which aren't in the same bracket usually as Cambodia and Laos and Myanmar.

43:07I mean, when Lindsay was talking earlier about those people that we were in touch with when we were at King's Romans who had just gotten out, there was one guy who was a Nepalese. So increasingly, Indians and Nepalese are being targeted because the English language skills is a really good skill and people are desperate for work. so he needs to get over and put to work. The Nepalese guy who had just been released from this trafficking scam compound where he was in for months and was in a really bad state, the Thais wouldn't let him in when he got on the boat over from Laos because he'd overstayed his re-entry visa because he'd been trafficked into a compound.

43:45And then they were saying, no, no, no, you need to go back. And we tried to explain to him, he was like, no, no, no, if he goes back, he's going to be put inside a trafficking compound and they said, well, he's not got the legal right to come out of Thailand. I was like, hold him here, phone the Nepalese embassy, make a case, do something, don't put him on that boat. And Lindsay, you said, just put him on a boat to a place further down the shore of Laos. So he'd still be in the country, but he wouldn't be in King's Romans compound. And I think it was like pointed at the phone number, the anti-trafficking phone number that is on the wall of this border post police station and said, can we phone that?

44:21Can we talk to them? this is trafficking. They said, it's not a real number. It's just up there to scare people. Wow. It's not even a real number, a real agency, nothing. No one answered when we called. That's so horrifying. So what happened to this guy? Well, actually, we did manage to keep in touch with a mutual contact and they did eventually let him back out the other way. And I know that he managed to get back to his embassy in Vienchen by Laos. Yeah. So he was incredibly lucky in this situation. I think he'd already paid his exit from this place and the company he was working with had been spooked.

44:52because they'd been a kind of like semi-raid on them. It wasn't like a serious raid, but they'd been a bit spooked by something. So I think they just weren't taking any chances that week. I think a different week he would have been very unlucky. Oh, that's so awful. Other escape stories are just really harrowing. Another guy walked through rice paddies for two days, sugarcane plantations and jungle with a guide, thankfully, who steered him away from landmines placed more than 40 years ago during Cambodia's civil war. So even if you escape, and even if you get out of the town with no cops, and you walk into the jungle, and you don't get eaten by something while you're there, you get to walk for days and days, hopefully going towards the border, and maybe step on a landmine.

45:34And a lot of people escaping from the Vietnam side, there's a river near to one of the places that people are being kept. A lot of guys had jumped into this river to try and escape, and there was quite a few people drowned, trying to get away into Vietnam last year. A guy that we interviewed of this Chinese guy who's absolutely lovely and is now spending a lot of his time back in China trying to sort of educate other people on how to not get caught up in the same thing. He tried to break out in the middle of the night. He'd made this whole plan and he jumped from one building to another building and lost his footing as he jumped onto a lower roof and fell and broke his spine.

46:09He was basically crawling across the ground thinking he was going to die and dragging himself, tried to drag himself to the road. And he said the guards were just pointing out the window laughing at him because they thought he was a goner so they were just watching him they thought they were watching him die and they were just like laughing at him and he managed to crawl to the road and a cambodian tuk-tuk driver i don't know if you're familiar with tuk-tiks they're like these kind of yeah those little tiny like motorcycle rickshaw taxi yeah rickshaw yeah so like a local cambodian tuk-tuk driver saw him and basically rescued him put him in the back and took him to a hospital and then there was at that time there was a network of um like local chinese business people and volunteers who were all just helping Chinese people who escaped from these places.

46:49And he was really lucky and he was kind of helped to get out of the country in a process of three or four months. And when I spoke to him last, he was about to have surgery on his spine. But like, yeah, the ordeals that people go through to try and escape are just horrific. And increasingly more and more people just decide to kill themselves. You know, breaking your spine and crawling away is fucking horrible. That is like one of the luckier stories. and you have to have so many things go right for you to be able to get out, whether it's enough people putting enough annoying pressure or they just so happen to raid your one compound to make a headline that day.

47:26There's a lot of things that need to go right and they usually don't. So there's just constant stories, especially in Sunitville and also at Batvet on the Vietnam border where people just jump out of the window knowing full well they'll kill themselves because they just cannot take it anymore these people are worked sometimes up to 18 hours a day they're tortured regularly they're tased they're sexually assaulted they're beaten and humiliated in front of everyone but also on top of that they know that they are stealing people's entire life savings so it's like one of the worst forms of slavery in that way because it's it's not even like you're being enslaved and and that's all that you need to worry about you You also don't need to feel an immense level of guilt at the activity that you're doing as well.

48:14So people hate themselves as well as being tortured on a daily basis. And it's really, really hard for a lot of people to come back from that as well. This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guests, Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsay Kennedy. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support one of our amazing sponsors. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. You can also search for any sponsor using the AI chatbot on the website as well over at jordanharbinger.com.

48:51Thank you so much for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy. The heartlessness of this is particularly particularly striking. There's one piece that you wrote and it said it was after he was trafficked a second time that his name is Soraton suffered his most significant trauma. He was working at a fictitious loan company that tricked consumers into sending money by telling them it was the only way to access a larger loan. One victim, a middle-aged man from eastern Thailand who needed the cash to pay for his mother's medical care, called the office on video to plead for his life savings back.

49:27When a supervisor refused, the man picked up a handgun, pointed it at his head, and pulled the trigger. There was just silence after we heard the gunshot, said Soraton, who was stationed next to the monitor and watched the entire incident. The boss just walked away. They have no feelings because they're human traffickers. That is one of the most effed up things that I've probably ever read. And it's just so bad. I mean, the romance scams, this guy need, his mother needed medical care and they scammed him. And then he's like, look, man, I need the money. And they were like, we don't care. And then he killed himself on camera.

49:57I mean, just, and that's happening times a million all the time. I know they're doing romance scams, loan scams, the pig butchering cryptocurrency scams and stuff like that. It's weird. This is a weird sort of set of crimes because even the Chinese government is cracking down or trying to crack down on this because it's their own citizens being trafficked. It's their own citizens being scammed. But it's also Chinese gangsters that are doing it. And China needs Cambodia as an ally because Vietnam is kind of closer to the United States, which is a little ironic. And they need this counterbalance.

50:26But also it sort of expands Chinese influence in this weird way. can you speak to this a little bit? Because it's kind of confusing. It's like China wants it to stop, but not really. They kind of just want to point the cannon at other countries instead. Yeah. I think it's important to remember sometimes that like, I think we often think of the Chinese government as like one homogenous mass with one purpose. It's like any government, right? There's people within that. There's going to be people or sectors within that, or even regional governments within that who have their own ties to businesses or their own ties or sort of gangsters or whatever.

50:57And their aims might not always align. But what is true is that there are a lot of Chinese gangsters, like this broken tooth guy we mentioned before, who did time in China and then left China and sort of in shame, but then have set up places around the world where, as part of their business empire, which is often a criminal business empire, they also set up cultural groups that might be like a chamber of commerce or it might be called the Hongmen associations, which are basically the idea of them is they promote Chinese interests and they bring Chinese businesses together and they always go out of their way to do certain things like advocating for the reunification of China and Taiwan that kind of thing right and being very anti-Hong Kong and there are occasionally sort of like some signs that they might get involved in sort of like violence against like Hong Kong and pro-democracy protesters abroad that kind of thing they're very useful to the Chinese government or to sectors of the Chinese government and one thing that we are really really scared about right now is um it turned out it came out last year that um the fuzhan government well the fuzhan police department i think in china which is a place in china they've set up 54 i think so far um sort of illegal police stations around the world and all these different countries are secret police stations which they said were partly to tackle local um crime and um things like things like scams and online gambling and deal with their citizens and persuade them to come home if they break the law.

52:22There have been quite a lot of signs they've actually been quite involved in trying to influence politics in different countries and that they also are sometimes used to, let's say a Chinese student is found to have said something that wasn't very flattering about China during a history lesson at uni, then they maybe bring them in and just have a quiet word with them, remind them they're an ambassador for China, they know where their family lives. And it's very, very sinister. But these places have cropped up pretty much everywhere we've seen the scam stuff, right? So they're in Cambodia, they're in Croatia, in Montenegro they're like everywhere you see the scams and so we're still trying to like figure out exactly what their relationship is with these scam guys and whether they are kind of furthering the interests of the larger figures while helping to keep down any smaller players that kind of thing we're all very concerned that there's two of these in London and one in Glasgow which are our two hometowns but also where they seem to have been set up the one in Glasgow is um has been set up above a Chinese restaurant that has been linked to the triad since the 80s.

53:20Known triad restaurant. Yeah, exactly. And the ones in London seem to have been set up in the business premises of Chinese business owners who, at least one of them, has some pretty dodgy connections with Chinese gangsters in London, people who have been done in the past for massive money laundering, for brothel keeping, for drug trafficking, but sort of the whole cohort, really. so we're still trying to tease out exactly what this relationship is between these sort of envoys of the chinese government and police around the world and these pretty horrific local gangster that run businesses um and that's going to take us a long time to figure out but yeah it is really scary it can almost sound like a little bit conspiratorial saying like i was just going to say it sounds like a conspiracy theory like all the chinese have secret police stations and it's like people right now are like oh come on red scare propaganda the police stations are i mean we we went to the police station in London yesterday, it's in Croydon, and then we followed some addresses linked to these scam sites where they're just used as basically a Dropbox for thousands of companies registered that run these scam operations in Cambodia.

54:25So you just go to these doors, you just see piles and piles of letters, all addressed from people saying like, most likely, please, can I have my money back? And also the tax man saying, who the hell is this company? We need money. And there's just thousands of letters in these dead addresses, right? And And you can look this up quite easily about the Chinese police station. And the main concern has been that political link, right? And then there's one in Chinatown in New York, for instance, and that's got quite a lot of high profile attention. But the relationship between organized crime groups and the Chinese state has been a pragmatic thing for the Chinese government for decades.

55:00And you can even see it when the Brits were leaving Hong Kong, there was basically a conversation between the Beijing government coming in and the current, the triad gangs that were inside the territory. And there was a really high murder rate. Hong Kong was a very violent place at that time. And they had a word with them saying, listen, you can operate. You can do your illegal gambling. You can do your prostitution. You can do loan sharking. But you've got to bring the violence down. We want tourists to come here. We want banks to come and settle here. Keep this place safe. And you guys control the vice and we'll let you operate.

55:32And from that, they've also said in more recent years, oh also there's a protest that's a pro-Hong Kong one can you go out and just beat the crap out of the protesters who are who are fighting for Hong Kong and the guys who go and attack these people on the street are the triads the Chinese mafia but it's now expanded where China have said to organized crime groups increasingly listen we don't want Ukraine instability in our country and that goes for drugs and for violence for moving weapons but we will turn somewhat of a blind eye if you go and operate in different partner countries that we have around the world where you can do some criminal activity but the exchange for that is you know you don't take the piss too much if we say calm down on some things you do that but also you act as a pro-china mouthpiece through semi-legitimized chinese business organizations and then we won't look too heavily into what you do in the special economic zone that we give you so there is a relationship between Chinese organized crime and the Chinese state at some levels, because you cannot have tens and tens of thousands of slaves and enormous slavery scam compounds just on the countries bordering China right next door.

56:47You cannot have that without some form of permission from the Chinese state. There is a strong relationship there, but it does change and it's complicated to understand. And And there are Chinese police trying to stop it and Chinese government, but there are ties with the government to these organised crime groups that are incredibly strong. There's also been a marked shift over the last couple of years of these places primarily targeting Chinese speakers on the Chinese mainland to targeting Europeans and Americans, Australians, but also Chinese speakers in these countries. So I think there probably has been a point at which the Chinese government's had a bit of a work with people and been like, you're embarrassing us back home, can you change your target audience to other people around the world?

57:28I think that's probably an arrangement that's been reached. I wondered about that because I was thinking, do they just scam Chinese people? And then either the population got so educated that these are obviously scams that it didn't work or but there's a there's a lot there's a lot of people in China. Right. So I feel like you'd never run out of victims or. Yeah, my question was, or did they say, hey, look, if you're going to steal from people, don't do it in a place where they then report it to us and we have to do something about it and we can't do it to Chinese people in Canada because I get we all get these scam texts.

57:55but for some reason, and I don't know, I don't think I'm alone on this, but I definitely got more of them in Chinese, which is weird because while I can read Mandarin, they don't know that. And why am I getting voicemails from them in Chinese? Why am I getting Mandarin texts? Why are they always Asian women? Like some of it is probably targeted because I do podcast episodes like this where the CCP is, I mean, I've had agents of them come after me for various things or try and trick me to do things. But a lot of it's just scammy stuff. And I found that, you know, if you do an image search on the Chinese internet, you can find the picture that they sent me, even if it's not on the United States or the, sorry, the rest of the world internet.

58:35But some of it is definitely just in Chinese. And on previous episodes of the show, on the episode that we did about the pig butchering scam, which again was episode 737 with Winston Sturzel for people who want to go check it out, we actually crafted a response text in Chinese that said something like, actually this number belongs to, and I can't remember if it's like the minister of agriculture, secretary of the agriculture, lose my number. And it's all in Chinese. And a lot of times people would respond and they'd be like, wow, I'm really sorry. It's a wrong number. Please forgive me. And they'd use all these honorable terms.

59:04But now I'm like, crap. What if the person texting me is actually just in a cage, you know, essentially somewhere in Cambodia. Now I'm scaring them for no reason. Like maybe I got off their phone list, but I'm not really doing anything to help them. I've stopped saying that to people. I've had the normal texts come in. And sometimes it starts off as, hey, do you fancy earning a bit of money working part-time from home? You know, it's not always, hey, I think you look really good looking. Oh, thank you, ridiculous model that would obviously talk to me in real life. Don't be so hard on your show.

59:35Sometimes it's just, it's quite like, you know, the part-time work ones. And I've just started saying, are you enslaved in a Southeast Asian compound? Wow. And I've met victims from saying that. So at first they go, no, I don't know what you're talking about. And I go, no, it's okay. I'm a journalist. I've written these pieces. I understand your situation. Are you allowed to leave? Are you in touch with your family? And I've had maybe three or four people who have responded saying, yes, I am stuck. I don't know where I am. I was brought here. I was brought there. And then they would give you a little bit of details and they'd say, I'm very, very scared.

1:00:07I'm being beaten. I might be in Thailand, but maybe I'm in another country nearby. I don't know. My boss is coming. I need to go. And then maybe they've gotten contact once or twice more. And then the contact usually goes dark. Wow. So people have actually responded to that. So I mean, I would urge people to say that the next time someone tries to comment, say, like, are you being held against your will? And just spread this around the world as much as we can, that people are victims on that other side. I totally agree with that. But I would also say, though, just to be a little bit careful. And if it's better to say to people, like, here's a number you can call, like, here's Gassos' number, speak to them, for example.

1:00:42Because I've heard from Gassos that there's been a few rare occasions where I think maybe someone's boss was standing over their shoulder when someone's asking that question. and then they've said, I'm here, I'm not allowed to leave unless I get this money. And then someone's felt obliged to just put some money into the system because, and then it becomes part of the scam, you know? Part of the scam, yeah. Yeah, so it's really difficult. So I think you're absolutely right to like speak to someone like a human being, ask them if that's happening, ask them if you can help, give them the right numbers or website addresses or whatever, but definitely never ever hand over any money.

1:01:11I mean, they are really, really good at doing it. And there's a line that all of the scammers use, which is there's no unscammable person. There's just the wrong script. And that Vietnamese girl that I spoke about earlier that we luckily helped get out of a compound a few weeks ago, she had her phone taken off her when they knew that I was trying to get people involved. And then when she was in the police station, she was now talking to me on Instagram. So we communicate that way. Previously, we were speaking on Telegram on her phone, but the scammers now had her phone and they got in touch and said, what are you doing?

1:01:42Who are you? And I explained, well, I know you guys are human traffickers doing scams, like blah, blah, blah. and they were like, no, no, no, brother, brother, we're not. This lady, she owes us money and she wanted to come work here as a job to pay off some of the money. This is a labor dispute. No one's been hurt. And like, if you weren't as aware of it, you could even look at that and go like, man, you guys are pretty convincing. Like, yeah, like maybe this was a labor dispute. Maybe you should get her back. Maybe she shouldn't leave. But it gets into your head really quickly. They're really, really, really effective at it.

1:02:14And what was interesting was they changed effortlessly between the Cambodian language, Chinese and English, because there must have been probably about six or seven people in the room all messaging to each of my different queries. And then they would pass it and I would translate it on Google Translate. But it was so fluid and so well written, the way that they were explaining the situation. So, yes, and that's the thing to bear in mind. Anyone can be scammed. People aren't idiots, right? These people find really vulnerable people who are a bit down in their luck or having a rough time who can be incredibly intelligent.

1:02:47And it goes that other way for the people who get brought in to be the victims or forced to do it. They're not always people from some really rural part of some very far away country that might not have heard about these kind of things. A lot of them have, and some of them are really intelligent people with degrees. One victim we spoke to recently was from India and had a really good degree in engineering, really, really smart, intelligent person, but was just looking for a new job and just got convinced. These people can trick anyone. He thought he was coming to be a construction engineer. Wow.

1:03:17Yeah. And when he arrived and they said, how good are you using a computer? That's all that matters. And he was like, where would that matter? Right. He's like, hey, you know, guys know, you guys don't seem to understand engineering very well. Oh, wait a minute. I'm in a cave. Yeah. God, it's so horrible. So, okay. So people on both ends are actually victims. If we get a scam call, yeah, I was going to say, what do we reply with? Can we, can we give them a hotline? Can I put that in the show notes? You know, hey, are you being held against your will? If so, here's a place that you can text when you are away from your boss using, I don't know, a hidden app or something like that.

1:03:48Yeah, absolutely. Global anti-scam organization is probably the best one. We can like we will give you a few links that you can put to the bottom if people do want to just have a few links to just, you know, respond with like talk to these people, talk to these people. Yeah, because I think, you know, we had thousands of people responding with I'm an official in the Chinese Communist Party. Don't ever text me again, which was kind of entertaining because the people get freaked out or they don't care. A lot of them don't care because they're like, whatever, I'm in Cambodia. You can't touch me and I'm not Chinese anyways.

1:04:14Or you can tell someone else is typing because the language gets really weird and then they're just cursing at you and you're like, this is the boss. This isn't the scammer. This is somebody else who's got worse English and is really angry because I've had that happen too. But I would love to figure out how we can mobilize the Jordan Harbinger show army to when they get these, they're now just create, they're just awareness machines where it's like, hey, if you're stuck somewhere, here's how you report it. and here's how you maybe try to get out of there. And people have escaped. Because they might not know that people have escaped.

1:04:44They might not know that people are actually looking for this and that there's international attention on this issue and that if they can escape where they are, if they know where they are, they can get home. They might not even know that. Yeah, absolutely. What can we even do besides that? Because it seems like if there's 100 ,000 people being held against their will, where do you begin to chip away at this problem? A lot of pressure could be put onto people's governments in the developed countries that they might be listening to this podcast on. You know, I mean, we were talking about these Chinese police stations, but a big aspect of them is that these business people or officials or whatever they are, have really tight relationships with the host government.

1:05:22And the one who runs the one in Croydon in London was pictured with two of the last few prime ministers, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, at constant events with them. The one who runs the one in Glasgow has been pictured several times who's the former First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, who's a sexually assaulting, horrible person anyway, so he's stupid enough to get involved with them. But there's a kind of cohort of politicians who might now be very, very vocal about being cautious of taking money from Russian officials and oligarchs and want to crack down on that cash. But we were talking about it for years, right?

1:06:00We were talking about the dangers of Russian money for a long time, and it took the Ukraine war for governments to actually really start to take that a lot more seriously. China is getting so heavily involved in so many countries because it has the capital to invest into governments, to really favourable relationships. I think we need a conversation, a lot of developed nations, about our relationship with China and about what the consequences of that are. There should be a lot more countries in the world right now speaking out about this, especially considering how many of their own citizens are being scammed out of their life savings.

1:06:35But it's very difficult to find. So Cambodia's had issues in the past. For a long time, it was seen as a place that people went to for child sexual abuse, for example. And the fact that there was such an international outcry and people did put pressure on their politicians to bring it up with Cambodian politicians and there was a lot written about it and people shared those things, that embarrassed them hugely. And they have worked really hard for the last 15 years to completely clean that side of the country up. I mean, it's never going to completely disappear, right? But it's certainly not any more than any other country now.

1:07:06So I think that when an issue becomes big enough that it starts to embarrass a country like Cambodia, which does rely on tourism and does have relationships with lots of other countries, economic relationships with lots of different countries, having that kind of pressure put on them can actually make a big difference to policymaking. So it's not kind of a hopeless case. Thank you very much. What's next for you two? I mean, you're always off on some sort of adventure, if you can call it that. What are you going to be doing next? Right now we're finishing up an investigation for an NGO into small arms trafficking around Southeast Asia, which has been fun.

1:07:41And then we've just got a few more projects, mostly, again, kind of remaining around the Southeast Asia area for the next year, looking at the scam compounds, looking at human trafficking, looking at the links to other forms of organized crime. And then we've got the Cambodian elections coming up in July. It's pretty obvious what way it's going to go. You know, there's no other party. But I'm just kind of trying to put all that together because Cambodia, once this prime minister wins this election, he'll pretty soon be passing over power to his son. Oh, it's that kind of election. He's been in power for a long time.

1:08:13So we'll be monitoring how that kind of changes and how organized crime groups will develop. Wow. Really, really unbelievable. Small arms trafficking sounds interesting as well. I mean, we're obviously interested in the same stuff. The difference is you are right there with front row seats, court side seats to a lot of this. Aren't you worried about your safety? I mean, you guys live in Cambodia and here you are like, here's a criminal and look at this criminal. This politician's involved in crime and look at this place over here. There's tons of crime. I'm going to go there and myself and look at it.

1:08:42It's like, what? How are you safe doing that? I mean, just in case my mom listens to this, everything's under control. We've got protocols for everything. But no, I mean that. Yeah, it is nerve wracking sometimes. I think also, though, like, I mean, you know, we're in different kind of dangerous situations. It's like, you know, places in Southeast Asia, like Scam Compounds, where the guys come out holding their tasers, staring me up and down, ready to do something. Or in Afghanistan, when the Taliban is, you know, looking for a little bit of a scrap. And it's all a bit scary. But also just bearing in mind all the time that you are a white Western journalist.

1:09:19You're still at risk, but the risks that we take are nowhere near. what local journalists in places like Afghanistan or in Southeast Asia take all the time. It's a lot less problematic for a government there to disappear a journalist or to arrest a journalist that's from that country. We have the benefit of embassies making a load of noise or NGOs being really vocal. So yeah, it can be a bit dangerous, but it's not nearly as dangerous for us as it is for local journalists and geo-investigators who are really risking their lives. We can actually leave the country when we have something sensitive coming out, whereas our Cambodian colleagues cannot a lot of the time.

1:09:58That's a good point. Although that's not going to make your parents feel better. Thank you two very much. Really interesting. We'll have to have you back on sometime. I'm sure there's a lot more we can talk about. But again, I really appreciate your time and you're doing really important work. I mean, most of the stuff that I've read about this is from you guys. And so I think you're probably on the cutting edge of this horrific sort of stuff. And I think but for your guys work, we wouldn't necessarily know how horrible this really is. So hopefully that leads to the unwinding of some of this, at least in the long term.

1:10:30Thank you. I hope so much. Now I've got some thoughts on this episode. But before I get into that, here's a preview of my conversation with a former Homeland Security agent who reluctantly got involved in chasing down global child trafficking. Did you know that there are more people enslaved right now than there ever were before in history? Here's a quick listen. 30 million slaves in the world, is that correct? I mean, that's insane and is correct. 10 million of those are children who are either in slave labor, organ harvesting, or sex trafficking. The traffickers are trying to get these kids into our country and into our black sex market because that's where you can make the most money.

1:11:09Again, we are the demand. We drive this. it's a$150 billion a year business by most estimates. The amount of money made every year selling children, with that money you could buy every single Starbucks franchise in the world, every single NBA franchise, every team, and still have enough money left over to send every child in America to college for four years. That's per year selling human beings. We go online in the dark net, And honestly, Jordan, it was about 10 times worse than my mind could have conceived. The things that people do to children, I could not comprehend. We helped rescue a little girl who was smuggled in from Mexico, taken to New York City between the ages of 12 and 17 years old.

1:11:54In New York City, she was raped over 60 ,000 times. They bring them here and they just have these clients lined up and they drive her to this house, this hotel, this bar, and she's raped, I mean, easily 15 to 20 times within a 24-hour period. I mean, and this is the life of thousands, tens of thousands of children in the United States right now. Just like in the 18th, 19th century, no one's really talking about it. It's too hard, people look away, they don't want to engage, and that's where I get frustrated. Like, look what's happening right now. Like, I'm not going to get into the argument, the whole debate with the right, I'm just using it as an example, but governments are shifting now.

1:12:32People are getting so loud, we're going to see changes. But I would love to see someday that happen for child rape victims. I'd like to see something so loud in every country that we have riots and people screaming because the children don't have a voice. You know, they can't protest. They can't rally. And they're the most precious in the world. And yet they're being exploited, trafficked, kidnapped, raped by the millions. For more, including how Tim Ballard became involved with busting child traffickers and rescuing their victims, check out episode 369 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. This tale goes even deeper than that.

1:13:09Honestly, folks, there's so much that we didn't even cover because we either didn't have time or can't. We ended up working on something shortly after I recorded this interview. There's going to be more to come on that as well. You'd be surprised, right? People think, well, why don't you just call your embassy or get in contact or doesn't your family know you're missing? Several embassies have pleaded with the Cambodian government to intervene and have essentially been ignored. These crime organizations are loaded. They have enough to bribe their way into and out of pretty much anything. Meanwhile, the U.S.

1:13:38embassy has been quite careful not to speak out too much about the human trafficking crisis, mostly because they then have to downgrade Cambodia as a country in the next trafficking in persons report, which is something that actually ended up happening already, which means the U.S. government would have to then cut funding at a time where, frankly, we're concerned about ceding even more leverage to China, who does not care at all about organized crime going on or human trafficking in a country. One of the most mental things about this whole thing, which newspapers obviously won't really want to touch either, is that in Cambodia, Nathan and Lindsay are pretty sure, and they didn't say this on the record, but I got their permission to repeat this.

1:14:17The Cambodian prime minister's nephew is involved in a lot of this. So of course the embassies are getting ignored. He's the same guy that was once accused of trafficking millions of dollars of heroin into Australia, hidden inside timber. I mean, this guy, there's some charmers running things over there. Now, why do I do this kind of thing? What's the point? Is it just to bring you a random depressing news article? No. The most effective weapon against organized crime groups perpetuating scams and abusing workers is simply making what they do unprofitable. In other words, boosting awareness about the prevalence and the dangers of online and telephone scams, educating people how to spot the signs so they don't hand over money in the first place.

1:14:55And look, if the scam doesn't continue, the human trafficking will lessen. And that's the real cost, right? These people who are trapped in these prison camps being forced to scam old people out of money or not so old people out of money. A continually updated searchable list of thousands of known scam websites. In other words, if you get a site and you think you can invest in it, go ahead and search it. So in other words, people thinking about making an investment can check any sites or links they're using to make sure it hasn't already been identified as a con. We're going to link to that in the show notes.

1:15:22It's run by an NGO called Global Anti-Scam. Also, where there's smoke, there's fire. It's not just human trafficking. These same places have illegal logging, wildlife trafficking. We did an episode on that, episode 545. King's Romans Casino, other special economic zone casinos have a lot of that wildlife trafficking. A lot of the logging goes on around it, the human trafficking, the scamming. The sex work, the sex work with minors being trafficked. It's all one sort of disgusting Sodom and Gomorrah over there. And Rachel's episode, again, episode 545, super interesting. She went undercover as a prostitute to uncover wildlife trafficking.

1:15:56So go ahead and get in on that. Also in the show notes, we'll include the URL, the website that you can send when you get a scam text and you think that person might be forced into the scam work. You can simply ask them. Sometimes they'll tell you the truth and you can send them to this organization and And hopefully something can be done. This is a matter of international pressure and exposure. And that's all we can really do here. Big thank you to Nathan and Lindsay. Again, all links to their work will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. You can also search any show, any answer we've ever given on this show.

1:16:25jordanharbinger.com slash AI is our AI chatbot. Transcripts in the show notes, videos on YouTube. I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. And hey, advertisers, deals, discounts, all the ways to support the show at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. And yes, I'm teaching you how to connect with other people using the same software systems and tiny habits that I use to manage all my relationships, manage my network of folks, dig the well before you get thirsty, folks. Make those relationships before you need them.

1:16:56JordanHarbinger.com slash course. Many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to that course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Emilio Campo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's interested in scams, human trafficking, organized crime, definitely share this episode with them. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

1:17:28In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time.

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From the publisher

Nathan Paul Southern (@NathanPSouthern) and Lindsey Kennedy (@LindsAKennedy) are investigative journalists working to bring awareness to the growing issue of cyber-slavery in Southeast Asia facilitated by Chinese triads with links to local government and law enforcement agencies.

What We Discuss with Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy:

Aided by corrupt government and law enforcement agencies, organized criminals hold thousands of people in modern-day slavery in Southeast Asia, forcing them to run cyber-scams worldwide.
Victims are lured by promises of lucrative online trading jobs, and abducted against their will when they arrive — for a minimum of six months — to work as cyber-slaves.
These captives are beaten, electrocuted, and tortured if they try to escape or don't make enough money. Suicides, with victims jumping from balconies to their death, have become commonplace.
The Cambodian Prime Minister's nephew has been implicated in the human trafficking trade, which is why embassies have been ignored when they plead for intervention.
What those of us in the Western world can do to fight back against these organized crime groups and ensure their dirty deeds can no longer be done dirt cheap enough to turn a profit.
And much more...

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/833

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833: Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy | Sourcing Cyber-Slavery

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