[HN Gopher] Leaked chats expose the daily life of a scam compoun...
___________________________________________________________________
Leaked chats expose the daily life of a scam compound's enslaved
workforce
https://archive.is/mCEHR
Author : smurda
Score : 260 points
Date : 2026-02-02 05:10 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| alwa wrote:
| https://archive.is/mCEHR
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The more senior boss, who went by the name Da Hai
|
| Weird. In Wired's own graphic of the org chart, this person
| appears, but he's labeled "SEA" instead of "DA HAI".
| jtvjan wrote:
| In the chart, it says Da Hai (dahai, lit. big sea) above
| "SEA", which means 'ocean'.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Yes, I know, but the intended audience can't read Da Hai .
|
| The chart and the article are both created by Wired; it's
| strange for them to refer to him one way in the chart and
| another way in the article.
|
| I'm curious about the ethnic makeup of the "team leader"
| level. One of them is called "Ted", and seems to also be
| called Te De ["te de"]. The Te De could just be because
| everyone in the upper levels is Chinese, but the English-
| language post from Ted shown in the article doesn't really
| suggest a native English speaker. (And does suggest an
| emotional loyalty to China.)
|
| Amani doesn't sound like a Chinese name or like the English
| name of a Chinese person.
| bandrami wrote:
| "Amani" is an East African name
| walterbell wrote:
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/feds-seize-15-bi...
|
| _> [US] Federal prosecutors have seized $15 billion from the
| alleged kingpin of an operation that used imprisoned laborers to
| trick unsuspecting people into making investments in phony funds,
| often after spending months faking romantic relationships with
| the victims._
|
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-29/china-executes-online...
|
| _> China has executed 11 people involved in criminal gangs in
| Myanmar, including online scam ringleaders. Their crimes included
| "intentional homicide, intentional injury, unlawful detention,
| fraud and casino establishment"_
|
| https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/3184205/why-china-was-so-k...
|
| _> Chen 's case might prove more complicated since the US had
| seized a large amount of his cryptocurrency assets, but he was
| now in custody in China.. "If China doesn't cooperate, it will be
| extremely difficult for the US to investigate Chen."_
| giarc wrote:
| >seized $15 billion from the alleged kingpin
|
| I know the answer but why amass $15 billion, more money than a
| person could spend in a lifetime, and still conduct this scam?
| You think a person would say "enough" and escape to a beach
| somewhere.
| fragmede wrote:
| I'm not sure what to call the bias but the people who have
| done that we don't hear about so we're only hearing about the
| ones that don't do that. Who knows how many ruffians and
| scofflaws are out there on beaches, going unknown!
| giarc wrote:
| Good point - it's like the opposite of survivorship bias?
| We only hear about the ones that don't survive and get
| caught. The "survivors" we don't hear about all the
| criminals who are still at large I guess.
| miohtama wrote:
| Because it was old Bitcoin, which was confiscated long time
| ago and did 100x.
| gkanai wrote:
| China executes 11 members of Myanmar scam mafia
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2gdrvy9gjo
|
| China executes four more Myanmar mafia members
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg4e9eqz4rxo
| v3ss0n wrote:
| They are Ethnic Chinese who were operating scam centers in
| collaboration with junta at northern area Laukkai.
|
| There are more at shwe Koko area.
| simianwords wrote:
| were they Chinese citizens?
| sigwinch wrote:
| China claims jurisdiction because 20 Chinese citizens were
| murdered, if that's what you're wondering.
| dmix wrote:
| They are usually Chinese triad gangsters who operate scam
| businesses and illegal casinos in south east asia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triad_(organised_crime)
| master_crab wrote:
| The BBC article is interesting:
|
| _With these executions Beijing is sending a message of
| deterrence to would-be scammers. But the business has now moved
| to Myanmar 's border with Thailand, and to Cambodia and Laos,
| where China has much less influence.
|
| Hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked to run
| online scams in Myanmar and elsewhere in South East Asia,
| according to estimates by the UN. Among them are thousands of
| Chinese people, and their victims who they swindle billions of
| dollars from are mainly Chinese too.
|
| Frustrated by the Myanmar military's refusal to stop the scam
| business, from which it was almost certainly profiting, Beijing
| tacitly backed an offensive by an ethnic insurgent alliance in
| Shan State in late 2023. The alliance captured significant
| territory from the military and overran Laukkaing, a key border
| town._
|
| China exercising profound influence over their near abroad.
| axus wrote:
| And they didn't even have to concoct a lie to justify it
| bandris wrote:
| Complementary movie on this topic: "No More Bets" from 2023
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_More_Bets
| Epskampie wrote:
| Horrifying read. I recently read a book about a girl who was
| pressed into prostitution, and this reads much the same. [1]
| Before I was convinced that slavery was mostly a thing of the
| past, how awful to find out this isn't true.
|
| 1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6515858-slave-girl
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Why would a criminal organization that trafficked you into a
| place where you have no legal recourse ever stop exploiting
| you?
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| Same reason your government doesn't set taxes to 100%, has
| rules for themselves they at least sort of follow, and only
| treats people like shit when they've got a pretext. If they
| make it "too bad" then they'll have to piss away a whole lot
| more money on ensuring compliance, it'll threaten stability,
| etc.
|
| Slaves are the least motivated and least productive form of
| workers. Slaves who know they're slaves are worse still.
| Shooting for maximum extraction of labor doesn't actually get
| you the best ROI. Don't get me wrong, they'll still treat you
| like shit. But they maximize their "take home" by not going
| too far with it.
|
| I get that we all want to turn off our brains and hand wring
| because "criminals" or whatever but the dynamics of human
| organizations are unchanged regardless of what side of the
| law they're operating on.
| mapt wrote:
| Slavery was replaced by wage labor because it was more
| productive in the long run - that's part of the economists
| founding narrative. But I think they tend not to emphasize
| that it was also simply because it was a lot more flexible
| for a business in a competitive market to rent than to own,
| ceter paribus.
|
| Quasi-slave status persisted in many situations for a long
| time, being a local maxima for various management
| situations. Penal slaves in the postwar American South were
| in many cases treated worse than their chattel slave
| parents/grandparents partially because they were rented out
| by their owners, who didn't pay for them, to managers who
| rented and didn't have any stake in their survival.
| alpinisme wrote:
| These just-so narratives about how slavery was abolished
| for rational economic reasons can be quite frustrating.
| Obviously historically most people who owned slaves
| didn't stop owning slaves because it was more profitable
| to give freedom and pay. Nor because they were competing
| with neighbors who had turned to cheaper wage labor. They
| did so because they were forced. Slavery was a topic of
| great political turmoil.
|
| Is the argument that it would have come back if it were
| really cheaper? Or is the argument just so above the fray
| that the political turmoil is part of the supposed
| "costs" that were saved by abolition?
|
| I'm not trying to directly engage the question whether
| slavery was more profitable than wage labor. It just
| always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as
| the ones that moved history.
| estearum wrote:
| And vice versa, the people who pushed for abolition (in
| the US anyway) did not do it for economic reasons either.
| It was a deeply moral mission initiated by, basically,
| religious fundamentalists. Then followed on by more
| mainstream liberals, still for ethical reasons, and then
| followed on by the masses once war broke out over it.
| graemep wrote:
| A similar pattern in the UK, bar the war.
|
| There was use of military force to suppress the slave
| trade but not actual war
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa_Squadron
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| >These just-so narratives about how slavery was abolished
| for rational economic reasons can be quite frustrating.
| Obviously historically most people who owned slaves
| didn't stop owning slaves because it was more profitable
| to give freedom and pay. Nor because they were competing
| with neighbors who had turned to cheaper wage labor. They
| did so because they were forced. Slavery was a topic of
| great political turmoil.
|
| These sorts of ignorant narratives about how humanity
| abolished slavery out of the goodness of its heart can be
| so frustrating.
|
| If slavery was so much more profitable that those
| engaging in it were the dominant economic force in
| society it never would have been abolished, at the very
| least because so much other economic activity would have
| depended upon that surplus (stolen from the slaves).
|
| This isn't so say that moral factors didn't matter, they
| absolutely did but if we couldn't afford abolish slavery
| or or if we did despite not being able to afford to or if
| free workers were substantially worse than slaves at the
| margin we'd have been out competed by some other society
| that didn't make that choice.
|
| >Or is the argument just so above the fray that the
| political turmoil is part of the supposed "costs" that
| were saved by abolition?
|
| That's certainly part of it. It takes a lot of constant
| violence to keep people enslaved. You can shit-can all
| that administrative overhead if you make people "free"
| (well not all of it, but a lot).
|
| >It just always annoys me when people treat the economic
| forces as the ones that moved history.
|
| It annoys me when people think we can just do what we
| want. We are fundamentally tied to what we can afford, in
| the most general sense of that word. Our freedom of
| action is limited.
|
| Edit: We'd all be better off if everyone stopped thinking
| of slavery as a binary and instead as the fraction of a
| worker's surplus that is taken by threat of violence.
| Even if where one draws the line of "taken by violence"
| varies, this at least enables one to make better
| comparisons across centuries and locations. But that
| leads to some deeply uncomfortable questions for many so
| of course we won't do that.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> It takes a lot of constant violence to keep people
| enslaved_
|
| Or digital transaction cancel-sanction-kill switch tied
| to biometric identity of fugitive human assets.
|
| Paper passport hostages are crude approximation.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| > It just always annoys me when people treat the economic
| forces as the ones that moved history.
|
| Why? The economics of oil, cotton and silver, for
| example, are undeniably important forces in moving the
| history of many regions.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Contrary to what most people seem to think about the
| past, slavery was oft seen as naturally repulsive even
| thousands of years back. It required regular defense. In
| Aristotle's Politics [1], written some 2400+ years ago,
| he felt compelled to lay out just such a defense and it
| was, by far, his weakest argument. He clearly started at
| his conclusion and worked backwards from there, instead
| of working forward from first principles and he did in
| other topics. The reason it's relevant is that he did
| accurately predict the end of slavery:
|
| "For if every instrument could accomplish its own work,
| obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the
| statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which,
| says the poet, 'Of their own accord entered the assembly
| of the Gods.' If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave
| and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide
| them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters
| slaves."
|
| There were thousands of years of efforts to end slavery,
| some countries would occasionally succeed at such only to
| see it spring right back. Yet following the industrial
| revolution it began rapidly disappearing everywhere that
| had gone through industrialization + urbanization. The
| issue in your mental model is that you're only
| considering local effects over very immediate time
| frames. Think about the bigger picture.
|
| Industrialization drove big money away from farms and
| into factories, away from rural scarcely populated rural
| areas into densely populated urban areas packed with very
| poor potential workers. As soon as the necessity argument
| for slavery became plainly absurd, to say nothing of the
| issue of industrialization also reducing the need for so
| many workers even on plantations, slavery wasn't long for
| this world. This says nothing about actual slave holders
| who, as you said, did not just go quietly into the night.
| But as their economic might relatively waned, so did
| their influence.
|
| [1] - https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.mb.txt
| jltsiren wrote:
| Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian
| Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the
| Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly,
| Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity
| spread, slaves were no longer conveniently available, and
| the society had to adapt.
|
| In densely populated areas, that meant systems like
| serfdom. Agricultural land was a scarce resource mostly
| owned by the elite. Most peasants were nominally free but
| tied to the land, with obligations towards whoever owned
| the land. Peasants farmed land owned by the local lord
| and paid rent with labor. And if the lord sold the land,
| the peasants and their obligations went with it.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| >Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian
| Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the
| Church opposed keeping Christian slaves.
|
| It disappeared because it was replaced by indentured
| servitude on the low end and restriction and tax on who
| could do what trades on the high end. Because the lords
| own a huge fraction of all the farmland. So this is very
| much a "you're nominally free but you're gonna be share-
| cropping your old master's land" situation for the former
| serfs. An improvement, sure. But not nearly as big of one
| as the history books tout.
|
| Lucky for them that didn't last very long until the black
| death made labor way more valuable so a lot of the rules
| got eased up and once that unleashed a bunch more
| productivity at the margin, well there was no going back.
|
| >Most peasants were nominally free but tied to the land,
| with obligations towards whoever owned the land. Peasants
| farmed land owned by the local lord and paid rent with
| labor. And if the lord sold the land, the peasants and
| their obligations went with i
|
| I'm not saying they're equivalent, but there's a very
| good comparison to most professional licensure to be made
| here.
| graemep wrote:
| Serfdom was a huge improvement. Serfs could not be taken
| away from their homes and families. They could own
| things. They had far more rights.
| master_crab wrote:
| _Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian
| Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the
| Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly,
| Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity
| spread, slaves were no longer conveniently available, and
| the society had to adapt._
|
| This requires a very bold, 115 font asterisk. Or rather
| it's plain wrong. Mass slavery in Europe didn't really
| end until serfdom was abolished (1800s). And let's not
| even get started on the African slave trade which was
| managed and prospered off of from Europeans, both from
| direct sales and indirectly from slave labor. Also, many
| of those slaves converted to Christianity, so it wasn't
| based on any religious affiliation.
| graemep wrote:
| It was abolished in western Europe. Even in eastern
| Europe serfdom was not the same as slavery.
|
| The African slave trade happened between west Africa and
| the Americas, and Africa and west Asia. Not with Europe.
|
| Slave owners refused to free slves who converted, and
| tired to prevent them being converted :
| https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/protestant-slavery
| thelock85 wrote:
| I'm a bit confused by your reply. Pretty sure the rulers
| of the Dahomey kingdom weren't trading with people of the
| "Americas" but with Europeans, before and after its
| abolishment across Western Europe. In the book Fistful of
| Shells, historian Toby Green argues the scale of the
| trade was only made possible by European traders flooding
| West Africa with cheap currency (shells which had little
| value to them but that could be collected in the billions
| from Brazil and the Indo-Pacific).
| graemep wrote:
| My points are:
|
| 1. slavery in Western Europe had been abolished long
| before the transatlantic slave trade - the Europeans were
| intermediaries, but there was little to no slavery in
| their home countries. There were many court rulings in
| England against slavery.
|
| 2. not enslaving Christians played a role in abolishing
| slavery in medieval Europe
|
| 3. serfdom was a far better condition that being a slave
|
| 4. Slave owners in the Americas opposed the conversion of
| slaves to Christianity. they also censored the version of
| the Bible available to slaves very heavily.
|
| 5. The claim about mass slavery within Europe is
| misleading on two counts: serfs are not just chattel
| slaves (they had rights), and Western Europe was very
| different from Eastern Europe.
|
| https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-
| me/blog/bl...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain#Judicial
| _de...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Select_Parts_of_the_Holy_Bi
| ble...
| mapt wrote:
| Debt/war/penal/chattel slavery was not a particularly
| strong economic activity in Europe in the Middle Ages.
| What we're mostly talking about is agricultural serfdom.
|
| I think the Church had a lot less to do with the end of
| _serfdom_ than the Black Death. The sudden population
| drop mandated that lords who wanted to maintain
| production had to steal peasants from other lords, and
| improve their own compensation/conditions to retain their
| own labor force. And so on for the rest of the economy as
| well.
|
| This represented a massive transfer of power and rights
| downwards... for a while. The late 1300's and 1400's have
| some of the best conditions for the laboring class for
| the previous 400 years or the next 400 years. You can
| hear about some of the dark days to follow in England
| specifically in
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ec9Al5ezYs
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| The Quakers in New England in the 1800s were known for
| (1) being abolitionists and (2) whalers. They often
| bragged about employing freed and escaped slaves on their
| ships. It all sounds great when viewed through a narrow
| lens, but the whale boats had a system of paying the crew
| when they returned successfully. No whales, no pay. Yes,
| the Quakers would risk the cost of the ship and the
| supplies, but they didn't pay for the labor until the end
| ... and then only when the workers actually succeeded.
| The plantations had to capitalize the cost of the slaves
| upfront, a significant cost that often required large
| loans. Before the Civil War, places like New Orleans were
| big banking centers.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| The late 1700s early 1800s British Army and Navy also
| drove a "famously hard" bargain when it came to the
| working situation of the former slaves they employed.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Slavery is alive and well in most part of the world, especially
| south asia, middle east, Russia and Africa,where children with
| no papers are trafficked all the time for the worse things you
| could imagine. I'm not sure what convinced you otherwise.
| segmondy wrote:
| children? how about adults?
|
| After USA destabilized Libya, it turned horrible. In Libya
| there are open slave markets. Adults. Africans trying to who
| travel a great deal trying to get to Europe are often
| kidnapped and kept as slaves in Libya.
|
| https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/the-scandal-of-a-
| sl...
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| I'm well aware of Libya and its open air black slave
| markets, don't worry, an absolute disgrace what happened in
| Libya, and we could talk about Syria too and how The Yasidi
| were enslaved by Daesh...
| a_better_world wrote:
| Also in the USA. We call it "prison labor", and over 1% of
| our adult population is "under correctional control."
|
| Approximately two-thirds (about 61% to over 65%) of the 1.2
| million people incarcerated in US state and federal prisons
| are employed in prison labor, totaling around 800,000
| workers. These workers often perform maintenance tasks for,
| on average, 13 to 52 cents per hour, with many facing forced
| labor conditions https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-
| racism-prison-labor/#...
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| I'm against for-profit prisons, but equating people who
| commit crimes and end up in prison and are forced to work
| as part of their sentence, to people who have committed no
| crimes is a bit ridiculous.
| linguae wrote:
| I understand your sentiment. Unfortunately, the history
| of America's legal system isn't simple. There are people
| in prison who never actually committed a crime, but who
| were convicted because they couldn't afford good legal
| representation during their trial. This
| disproportionately affects the poor, and there are
| correlations between poverty and minority status in
| America. Some people have been able to get their
| convictions overturned, but this typically requires very
| sympathetic people advocating for them.
|
| There's also a very long history in America of laws and
| law enforcement being targeted against poor people and
| minorities. Vagrancy laws
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrancy#Post-Civil_War)
| and modern anti-homeless laws effectively criminalize
| homelessness, and the War on Drugs has had a major
| negative impact on poor people and minorities. Yes, in
| this situation those who have been imprisoned due to such
| laws did violate the law, but such laws, in my opinion,
| serve the function of kicking people while they are down
| rather than addressing the root causes of their poverty.
|
| There's a good argument that having a system of convict
| labor creates a perverse incentive to fill that labor
| pipeline, similar to how well-meaning traffic laws (such
| as speed limits) can be abused (for example, "speed
| traps").
| stevenwoo wrote:
| If you are open to a bit of reading I would recommend The
| New Jim Crow, Usual Cruelty, and Copoganda. The USA has a
| disproportionate amount of prisoners and armed law
| enforcement compared to every other comparable country -
| because it is a hugely profitable industry that self
| perpetuates itself really well- it's similar in a way to
| how hard it is to get any consumer protections in USA
| from predatory and polluting entities.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| There are also slaves you see outside your window without
| recognizing them as such. Homeless people are sometimes
| exploited by gang members who enslave them to either pimp
| themselves out or sell drugs.
|
| One of the side effects of a society tolerating thousands
| of people living in nylon tarps with no real safety net.
| Throaway1985232 wrote:
| drug addicts as well are manipulated by dealers into
| theft & other crimes to pay for their addiction,
| essentially a form of chemical induced slavery
| catigula wrote:
| The West has largely snuffed the horror of slavery in its
| sphere but outside of that it's the wild west. There are
| horrifying things to read if you go down that rabbit hole.
| cobri wrote:
| According to International Justice Mission [1], 50 million
| people are trapped in human trafficking.
|
| 1: https://www.ijm.org/
| anothereng wrote:
| and most of them are in muslim countries.
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| Source for this? This just reads as blatant xenophobia...
| tweetle_beetle wrote:
| Looked this up out of curiosity and came across a non-
| profit which produces reports on the topic and seems to
| be the basis for the Wikipedia article on modern slavery.
|
| According to the 2023 Global Slavery Index, 7-8 of the
| top 10 countries in the world with the highest prevalence
| of modern slavery have a majority religion of Islam
| (Mauritania has disputed figures about religious
| prevalence with Christianity and Islam at similar
| levels). And none of the countries in the top 10 lowest
| prevalence have a majority religion of Islam. Prevalence
| here is used to mean estimated number of people in
| slavery per 1000 population.
|
| However, the absolute figures for total people affected
| are proportional to the size of the country, as you would
| expect, with North Korea and Russia topping the list.
|
| And if you look at driving factors, the US is the leading
| importer of products at risk of being produced by slavery
| by an order of magnitude.
|
| https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > I was convinced that slavery was mostly a thing of the past
|
| Unfortunately, it's the opposite. There's more people in
| enslaved situations now than ever before in all of human
| history.
| thoi4o8094ijoi wrote:
| I wonder what kind of stories one'd hear from scam-centers in
| India.
| Havoc wrote:
| They run the same corporate style operations. Management team,
| performance reviews etc all that jazz
| rainsil wrote:
| We have quite a bit of insight into Indian scam centers thanks
| to the work of scambaiters like Jim Browning[1] who frequently
| hack into their CCTV cameras and desktops.
|
| The big difference is that the workers in India are voluntarily
| employed. In fact they often work for companies that do
| legitimate customer support as well, so they maintain the
| facade of doing "service" for their "clients".
|
| It's also worth noting that Indian call centers focus more on
| tech support scams rather than romance scams.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/JimBrowning
| Incipient wrote:
| I'm surprised anyone here expects these things not to be
| happening. The world outside of our (frankly small) 'western
| bubble' varies from pretty rough to absolutely horrific.
|
| I'm personally not too sure what anyone does about it. People
| left unchecked, to some degree, are awful.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > The world outside of our (frankly small) 'western bubble'
| varies
|
| Even within our "western bubble" horrible like these things
| continue being exposed, at least once every year. Sex
| trafficking rings, slavery and more seems a lot more prevelant
| than seemingly some people like to believe here, even in our
| "western bubble".
|
| One would think the whole Epstein affair that keeps growing
| would make people realize this, even more since there is still
| many individuals who are seemingly shielded for whatever
| reason. And that's what we know about, that they're "willing"
| to share, so imagine the ones who aren't as dumb and big as
| Epstein, they're still around and they're still in our "western
| bubble".
| tdb7893 wrote:
| There's sadly forced labor within the 'western bubble', too. My
| experience from working in tech is the bubble is mostly a small
| set upper middle class people.
|
| As a human it's not like you meet that many people so I think
| necessarily we have a very myopic view of how the world is. I
| mean hell, I often don't even know what people I see regularly
| are going through, there are people I talked to regularly that
| had severely abusive relationships or were going through a
| serious illness and it took a while for me to figure out.
| jezzamon wrote:
| While not as bad, MLM style companies share a lot of the same
| techniques as described in this article. Seems like a lot of
| them hold people primarily by indoctrination rather than actual
| force
| simianwords wrote:
| Does Laos not have a functioning justice and enforcement system
| that the individuals trapped here could not just call them?
| pjc50 wrote:
| The catch-22 is that these people are nearly always immigrants,
| and the criminals have taken their documentation, so the best
| case scenario is they get rescued and then deported, possibly
| via a spell in immigration detention. The worst case scenario
| is the cops turn up, laugh, collect the day's bribe money and
| then the person who called the cops gets beaten.
|
| (this is an important dynamic in sex trafficking as well)
| JustSkyfall wrote:
| The government is somewhat complicit - there are even reports
| that the police take escapees back to their captives for a
| bribe
| simianwords wrote:
| this is far bigger a problem and requires interventions from
| China and India. what good is it to just punish the people
| who ran the scam but not the country that supported it?
| eviks wrote:
| What you see is exactly how those systems function
| astura wrote:
| From TFA:
|
| >The relative leniency of Muzahir's compound, says Harvard's
| Sims, likely stems from scam operations' sense of total control
| in Laos' Golden Triangle region--a zone of the country
| controlled largely by Chinese business interests that has
| become a host to crimes ranging from narcotics and organ sales
| to illegal wildlife trafficking. Even human trafficking victims
| who escape from a compound there, Sims points out, can be
| tracked down relatively easily thanks to Chinese organized
| crime's influence over local law enforcement. "These guys don't
| have to be held in a cell," Sims says. "The whole place is a
| closed circuit."
| andrepd wrote:
| That's why those "scammer gets owned" videos made by douche
| youtubers, full of people gloating in the comments about how
| superior they are, never sat right with me. Those people crammed
| into warehouses are obviously extremely desperate or coerced or
| both.
| scns wrote:
| There is quite a difference between indians going to "work" in
| a shiny building in the business district and native chinese
| held captive in Myanmar and forced to scam people in China.
| jrmg wrote:
| Don't like that you're being downvoted. I've always felt the
| same.
| gambiting wrote:
| I don't - it's the same as people defending thieves and
| burglars because "they are just people and they have families
| to feed". I've had shit stolen from my house before and the
| emotional damage this causes is far greater than anything
| financial - to me, thieves could be shot on the spot,
| literally zero sympathy towards them, they are only one spot
| below actual murderers and rapists in my book.
|
| These guys are the same - do I feel bad for their plight?
| Yes, for sure, I wish we could help them and make sure they
| can live their lives free and not in what is effectively
| slavery. But they are currently "employed" destroying peoples
| lives, so many examples of people losing their lives savings
| to these scammers, many commit suicide due to this. Fucking
| around with them for youtube videos is the least we can do.
| commandersaki wrote:
| You understand the front line of the pig butchering scam
| don't have agency, yet you call them thieves and burglars.
| They're not the ones doing it, it is those who control
| them. Having said that, I neither agree or disagree whether
| youtube videos should gloat about how they've wasted their
| time or whatever.
|
| I think we need to make it practically impossible to run
| the scam by having social media / messaging operators
| shutdown fraudulent accounts, especially if reported.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>They're not the ones doing it, it is those who control
| them
|
| No, it is quite literally them doing it, not the people
| running the operation. Same as if there is an organised
| gang in my area it's the people who are in my house that
| are doing the burglaring, not the people running the
| gang.
|
| And yes, I appreciate very much that they might not have
| any choice in the matter which is why I said, I am
| genuinely sympathetic to their position and I hope we can
| solve this.
| andrepd wrote:
| Thank you for illustrating my point in a far more unhinged
| manner than I could have possibly expected. Someone from a
| first world country in 2026 unironically defending that
| "thieves should be shot" needs to take a hard look at
| himself. Probably a good idea also to read the first few
| pages of Utopia by Thomas More, a fucking _510 year old
| book_ where the author explains why this is such a
| crushingly stupid (not to mention morally repugnant) way of
| thinking.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>needs to take a hard look at himself.
|
| I do every morning, having moral integrity is something
| really important to me. I just still can't get over the
| trauma of having my own home invaded, burglared, and the
| people who did it getting away with it scott free - I
| sincerely hope they get hit by a train and die a very
| painful death.
|
| >> Probably a good idea also to read the first few pages
| of Utopia by Thomas More,
|
| I will do that, it's bedtime for me now but I'll have a
| look tomorrow.
| dudefeliciano wrote:
| A while back I thought I could make a bit of extra cash by
| playing along with these scams, apparently they give returns on
| the first/second round of investment and only run off with the
| money once the sum is large enough for them. Knowing that someone
| may get beaten or worse for losing money prevented me from going
| through with it
| Havoc wrote:
| The returns show are general on app/paper only not something
| you can actually withdraw
| dudefeliciano wrote:
| That makes sense to me and is what I would expect. I have
| seen accounts where people were in fact allowed to withdraw
| their small initial gains (although i can not confirm that
| was the case, maybe they were just trying to save face)
| that's what gave me the idea to scam the scammers in the
| first place.
| nsvd2 wrote:
| They would likely allow you to withdraw some returns but
| not the principle.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Trying to scam the scammers is one of the world's oldest
| ways of getting scammed.
| skeptic_ai wrote:
| They sent me to my usdt wallet. So i actually got it. Of
| course after I earned 30 USD they make it impossible to
| withdraw unless I "invested" 100 usd. Very weird scam to pay
| out 30usd.
|
| So means 1 in 3 people must invest 100 in order for them to
| breakeven, which tbh doesn't make sense.
|
| Also note that came from a random telegram account from
| dubai.
|
| They asked if I wanted to make money etc. I obviously thought
| was a scam. I never expected to really cash out the 30 USD.
| e40 wrote:
| The phrase playing with fire comes to mind.
| jonhohle wrote:
| If you would be able to withdraw (you wouldn't be able to) that
| money has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is from
| other people who were scammed.
|
| No one is going to get beaten because of your interactions with
| scammers. They're going to be beaten because they are enslaved.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Is there an archive link somewhere? All I see is a 21 minute
| podcast I can't listen to without a sub, and a single paragraph
| of copy.
| flancian wrote:
| Found this archive link:
|
| https://archive.is/2026.02.02-090119/https://www.wired.com/s...
| e40 wrote:
| I have noticed a dramatic decline in human scam calls and a
| commensurate increase in ai calls.
| LoveMortuus wrote:
| I wouldn't say I'm enslaved, would be unfair.
|
| That being said, I live in a room rented to me by the company
| that hires me, I work for a customer service center, so it's not
| a construction situation. The reason the company rents us rooms
| is because we're not paid enough to afford normal rent.
|
| All this means that if there's ever a ramp down, I'd be
| immediately jobless and homeless, which does not feel good at
| all...
| nemomarx wrote:
| If you added on top being in a foreign country and needing your
| employer for your visa, I think you'd basically have the same
| situation as the article?
|
| So that's a little precarious. I hope you have some savings
| built up.
| RankingMember wrote:
| A situation like you describe is ripe for abuse. H1Bs here deal
| with similar precariousness, though not on the level of what it
| sounds like you're dealing with. I hope your situation improves
| and you gain some security.
| RandyOrion wrote:
| A related paper interviewing victims of the pig-butchering scams.
|
| "Hello, is this Anna?": Unpacking the Lifecycle of Pig-Butchering
| Scams [1]
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20821
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