Slavery Today is Erected by Cryptocurrency and Social Media

Recording from inside a scam compound

In these human trafficking (HT) cases, unemployed men and women are deceived by recruiters or online ads about overseas jobs in Cambodia, Thailand or other SEA countries [3], if not outright kidnapped. Upon arriving, the recruits are trapped for months to years and forced to run the unsavoury parts of online scams [4] and/or held for ransom to their families [5]. They are taught to target users of social media and dating apps and to patiently drive victims online into burning through all their moneys on well-scripted schemes. Non-performers can suffer beatings [6], electrocutions and rape [7], among others, and are frequently sold off as labour to other companies like chattel.

The numbers involved in this human trade are not trivial. It has its roots in Chinese telecom fraud and illegal gambling industry targeting the mainland Chinese, so Chinese citizens comprise most HT victims of SEA scam syndicates at ~80%, followed by Taiwanese, Chinese Malaysians, then Thai, Vietnamese and other nationalities. Chinese media has reported that 300,000 Chinese are employed as online scammers in SEA [8] (note that their primary target, China, has a population of 1.4 billion). Trafficking of Chinese citizens has been so severe, the Chinese government has implemented draconian measures on its citizens heading to and returning from high-risk countries [9], as well as awareness campaigns about syndicates targeting its citizens on those countries. Likewise, Thai police has tried cross-border operations aimed at saving an alleged 3,000 of its citizens that have been trafficked into Cambodia to do scams [10]. As the scam syndicates are expanding their reach to the “foreign” non-Chinese market, they have been recently trafficking also English-speaking South Asians [11],[12].

It is hard to know the proportion of truly captive, since they range from some kidnapped off the street, some who were tricked, some who knew but naively thought they can just wing it, to the free agents who rotate through different scam companies. However these schemes are time-consuming, labor-intensive and, for most, morally sickening, hence the reliance on large numbers of indentured labor. Also, in absence of labor protections inside the large “technology parks”, “special economic zones” and private real estates where many scam companies are based, wanton human rights abuses are almost expected. And in light of well-documented beatings, starvation, rape and other abuses that happen to guest workers, local authorities are almost singularly concerned only with the HT victims’ visa statuses [13].

Economic Damage

The principal perpetrators profit off the backs of indentured workers and scam victims. It is hard to quantify the economic and opportunity cost to HT victims, but there is data on the criminal earnings of these “fraud factories”. In 2021 online romance-investment frauds of the kind perfected on China by these SEA scams companies (so-called pig-butchering scam) has netted $429 million in losses from only 4,325 victims in the US [14], which averages an astounding $100,000 loss per victim! This is likely still much under-reporting and does not include the other online investment frauds they perpetrate on US residents, which should approach $1 billion [14]. Other countries have seen similar numbers when adjusted for their own currencies. From estimates on the blockchain, tens of billions of US dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency has been reaped by the SEA scam boiler room companies [15]. These numbers still do not count wire fraud, which predominated earlier, and which we estimate to be ~30% of the amounts defrauded in 2021 [16]. Finally, numbers from China itself, the original target of the SEA fraud factories, Chinese police reports of just pig butchering scams in 2020 amounted to 40 Billion RMB in 2020 [17] -- $5.7 Billion USD – not yet including gambling scams.

REFERENCES

[1] https://www.globalantiscam.org/modern-slavery-job-scam

[2] https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3165149/online-fraud-how-chinese-nationals-forced-run

[3] https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/79366408

[4] https://vodenglish.news/lured-with-the-promise-of-jobs-thai-nationals-detained-sold-to-scam-operations-in-cambodia/

[5]

[6] https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/155702568

[7] https://www.globalantiscam.org/post/some-chinese-lured-by-high-paying-jobs-end-up-in-telecom-fraud-prostitution-in-myanmar

[8] https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzI3MTA2MTk4NQ==&mid=2650589928&idx=1&sn=7e562d899029fe725d65230f11eba9fb&scene=21#wechat_redirect

[9] https://finance.ifeng.com/c/86e88MUfxCR

[10] https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/2285998/illegal-workers-to-be-caught-returned

[11] https://vodenglish.news/four-pakistanis-rescued-from-captivity-forced-labor-in-sihanoukville/

[12] https://www.globalantiscam.org/post/tricking-english-translators-for-shazhupan-scripts

[13] https://vodenglish.news/49-thais-repatriated-amid-trafficking-scourge-police-say-they-dont-ask-about-their-work/

[14] https://www.ic3.gov/Media/PDF/AnnualReport/2021_IC3Report.pdf

[15] https://cipherblade.com/blog/the-prevalence-of-sha-zhu-pan-aka-pig-butchering-scams/

[16] https://www.globalantiscam.org/post/statistics-of-crypto-romance-pig-butchering-scam

[17] http://www.xinghuozhiku.com/59618.html