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The ads on the Telegram messaging service's White Shark Channel were matter-of-fact and clipped. This Chinese-language forum had 5,700 users, but it wasn't selling used Peloton or cleaning services Human beings were being sold in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, and other cities in Southeast Asia.
A Chinese man was sold in Sihanoukville. One ad said that a young man with an ID card was typing very slow. Six people from Bangladesh can type and speak English. In the days of American slavery, the channel offered bounties for people who had fled. Telegram shut down the White Shark Channel after an inquiry from ProPublica. Similar forums are free.
He said that Fan was sold twice in the past year. He isn't sure if he was on Telegram. Each time he was sold, his new abductors increased the amount of money he would have to pay to free him. His debt went from $7,000 to $15,500 in a country with an annual per capita income of about $1,600.
AdvertisementFan's descent into forced labor began with a chance. He used to be a prep cook at his sister's restaurant in China's Fujian province until it closed. Fan was offered a marketing position with a well known food delivery company in Cambodia. The company offered to fly him in after he accepted the $1,000 a month proposal. Fan told his brother that he was going to work in Cambodia. Fan's brother left his job to join him. It was too late for them to realize the offer was not real. They were not allowed to leave the compound where they were working.
Unlike the countless people who were forced to perform sex work or labor for commercial shrimping operations, the two brothers ended up in a new career as financial scam artists.
Thousands of people from China, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and other countries have been tricked. According to interviews with human rights advocates, law enforcement personnel, rescuers and a dozen victims of this new form of human trafficking, Chinese criminal syndicates have set up cyber fraud operations in Cambodia, Laotian and Myanmar, where fake job ads lure them into working. If they resist, they will be beaten, deprived of food or shocked with electric shocks. People jump from balconies. Others are paid to participate in cyber crime.
Fan and his brother lived in a compound surrounded by a fence. In order to lure people in Germany into depositing funds with a fake online broker, they also targeted English speakers in other countries.
AdvertisementMatt Friedman is the chief executive of the Mekong Club, a Hong Kong-based nonprofit that fights modern slavery. Friedman said it was unlike anything he had ever seen. Vice published an article in July about the phenomenon in the U.S.
Pig butchering is one of the most common techniques used in these operations. The approach combines some time-tested elements of fraud, such as gaining trust, in the manner of a Ponzi scheme, by making it easy for marks to extract cash at first, with elements unique to the internet era. It depends on the ease with which currency can be moved electronically and the effectiveness of relationships nurtured on social media.
Fraudsters ingratiate themselves into online friendships or romantic relationships and then manipulate their targets into depositing larger and larger sums in investment platforms that are controlled by them. The targets lose access to their funds when they can't or won't deposit more. The only way to get their money back is to deposit more money or pay a fee. The funds disappear in the same way.
Many Americans have lost a lot of money. A hospital technician in Houston convinced her friends and colleagues to join her in a similar scheme. An accountant in Connecticut is no longer planning on retiring after seeing $185,000 disappear in two separate scam. More than twenty scam victims from seven countries were interviewed by ProPublica.
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