MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Say you get a text on your phone, just one word - hi. Seems benign, but when it shows up from an unknown number, there is a better than decent chance it's a scam - a scam known as pig butchering. The goal is to build a relationship with you, gain your trust, then take your money. Well, people all over the world fall for this. It turns out, though, the people sending those texts are often also victims.
Over the last several years, journalists and human rights advocates have tracked a network of criminal syndicates that traffic, enslave and torture people in a multi-billion-dollar cyber fraud industry. Well, Feliz Solomon is one of those journalists. She covers Southeast Asia for The Wall Street Journal. Hi, Feliz.
FELIZ SOLOMON: Hi.
KELLY: Hi. What this term, pig butchering? Where does that come from?
SOLOMON: Pig butchering is a type of fraud where scammers will build a relationship with a person, and they'll build their trust and get them to eventually invest a lot of money. They get them to invest more and more. And that's the fattening phase of the scam. And then they butcher them by taking all the money and ghosting them.
KELLY: How did you stumble on this story? Did you get one of these texts? How did you decide to report on this?
SOLOMON: I myself have gotten many of these texts, but I started reporting on this story because I'm based in Southeast Asia, and we started seeing reports out of places like Cambodia and Myanmar where people had been escaping from these mysterious compounds that we always sort of thought were associated mostly with casinos. But they were coming out with these really strange stories that they had been held captive and abused and forced to carry out illegal work like scams. And we had never heard of this before. I think it was late 2021 and early 2022 when we really started hearing about this more and more. And we just decided to dig in.
KELLY: Focus on one of these people who has a starring role in your piece. This is a man named Billy, 41 years old, from Ethiopia - moved to Thailand for what looked like a legit job opportunity, ended up in one of these compounds near the border, beaten up because he was refusing to send scam texts, at least initially. Pick up with his story and why you put it at the center of your reporting.
SOLOMON: Billy had a really powerful story. I met him in Thailand early this year, shortly after he had gotten out of a scam compound in Myanmar, just across the border. And when we met, he had wounds on his body. He visibly was very traumatized. What had happened to him was still really, really fresh. And he also speaks really good English, so he was able to tell his story in a really powerful way.
What happened to him was really emblematic of what has happened to many, many other people who have been caught up in this. He was tricked by a recruiter online into taking what he thought was a legitimate job. He then went to Bangkok and was met by someone who said they represented a legitimate company who then took him to the Myanmar border, snuck him across. And he ended up enslaved there for about 16 months between there and other scam compounds.
KELLY: Yeah. His captors had him posing as a woman, a rich woman from Singapore named Alicia. He had a script. He had photos. He had videos to scam hundreds of victims.
SOLOMON: That's right. So once he had arrived in one of these scam compounds, he was trained. He was given laptops and mobile phones that were loaded up with pictures, videos and a PDF that had a script. It told him everything that he should say to engage with victims, how to convince them that they should invest their money, what exact words to use, how to calm them down if they started to feel nervous about what was happening. It was a whole package that had been prepared for him and other scammers that just walked them through all the steps of a scam.
KELLY: And how much money is to be made here? Like, how much money are people giving?
SOLOMON: It depends. Some people lose a little bit of money, and some people lose a lot. I have also interviewed one man who lost his entire life savings. It was more than $715,000 in the course of about two months engaging with a scammer. But we've heard everything from a few hundred to a few thousand to a million or so.
KELLY: I mean, here - among the many things that puzzle me about this, why do these criminal syndicates need Billy or someone like Billy? If it's all fake, if there's a script and it's fake pictures and fake names, why can't they just pose as Alicia themselves?
SOLOMON: Because these scam syndicates are industrial scale, they need a lot of manpower. And frankly, it's easier and cheaper for them to traffic people in and enslave them.
KELLY: Who's at the helm of all this? How high does it go?
SOLOMON: Well, what we know is that the places where these scam centers operate are run by well-known Chinese fugitives. There are a few of them. Most of them are already on U.S. sanctions lists and are wanted in China, but they've sort of found a place for themselves in lawless parts of Southeast Asia, for instance, in the borderlands of Myanmar and in parts of Cambodia. These are just places where it's really hard for law enforcement to reach them, and they're just lawless areas.
KELLY: So what can be done about this? What are governments in Southeast Asia trying to do?
SOLOMON: There have been some efforts to crack down on this. China launched a crackdown in mid-2022, primarily targeting scams that were victimizing Chinese people. They were either trafficking Chinese people in to work there or scamming Chinese people and stealing Chinese money. That was a big problem for the Chinese government. They had worked with authorities in Myanmar and elsewhere to go in and do a bunch of raids and arrest a lot of people. Other than that, there are a lot of obstacles to shutting these places down, primarily because they're so hard to reach.
KELLY: And to bring us full circle to the human element because it sounds like Billy, while scamming people, was very much a victim himself. Can you say where he is? Is he OK?
SOLOMON: He is OK. He has returned to Ethiopia. But since he got back, he's had a lot of trouble readjusting to society. He was with three other Ethiopian guys. They all got deported at the same time.
KELLY: Their families had to pay - right? - a ransom?
SOLOMON: Yes. Their families had to pay ransoms to get them out of there. So it was very costly and took a lot of time. But in early March, all four of them returned to Ethiopia. Since then, none of them have been able to find work. It's been really hard for them because, for one thing, there aren't a whole lot of jobs in Ethiopia for them. But secondly, they're having trouble finding work because potential employers want to know, you know, where have you been for the past year and a half? And they don't really want to say.
They're also still emotionally and physically recovering from what happened to them. Billy still has - I met him in Ethiopia in June. And he still had, you know, open wounds on his body and - just some of the wounds from being beaten there, they still have not healed. But beyond that, they all have trouble sleeping. They have trouble socializing. And the four of them are very close with each other. But it's really hard for them to reintegrate with broader society.
KELLY: Wall Street Journal Reporter Feliz Solomon. Her piece is headlined "Posing As Alicia, This Man Scammed Hundreds Online." He was also a victim. Feliz Solomon, thank you.
SOLOMON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
