Not All Of The Scammers We Hate So Much Are Harming Us Out Of Their Own Free Will
It turns out those phone and text scams are largely run by trafficking victims working under appalling conditions.
WHYFRAME | Shutterstock We all get them, often multiple times a day: irritating texts where someone pretends to be someone with a wrong number to try to scam us, or phone calls about security breaches on our computers, fake criminal charges against us, or some malarkey about "your car's extended warranty."
Those incessant scam phone calls and texts are a steadily growing nuisance, and if you're like many people you'd like to give the people making them a piece of your mind. But it turns out that many — and probably most — of those people are victims themselves.
Crackdowns on scam centers in Myanmar have found thousands of employees working against their will.
The crackdowns, a coordinated effort among the governments of Thailand, Myanmar and China, have recently resulted in more than 7,000 workers being held in a town on the Myanmar-Thailand border waiting to be sent back to their home countries.
These workers are behind all those scam calls and texts about fake romances, illegal gambling and sham investment schemes, among other ploys, that are blowing up our phones all the time. Officials believe most of them are human trafficking victims, working entirely against their will under conditions that have been called modern-day slavery.
Officials believe the 7,000 workers found so far are only a fraction of the total. The United Nations suspects hundreds of thousands of people are trapped in these jobs, which are scams in themselves.
The workers are lured by promises of legitimate work, then tortured if they try to leave.
The workers are lured to scam centers mainly in Myanmar from neighboring countries like China, Laos, Indonesia, and Vietnam with promises of legitimate employment. But the scam sprawls far beyond Asia. Crackdowns in the past year have found trafficked workers from as far away as Ethiopia, Brazil and even the United States.
Once trafficked, the workers are initiated into a series of scams nicknamed "pig butchering," a reference to the way victims are "fattened up" by scammers earning their trust, then drained of their money and ghosted.
The scams often involve posing as women to seduce men, then luring them into false investments. Billy, a man from Ethiopia interviewed as part of a 2024 Wall Street Journal exposé, lured one Pakistani man so deep that he sent Billy a video of himself self-harming when Billy's alter ego "Alicia" stopped responding. "Until I die I can’t forget it,” Billy told the WSJ.
But escaping often becomes impossible. Billy told the WSJ that his phone was constantly monitored, so he was unable to ask friends or family for help. When he attempted to lead a strike, he was brutally tortured for a week in full view of his co-workers.
When scammers do make it out, their journey is harrowing. First, they must pay a ransom to be released. In Billy's case, his father sold his house to pay the $7000 price on his head. But because of their illegal immigration status and the extent of the local criminal networks, they often cannot escape the country except by sneaking back over the border and hoping for the best, as Billy did. Many become so desperate in the process they end up lured back into the scam they were trying to escape in the first place.
The crackdowns are now releasing trafficked workers in numbers that are creating a humanitarian crisis.
Crisis was what allowed the scam centers to flourish in the first place. The 2021 military coup in Myanmar sparked an explosion of this lawless industry and a building spree of scam centers in the wilderness areas along the Thai border, where they function largely off-the-grid using Elon Musk's Starlink satellite internet services to operate. (Officials in the U.S. and Thailand who have asked Musk and his companies to shut down services to scam centers say their pleas have gone unanswered.)
Now, the coordinated effort to free many of the workers is creating a new crisis. Though the operation has freed thousands of trafficking victims so far, the influx of workers over the Thai border is creating a situation the government does not have the resources to adequately handle. Anti-trafficking charities and NGOs in the region say a humanitarian crisis is brewing.
Meanwhile, on social media, the very term "human trafficking" has been co-opted by bad actors to become a byword for American Facebook moms' cute little tots supposedly being kidnapped from Target parking lots, and other conspiracy theories for which there is scant evidence. Those working on the front lines to free people like Billy and his co-workers have begged people to stop propagating these distractions from the reality of human trafficking, only to often be castigated as part of the supposed problem.
Another social media trend has also emerged, too — one I am ashamed to admit I've taken part in myself — in which people knowingly engage these scammers in order to waste their time.
The footage or screenshots are then posted online, so we can all have a good laugh at bamboozling what we've assumed is a criminal on the other end of the phone. Never has the reality behind a joke been so unfunny.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.