Inside SE Asian Scam Centers
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Interesting story.
Lots of news about these in Thailand. All the surrounding countries have compounds, like Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos. They are typically run by Chinese triads. I am sure that there are some in Thailand, mainly up in the north Gold Triangle area.
IT WAS A perfect June evening in New York when I received my first email from the source who would ask me to call him Red Bull. He was writing from hell, 8,000 miles away.
A summer shower had left a rainbow over my Brooklyn neighborhood, and my two children were playing in a kiddie pool on the roof of our apartment building.
Now the sun was setting, while I—in typical 21st-century parenting fashion, forgive me—compulsively scrolled through every app on my phone.
The message had no subject line and came from an address on the encrypted email service Proton Mail: “vaultwhistle@proton.me.” I opened it.
“Hello. I’m currently working inside a major crypto romance scam operation based in the Golden Triangle,” it began. “I am a computer engineer being forced to work here under a contract.”
“I’ve collected internal evidence of how the scam works—step by step,” the message continued. “I am still inside the compound, so I cannot risk direct exposure. But I want to help shut this down.”
The picture below is from when I was up in far north Thailand (Ban Sop Ruak). On the right side is Laos, and that area is almost sure where some of the scam compounds operate, and the one the article talks about. Big casino in the middle of nowhere for the Chinese people who live there. In the middle between the two rivers is Myanmar, and I am standing in Thailand.
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There's a movie about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_More_Bets
Supposedly dramatized based on the account of someone scammed into slave labor working in large scale Internet scam operation for a controlling syndicate.
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Sad. Obviously, government acceptance (and probably cooperation) in places like Laos. Like in teh picture above, having this big casino and random office blocks in the middle of what is basically jungle makes no "rational" sense. Obviously something bad is going on there, yet, the police are bought off, etc. As the article says, (in so many words), "the workers are relatively free to move around, because there is no place for them to go, and if they do leave the compound, the police would quickly track them down."
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https://www.asiaone.com/asia/cambodian-scam-compound-yields-trove-fraud-evidence-thai-military-says
The Thai military said on Monday (Feb 2) it had recovered a trove of evidence of transnational fraud from a Cambodian scam compound seized during clashes last year between the two countries along their disputed border.
Briefing reporters and foreign delegates in Surin province, senior Thai military officials said the O'Smach complex had housed thousands of people, many of them victims of human trafficking who were forced to scam strangers or face punishment.
Soldiers later showed reporters around one of several buildings in the complex that were bombed and occupied by the Thai military late last year. The six‑storey building was strewn with documents, including long lists of what appeared to be potential targets and their contact details, as well as scripts for scam dialogues.
But wait!!!!!
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/cambodia-raids-scam-compound-crackdown-china-pressure-5900121
Cambodia has carried out a massive raid on scammer gangs, detaining more than 2,000 people amid pressure from China to crack down on its online fraud industry.
Nearly 1,800 Chinese nationals were among those held, according to the Cambodian interior ministry.
A ministry statement said that Cambodian police had conducted a large-scale enforcement operation on Saturday (Jan 31) morning at an online fraud compound in Bavet, the largest city in the southeastern province of Svay Rieng, which borders Vietnam.
A total of 2,044 foreigners were detained, of whom 1,792 were from mainland China, five from Taiwan, and 177 from Vietnam.
Cambodia has been getting a lot of pressure from China on this issue. The above raid (I think) is only for publicity and after things die down, it will be back to normal. The Chinese gangs make some huge payoffs to Cambodian government officials to be allowed to operate.
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@89th Interesting pictures.
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https://www.wired.com/story/models-are-applying-to-be-the-face-of-ai-scams/
WHEN APPLYING FOR jobs, Angel talks up her language skills. “I can speak fluent English, I can speak good Chinese, I also speak Russian and Turkish,” the glamorous, 24-year-old Uzbekistani woman explains in a selfie-style video made for recruiters. Angel had arrived in the Cambodian city of Sihanoukville that day, she said, and was ready to start work immediately.
Those impressive language skills, however, have likely been put to use as part of elaborate “pig-butchering” scams targeting Americans. That’s because, instead of applying for a conventional corporate job, Angel was putting herself forward to work as an “AI face model”—sitting in front of a computer all day and making deepfake video calls to manipulate potential scam victims. Her application, which also required her height and weight, says she has already clocked up “1 year as an AI model.”
Angel is far from alone in this pursuit. A WIRED review of dozens of recruitment videos and job ads posted to Telegram show people from around the world—including Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and multiple Asian countries—applying to be AI models or “real face” models in Cambodia and Southeast Asia. The region has become home to vast, industrialized scamming operations that hold thousands of human trafficking victims captive and force them to run online cryptocurrency investment and romance scams.
As well as tricking people into working in scam compounds, these high-tech, multibillion-dollar criminal enterprises can also attract people into seeking “work” as part of the operations. “In the past year until today, they are also hiring people doing AI modeling,” says Hieu Minh Ngo, a cybercrime investigator at the Vietnamese scam-fighting nonprofit ChongLuaDao. “They will give you the software so they can swap their face by using AI and they can do romance scams,” he says.
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