That being said, I live in a room rented to me by the company that hires me, I work for a customer service center, so it's not a construction situation. The reason the company rents us rooms is because we're not paid enough to afford normal rent.
All this means that if there's ever a ramp down, I'd be immediately jobless and homeless, which does not feel good at all...
If you added on top being in a foreign country and needing your employer for your visa, I think you'd basically have the same situation as the article?
So that's a little precarious. I hope you have some savings built up.
A situation like you describe is ripe for abuse. H1Bs here deal with similar precariousness, though not on the level of what it sounds like you're dealing with. I hope your situation improves and you gain some security.
And if there's a fire? Jobless, homeless, and without papers. You should give your passport and all other important papers to your employer for safekeeping.
> [US] Federal prosecutors have seized $15 billion from the alleged kingpin of an operation that used imprisoned laborers to trick unsuspecting people into making investments in phony funds, often after spending months faking romantic relationships with the victims.
> China has executed 11 people involved in criminal gangs in Myanmar, including online scam ringleaders. Their crimes included "intentional homicide, intentional injury, unlawful detention, fraud and casino establishment"
> Chen's case might prove more complicated since the US had seized a large amount of his cryptocurrency assets, but he was now in custody in China.. "If China doesn't cooperate, it will be extremely difficult for the US to investigate Chen."
I know the answer but why amass $15 billion, more money than a person could spend in a lifetime, and still conduct this scam? You think a person would say "enough" and escape to a beach somewhere.
I'm not sure what to call the bias but the people who have done that we don't hear about so we're only hearing about the ones that don't do that. Who knows how many ruffians and scofflaws are out there on beaches, going unknown!
Good point - it's like the opposite of survivorship bias? We only hear about the ones that don't survive and get caught. The "survivors" we don't hear about all the criminals who are still at large I guess.
A while back I thought I could make a bit of extra cash by playing along with these scams, apparently they give returns on the first/second round of investment and only run off with the money once the sum is large enough for them. Knowing that someone may get beaten or worse for losing money prevented me from going through with it
If you would be able to withdraw (you wouldn’t be able to) that money has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is from other people who were scammed.
No one is going to get beaten because of your interactions with scammers. They’re going to be beaten because they are enslaved.
They sent me to my usdt wallet. So i actually got it. Of course after I earned 30 USD they make it impossible to withdraw unless I “invested” 100 usd. Very weird scam to pay out 30usd.
So means 1 in 3 people must invest 100 in order for them to breakeven, which tbh doesn’t make sense.
Also note that came from a random telegram account from dubai.
They asked if I wanted to make money etc. I obviously thought was a scam. I never expected to really cash out the 30 USD.
That makes sense to me and is what I would expect. I have seen accounts where people were in fact allowed to withdraw their small initial gains (although i can not confirm that was the case, maybe they were just trying to save face) that's what gave me the idea to scam the scammers in the first place.
The catch-22 is that these people are nearly always immigrants, and the criminals have taken their documentation, so the best case scenario is they get rescued and then deported, possibly via a spell in immigration detention. The worst case scenario is the cops turn up, laugh, collect the day's bribe money and then the person who called the cops gets beaten.
(this is an important dynamic in sex trafficking as well)
this is far bigger a problem and requires interventions from China and India. what good is it to just punish the people who ran the scam but not the country that supported it?
>The relative leniency of Muzahir’s compound, says Harvard’s Sims, likely stems from scam operations’ sense of total control in Laos’ Golden Triangle region—a zone of the country controlled largely by Chinese business interests that has become a host to crimes ranging from narcotics and organ sales to illegal wildlife trafficking. Even human trafficking victims who escape from a compound there, Sims points out, can be tracked down relatively easily thanks to Chinese organized crime’s influence over local law enforcement. “These guys don’t have to be held in a cell,” Sims says. “The whole place is a closed circuit.”
I have been getting repeated emails saying something along the lines of "We have a family office who has a strong interest in making an investment into <MY_COMPANY_NAME> industry. Can we set up a time to discuss this opportunity?". They are signed with different names, always female, and coming from email addresses with a TLD of .help or .shop
It's obviously a scam and I am not replying, but I'm curious what the scam is here.
We have quite a bit of insight into Indian scam centers thanks to the work of scambaiters like Jim Browning[1] who frequently hack into their CCTV cameras and desktops.
The big difference is that the workers in India are voluntarily employed. In fact they often work for companies that do legitimate customer support as well, so they maintain the facade of doing “service” for their “clients”.
It’s also worth noting that Indian call centers focus more on tech support scams rather than romance scams.
Horrifying read. I recently read a book about a girl who was pressed into prostitution, and this reads much the same. [1] Before I was convinced that slavery was mostly a thing of the past, how awful to find out this isn't true.
Looked this up out of curiosity and came across a non-profit which produces reports on the topic and seems to be the basis for the Wikipedia article on modern slavery.
According to the 2023 Global Slavery Index, 7-8 of the top 10 countries in the world with the highest prevalence of modern slavery have a majority religion of Islam (Mauritania has disputed figures about religious prevalence with Christianity and Islam at similar levels). And none of the countries in the top 10 lowest prevalence have a majority religion of Islam. Prevalence here is used to mean estimated number of people in slavery per 1000 population.
However, the absolute figures for total people affected are proportional to the size of the country, as you would expect, with North Korea and Russia topping the list.
And if you look at driving factors, the US is the leading importer of products at risk of being produced by slavery by an order of magnitude.
Same reason your government doesn't set taxes to 100%, has rules for themselves they at least sort of follow, and only treats people like shit when they've got a pretext. If they make it "too bad" then they'll have to piss away a whole lot more money on ensuring compliance, it'll threaten stability, etc.
Slaves are the least motivated and least productive form of workers. Slaves who know they're slaves are worse still. Shooting for maximum extraction of labor doesn't actually get you the best ROI. Don't get me wrong, they'll still treat you like shit. But they maximize their "take home" by not going too far with it.
I get that we all want to turn off our brains and hand wring because "criminals" or whatever but the dynamics of human organizations are unchanged regardless of what side of the law they're operating on.
Slavery was replaced by wage labor because it was more productive in the long run - that's part of the economists founding narrative. But I think they tend not to emphasize that it was also simply because it was a lot more flexible for a business in a competitive market to rent than to own, ceter paribus.
Quasi-slave status persisted in many situations for a long time, being a local maxima for various management situations. Penal slaves in the postwar American South were in many cases treated worse than their chattel slave parents/grandparents partially because they were rented out by their owners, who didn't pay for them, to managers who rented and didn't have any stake in their survival.
Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly, Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity spread, slaves were no longer conveniently available, and the society had to adapt.
In densely populated areas, that meant systems like serfdom. Agricultural land was a scarce resource mostly owned by the elite. Most peasants were nominally free but tied to the land, with obligations towards whoever owned the land. Peasants farmed land owned by the local lord and paid rent with labor. And if the lord sold the land, the peasants and their obligations went with it.
Debt/war/penal/chattel slavery was not a particularly strong economic activity in Europe in the Middle Ages. What we're mostly talking about is agricultural serfdom.
I think the Church had a lot less to do with the end of _serfdom_ than the Black Death. The sudden population drop mandated that lords who wanted to maintain production had to steal peasants from other lords, and improve their own compensation/conditions to retain their own labor force. And so on for the rest of the economy as well.
This represented a massive transfer of power and rights downwards... for a while. The late 1300's and 1400's have some of the best conditions for the laboring class for the previous 400 years or the next 400 years. You can hear about some of the dark days to follow in England specifically in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ec9Al5ezYs
Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly, Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity spread, slaves were no longer conveniently available, and the society had to adapt.
This requires a very bold, 115 font asterisk. Or rather it’s plain wrong. Mass slavery in Europe didn’t really end until serfdom was abolished (1800s). And let’s not even get started on the African slave trade which was managed and prospered off of from Europeans, both from direct sales and indirectly from slave labor. Also, many of those slaves converted to Christianity, so it wasn’t based on any religious affiliation.
I’m a bit confused by your reply. Pretty sure the rulers of the Dahomey kingdom weren’t trading with people of the “Americas” but with Europeans, before and after its abolishment across Western Europe. In the book Fistful of Shells, historian Toby Green argues the scale of the trade was only made possible by European traders flooding West Africa with cheap currency (shells which had little value to them but that could be collected in the billions from Brazil and the Indo-Pacific).
1. slavery in Western Europe had been abolished long before the transatlantic slave trade - the Europeans were intermediaries, but there was little to no slavery in their home countries. There were many court rulings in England against slavery.
2. not enslaving Christians played a role in abolishing slavery in medieval Europe
3. serfdom was a far better condition that being a slave
4. Slave owners in the Americas opposed the conversion of slaves to Christianity. they also censored the version of the Bible available to slaves very heavily.
5. The claim about mass slavery within Europe is misleading on two counts: serfs are not just chattel slaves (they had rights), and Western Europe was very different from Eastern Europe.
>Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves.
It disappeared because it was replaced by indentured servitude on the low end and restriction and tax on who could do what trades on the high end. Because the lords own a huge fraction of all the farmland. So this is very much a "you're nominally free but you're gonna be share-cropping your old master's land" situation for the former serfs. An improvement, sure. But not nearly as big of one as the history books tout.
Lucky for them that didn't last very long until the black death made labor way more valuable so a lot of the rules got eased up and once that unleashed a bunch more productivity at the margin, well there was no going back.
>Most peasants were nominally free but tied to the land, with obligations towards whoever owned the land. Peasants farmed land owned by the local lord and paid rent with labor. And if the lord sold the land, the peasants and their obligations went with i
I'm not saying they're equivalent, but there's a very good comparison to most professional licensure to be made here.
These just-so narratives about how slavery was abolished for rational economic reasons can be quite frustrating. Obviously historically most people who owned slaves didn’t stop owning slaves because it was more profitable to give freedom and pay. Nor because they were competing with neighbors who had turned to cheaper wage labor. They did so because they were forced. Slavery was a topic of great political turmoil.
Is the argument that it would have come back if it were really cheaper? Or is the argument just so above the fray that the political turmoil is part of the supposed “costs” that were saved by abolition?
I’m not trying to directly engage the question whether slavery was more profitable than wage labor. It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history.
And vice versa, the people who pushed for abolition (in the US anyway) did not do it for economic reasons either. It was a deeply moral mission initiated by, basically, religious fundamentalists. Then followed on by more mainstream liberals, still for ethical reasons, and then followed on by the masses once war broke out over it.
Contrary to what most people seem to think about the past, slavery was oft seen as naturally repulsive even thousands of years back. It required regular defense. In Aristotle's Politics [1], written some 2400+ years ago, he felt compelled to lay out just such a defense and it was, by far, his weakest argument. He clearly started at his conclusion and worked backwards from there, instead of working forward from first principles and he did in other topics. The reason it's relevant is that he did accurately predict the end of slavery:
"For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'Of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods.' If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves."
There were thousands of years of efforts to end slavery, some countries would occasionally succeed at such only to see it spring right back. Yet following the industrial revolution it began rapidly disappearing everywhere that had gone through industrialization + urbanization. The issue in your mental model is that you're only considering local effects over very immediate time frames. Think about the bigger picture.
Industrialization drove big money away from farms and into factories, away from rural scarcely populated rural areas into densely populated urban areas packed with very poor potential workers. As soon as the necessity argument for slavery became plainly absurd, to say nothing of the issue of industrialization also reducing the need for so many workers even on plantations, slavery wasn't long for this world. This says nothing about actual slave holders who, as you said, did not just go quietly into the night. But as their economic might relatively waned, so did their influence.
>These just-so narratives about how slavery was abolished for rational economic reasons can be quite frustrating. Obviously historically most people who owned slaves didn’t stop owning slaves because it was more profitable to give freedom and pay. Nor because they were competing with neighbors who had turned to cheaper wage labor. They did so because they were forced. Slavery was a topic of great political turmoil.
These sorts of ignorant narratives about how humanity abolished slavery out of the goodness of its heart can be so frustrating.
If slavery was so much more profitable that those engaging in it were the dominant economic force in society it never would have been abolished, at the very least because so much other economic activity would have depended upon that surplus (stolen from the slaves).
This isn't so say that moral factors didn't matter, they absolutely did but if we couldn't afford abolish slavery or or if we did despite not being able to afford to or if free workers were substantially worse than slaves at the margin we'd have been out competed by some other society that didn't make that choice.
>Or is the argument just so above the fray that the political turmoil is part of the supposed “costs” that were saved by abolition?
That's certainly part of it. It takes a lot of constant violence to keep people enslaved. You can shit-can all that administrative overhead if you make people "free" (well not all of it, but a lot).
>It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history.
It annoys me when people think we can just do what we want. We are fundamentally tied to what we can afford, in the most general sense of that word. Our freedom of action is limited.
Edit: We'd all be better off if everyone stopped thinking of slavery as a binary and instead as the fraction of a worker's surplus that is taken by threat of violence. Even if where one draws the line of "taken by violence" varies, this at least enables one to make better comparisons across centuries and locations. But that leads to some deeply uncomfortable questions for many so of course we won't do that.
The Quakers in New England in the 1800s were known for (1) being abolitionists and (2) whalers. They often bragged about employing freed and escaped slaves on their ships. It all sounds great when viewed through a narrow lens, but the whale boats had a system of paying the crew when they returned successfully. No whales, no pay. Yes, the Quakers would risk the cost of the ship and the supplies, but they didn't pay for the labor until the end ... and then only when the workers actually succeeded. The plantations had to capitalize the cost of the slaves upfront, a significant cost that often required large loans. Before the Civil War, places like New Orleans were big banking centers.
The late 1700s early 1800s British Army and Navy also drove a "famously hard" bargain when it came to the working situation of the former slaves they employed.
Slavery is alive and well in most part of the world, especially south asia, middle east, Russia and Africa,where children with no papers are trafficked all the time for the worse things you could imagine. I'm not sure what convinced you otherwise.
Also in the USA. We call it "prison labor", and over 1% of our adult population is "under correctional control."
Approximately two-thirds (about 61% to over 65%) of the 1.2 million people incarcerated in US state and federal prisons are employed in prison labor, totaling around 800,000 workers. These workers often perform maintenance tasks for, on average, 13 to 52 cents per hour, with many facing forced labor conditions
https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-prison-labor/#...
There are also slaves you see outside your window without recognizing them as such. Homeless people are sometimes exploited by gang members who enslave them to either pimp themselves out or sell drugs.
One of the side effects of a society tolerating thousands of people living in nylon tarps with no real safety net.
I'm against for-profit prisons, but equating people who commit crimes and end up in prison and are forced to work as part of their sentence, to people who have committed no crimes is a bit ridiculous.
I understand your sentiment. Unfortunately, the history of America's legal system isn't simple. There are people in prison who never actually committed a crime, but who were convicted because they couldn't afford good legal representation during their trial. This disproportionately affects the poor, and there are correlations between poverty and minority status in America. Some people have been able to get their convictions overturned, but this typically requires very sympathetic people advocating for them.
There's also a very long history in America of laws and law enforcement being targeted against poor people and minorities. Vagrancy laws (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrancy#Post-Civil_War) and modern anti-homeless laws effectively criminalize homelessness, and the War on Drugs has had a major negative impact on poor people and minorities. Yes, in this situation those who have been imprisoned due to such laws did violate the law, but such laws, in my opinion, serve the function of kicking people while they are down rather than addressing the root causes of their poverty.
There's a good argument that having a system of convict labor creates a perverse incentive to fill that labor pipeline, similar to how well-meaning traffic laws (such as speed limits) can be abused (for example, "speed traps").
If you are open to a bit of reading I would recommend The New Jim Crow, Usual Cruelty, and Copoganda. The USA has a disproportionate amount of prisoners and armed law enforcement compared to every other comparable country - because it is a hugely profitable industry that self perpetuates itself really well- it’s similar in a way to how hard it is to get any consumer protections in USA from predatory and polluting entities.
After USA destabilized Libya, it turned horrible. In Libya there are open slave markets. Adults. Africans trying to who travel a great deal trying to get to Europe are often kidnapped and kept as slaves in Libya.
I'm well aware of Libya and its open air black slave markets, don't worry, an absolute disgrace what happened in Libya, and we could talk about Syria too and how The Yasidi were enslaved by Daesh...
The West has largely snuffed the horror of slavery in its sphere but outside of that it's the wild west. There are horrifying things to read if you go down that rabbit hole.
With these executions Beijing is sending a message of deterrence to would-be scammers. But the business has now moved to Myanmar's border with Thailand, and to Cambodia and Laos, where China has much less influence.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked to run online scams in Myanmar and elsewhere in South East Asia, according to estimates by the UN. Among them are thousands of Chinese people, and their victims who they swindle billions of dollars from are mainly Chinese too.
Frustrated by the Myanmar military's refusal to stop the scam business, from which it was almost certainly profiting, Beijing tacitly backed an offensive by an ethnic insurgent alliance in Shan State in late 2023. The alliance captured significant territory from the military and overran Laukkaing, a key border town.
China exercising profound influence over their near abroad.
They are Han Chinese, Most of those triad family come from Yunan borders a few decades ago. In Myanmar , thanks to military junta , they can easily buy citizenship by bribing authorities One of them is even a MP Senate in Military aligned party.
Yes, I know, but the intended audience can't read 大海.
The chart and the article are both created by Wired; it's strange for them to refer to him one way in the chart and another way in the article.
I'm curious about the ethnic makeup of the "team leader" level. One of them is called "Ted", and seems to also be called 特德 ["te de"]. The 特德 could just be because everyone in the upper levels is Chinese, but the English-language post from Ted shown in the article doesn't really suggest a native English speaker. (And does suggest an emotional loyalty to China.)
Amani doesn't sound like a Chinese name or like the English name of a Chinese person.
I'm surprised anyone here expects these things not to be happening. The world outside of our (frankly small) 'western bubble' varies from pretty rough to absolutely horrific.
I'm personally not too sure what anyone does about it. People left unchecked, to some degree, are awful.
While not as bad, MLM style companies share a lot of the same techniques as described in this article. Seems like a lot of them hold people primarily by indoctrination rather than actual force
> The world outside of our (frankly small) 'western bubble' varies
Even within our "western bubble" horrible like these things continue being exposed, at least once every year. Sex trafficking rings, slavery and more seems a lot more prevelant than seemingly some people like to believe here, even in our "western bubble".
One would think the whole Epstein affair that keeps growing would make people realize this, even more since there is still many individuals who are seemingly shielded for whatever reason. And that's what we know about, that they're "willing" to share, so imagine the ones who aren't as dumb and big as Epstein, they're still around and they're still in our "western bubble".
There's sadly forced labor within the 'western bubble', too. My experience from working in tech is the bubble is mostly a small set upper middle class people.
As a human it's not like you meet that many people so I think necessarily we have a very myopic view of how the world is. I mean hell, I often don't even know what people I see regularly are going through, there are people I talked to regularly that had severely abusive relationships or were going through a serious illness and it took a while for me to figure out.
That's why those "scammer gets owned" videos made by douche youtubers, full of people gloating in the comments about how superior they are, never sat right with me. Those people crammed into warehouses are obviously extremely desperate or coerced or both.
There is quite a difference between indians going to "work" in a shiny building in the business district and native chinese held captive in Myanmar and forced to scam people in China.
I don't - it's the same as people defending thieves and burglars because "they are just people and they have families to feed". I've had shit stolen from my house before and the emotional damage this causes is far greater than anything financial - to me, thieves could be shot on the spot, literally zero sympathy towards them, they are only one spot below actual murderers and rapists in my book.
These guys are the same - do I feel bad for their plight? Yes, for sure, I wish we could help them and make sure they can live their lives free and not in what is effectively slavery. But they are currently "employed" destroying peoples lives, so many examples of people losing their lives savings to these scammers, many commit suicide due to this. Fucking around with them for youtube videos is the least we can do.
You understand the front line of the pig butchering scam don't have agency, yet you call them thieves and burglars. They're not the ones doing it, it is those who control them. Having said that, I neither agree or disagree whether youtube videos should gloat about how they've wasted their time or whatever.
I think we need to make it practically impossible to run the scam by having social media / messaging operators shutdown fraudulent accounts, especially if reported.
>>They're not the ones doing it, it is those who control them
No, it is quite literally them doing it, not the people running the operation. Same as if there is an organised gang in my area it's the people who are in my house that are doing the burglaring, not the people running the gang.
And yes, I appreciate very much that they might not have any choice in the matter which is why I said, I am genuinely sympathetic to their position and I hope we can solve this.
Thank you for illustrating my point in a far more unhinged manner than I could have possibly expected. Someone from a first world country in 2026 unironically defending that "thieves should be shot" needs to take a hard look at himself. Probably a good idea also to read the first few pages of Utopia by Thomas More, a fucking 510 year old book where the author explains why this is such a crushingly stupid (not to mention morally repugnant) way of thinking.
I do every morning, having moral integrity is something really important to me. I just still can't get over the trauma of having my own home invaded, burglared, and the people who did it getting away with it scott free - I sincerely hope they get hit by a train and die a very painful death.
>> Probably a good idea also to read the first few pages of Utopia by Thomas More,
I will do that, it's bedtime for me now but I'll have a look tomorrow.
I wouldn't say I'm enslaved, would be unfair.
That being said, I live in a room rented to me by the company that hires me, I work for a customer service center, so it's not a construction situation. The reason the company rents us rooms is because we're not paid enough to afford normal rent.
All this means that if there's ever a ramp down, I'd be immediately jobless and homeless, which does not feel good at all...
If you added on top being in a foreign country and needing your employer for your visa, I think you'd basically have the same situation as the article?
So that's a little precarious. I hope you have some savings built up.
I'm putting all of my money into Quanloop (something like a P2P lending thingy) in hopes of growing the interest income to at least 1000€ per month.
Theoretically I should be able to reach that point in about 7 years, with the APY of ~15.6%, my goal is 80,000€.
A situation like you describe is ripe for abuse. H1Bs here deal with similar precariousness, though not on the level of what it sounds like you're dealing with. I hope your situation improves and you gain some security.
> The reason the company rents us rooms is because we're not paid enough to afford normal rent.
So they're paying you in the form of subsidized housing that is tied to work, instead of paying more. Yeah this should be illegal.
And if there's a fire? Jobless, homeless, and without papers. You should give your passport and all other important papers to your employer for safekeeping.
https://archive.is/mCEHR
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/feds-seize-15-bi...
> [US] Federal prosecutors have seized $15 billion from the alleged kingpin of an operation that used imprisoned laborers to trick unsuspecting people into making investments in phony funds, often after spending months faking romantic relationships with the victims.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-29/china-executes-online...
> China has executed 11 people involved in criminal gangs in Myanmar, including online scam ringleaders. Their crimes included "intentional homicide, intentional injury, unlawful detention, fraud and casino establishment"
https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/3184205/why-china-was-so-k...
> Chen's case might prove more complicated since the US had seized a large amount of his cryptocurrency assets, but he was now in custody in China.. "If China doesn't cooperate, it will be extremely difficult for the US to investigate Chen."
>seized $15 billion from the alleged kingpin
I know the answer but why amass $15 billion, more money than a person could spend in a lifetime, and still conduct this scam? You think a person would say "enough" and escape to a beach somewhere.
Because it was old Bitcoin, which was confiscated long time ago and did 100x.
I'm not sure what to call the bias but the people who have done that we don't hear about so we're only hearing about the ones that don't do that. Who knows how many ruffians and scofflaws are out there on beaches, going unknown!
Good point - it's like the opposite of survivorship bias? We only hear about the ones that don't survive and get caught. The "survivors" we don't hear about all the criminals who are still at large I guess.
A while back I thought I could make a bit of extra cash by playing along with these scams, apparently they give returns on the first/second round of investment and only run off with the money once the sum is large enough for them. Knowing that someone may get beaten or worse for losing money prevented me from going through with it
If you would be able to withdraw (you wouldn’t be able to) that money has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is from other people who were scammed.
No one is going to get beaten because of your interactions with scammers. They’re going to be beaten because they are enslaved.
The phrase playing with fire comes to mind.
The returns show are general on app/paper only not something you can actually withdraw
They sent me to my usdt wallet. So i actually got it. Of course after I earned 30 USD they make it impossible to withdraw unless I “invested” 100 usd. Very weird scam to pay out 30usd.
So means 1 in 3 people must invest 100 in order for them to breakeven, which tbh doesn’t make sense.
Also note that came from a random telegram account from dubai.
They asked if I wanted to make money etc. I obviously thought was a scam. I never expected to really cash out the 30 USD.
That makes sense to me and is what I would expect. I have seen accounts where people were in fact allowed to withdraw their small initial gains (although i can not confirm that was the case, maybe they were just trying to save face) that's what gave me the idea to scam the scammers in the first place.
They would likely allow you to withdraw some returns but not the principle.
Trying to scam the scammers is one of the world's oldest ways of getting scammed.
First taste is free. Don't engage with criminals even if they run crying to western media about being “enslaved.”
A related paper interviewing victims of the pig-butchering scams.
“Hello, is this Anna?": Unpacking the Lifecycle of Pig-Butchering Scams [1]
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20821
Does Laos not have a functioning justice and enforcement system that the individuals trapped here could not just call them?
The catch-22 is that these people are nearly always immigrants, and the criminals have taken their documentation, so the best case scenario is they get rescued and then deported, possibly via a spell in immigration detention. The worst case scenario is the cops turn up, laugh, collect the day's bribe money and then the person who called the cops gets beaten.
(this is an important dynamic in sex trafficking as well)
The government is somewhat complicit - there are even reports that the police take escapees back to their captives for a bribe
this is far bigger a problem and requires interventions from China and India. what good is it to just punish the people who ran the scam but not the country that supported it?
What you see is exactly how those systems function
From TFA:
>The relative leniency of Muzahir’s compound, says Harvard’s Sims, likely stems from scam operations’ sense of total control in Laos’ Golden Triangle region—a zone of the country controlled largely by Chinese business interests that has become a host to crimes ranging from narcotics and organ sales to illegal wildlife trafficking. Even human trafficking victims who escape from a compound there, Sims points out, can be tracked down relatively easily thanks to Chinese organized crime’s influence over local law enforcement. “These guys don’t have to be held in a cell,” Sims says. “The whole place is a closed circuit.”
Complementary movie on this topic: "No More Bets" from 2023
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_More_Bets
I have noticed a dramatic decline in human scam calls and a commensurate increase in ai calls.
Is there an archive link somewhere? All I see is a 21 minute podcast I can't listen to without a sub, and a single paragraph of copy.
Found this archive link:
https://archive.is/2026.02.02-090119/https://www.wired.com/s...
> 'Mass exodus' from Cambodian scam compounds a 'humanitarian crisis'
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-03/mass-exodus-from-camb...
I have been getting repeated emails saying something along the lines of "We have a family office who has a strong interest in making an investment into <MY_COMPANY_NAME> industry. Can we set up a time to discuss this opportunity?". They are signed with different names, always female, and coming from email addresses with a TLD of .help or .shop
It's obviously a scam and I am not replying, but I'm curious what the scam is here.
The investment is blocked till you transfer a fee to process it.
I wonder what kind of stories one'd hear from scam-centers in India.
We have quite a bit of insight into Indian scam centers thanks to the work of scambaiters like Jim Browning[1] who frequently hack into their CCTV cameras and desktops.
The big difference is that the workers in India are voluntarily employed. In fact they often work for companies that do legitimate customer support as well, so they maintain the facade of doing “service” for their “clients”.
It’s also worth noting that Indian call centers focus more on tech support scams rather than romance scams.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/JimBrowning
They run the same corporate style operations. Management team, performance reviews etc all that jazz
Horrifying read. I recently read a book about a girl who was pressed into prostitution, and this reads much the same. [1] Before I was convinced that slavery was mostly a thing of the past, how awful to find out this isn't true.
1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6515858-slave-girl
According to International Justice Mission [1], 50 million people are trapped in human trafficking.
1: https://www.ijm.org/
and most of them are in muslim countries.
Source for this? This just reads as blatant xenophobia...
Looked this up out of curiosity and came across a non-profit which produces reports on the topic and seems to be the basis for the Wikipedia article on modern slavery.
According to the 2023 Global Slavery Index, 7-8 of the top 10 countries in the world with the highest prevalence of modern slavery have a majority religion of Islam (Mauritania has disputed figures about religious prevalence with Christianity and Islam at similar levels). And none of the countries in the top 10 lowest prevalence have a majority religion of Islam. Prevalence here is used to mean estimated number of people in slavery per 1000 population.
However, the absolute figures for total people affected are proportional to the size of the country, as you would expect, with North Korea and Russia topping the list.
And if you look at driving factors, the US is the leading importer of products at risk of being produced by slavery by an order of magnitude.
https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/
Are you unfamiliar with the tenets?
Why would a criminal organization that trafficked you into a place where you have no legal recourse ever stop exploiting you?
Same reason your government doesn't set taxes to 100%, has rules for themselves they at least sort of follow, and only treats people like shit when they've got a pretext. If they make it "too bad" then they'll have to piss away a whole lot more money on ensuring compliance, it'll threaten stability, etc.
Slaves are the least motivated and least productive form of workers. Slaves who know they're slaves are worse still. Shooting for maximum extraction of labor doesn't actually get you the best ROI. Don't get me wrong, they'll still treat you like shit. But they maximize their "take home" by not going too far with it.
I get that we all want to turn off our brains and hand wring because "criminals" or whatever but the dynamics of human organizations are unchanged regardless of what side of the law they're operating on.
Slavery was replaced by wage labor because it was more productive in the long run - that's part of the economists founding narrative. But I think they tend not to emphasize that it was also simply because it was a lot more flexible for a business in a competitive market to rent than to own, ceter paribus.
Quasi-slave status persisted in many situations for a long time, being a local maxima for various management situations. Penal slaves in the postwar American South were in many cases treated worse than their chattel slave parents/grandparents partially because they were rented out by their owners, who didn't pay for them, to managers who rented and didn't have any stake in their survival.
Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly, Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity spread, slaves were no longer conveniently available, and the society had to adapt.
In densely populated areas, that meant systems like serfdom. Agricultural land was a scarce resource mostly owned by the elite. Most peasants were nominally free but tied to the land, with obligations towards whoever owned the land. Peasants farmed land owned by the local lord and paid rent with labor. And if the lord sold the land, the peasants and their obligations went with it.
Debt/war/penal/chattel slavery was not a particularly strong economic activity in Europe in the Middle Ages. What we're mostly talking about is agricultural serfdom.
I think the Church had a lot less to do with the end of _serfdom_ than the Black Death. The sudden population drop mandated that lords who wanted to maintain production had to steal peasants from other lords, and improve their own compensation/conditions to retain their own labor force. And so on for the rest of the economy as well.
This represented a massive transfer of power and rights downwards... for a while. The late 1300's and 1400's have some of the best conditions for the laboring class for the previous 400 years or the next 400 years. You can hear about some of the dark days to follow in England specifically in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ec9Al5ezYs
Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly, Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity spread, slaves were no longer conveniently available, and the society had to adapt.
This requires a very bold, 115 font asterisk. Or rather it’s plain wrong. Mass slavery in Europe didn’t really end until serfdom was abolished (1800s). And let’s not even get started on the African slave trade which was managed and prospered off of from Europeans, both from direct sales and indirectly from slave labor. Also, many of those slaves converted to Christianity, so it wasn’t based on any religious affiliation.
It was abolished in western Europe. Even in eastern Europe serfdom was not the same as slavery.
The African slave trade happened between west Africa and the Americas, and Africa and west Asia. Not with Europe.
Slave owners refused to free slves who converted, and tired to prevent them being converted : https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/protestant-slavery
I’m a bit confused by your reply. Pretty sure the rulers of the Dahomey kingdom weren’t trading with people of the “Americas” but with Europeans, before and after its abolishment across Western Europe. In the book Fistful of Shells, historian Toby Green argues the scale of the trade was only made possible by European traders flooding West Africa with cheap currency (shells which had little value to them but that could be collected in the billions from Brazil and the Indo-Pacific).
My points are:
1. slavery in Western Europe had been abolished long before the transatlantic slave trade - the Europeans were intermediaries, but there was little to no slavery in their home countries. There were many court rulings in England against slavery.
2. not enslaving Christians played a role in abolishing slavery in medieval Europe
3. serfdom was a far better condition that being a slave
4. Slave owners in the Americas opposed the conversion of slaves to Christianity. they also censored the version of the Bible available to slaves very heavily.
5. The claim about mass slavery within Europe is misleading on two counts: serfs are not just chattel slaves (they had rights), and Western Europe was very different from Eastern Europe.
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/blog/bl...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain#Judicial_de...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Select_Parts_of_the_Holy_Bible...
>Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves.
It disappeared because it was replaced by indentured servitude on the low end and restriction and tax on who could do what trades on the high end. Because the lords own a huge fraction of all the farmland. So this is very much a "you're nominally free but you're gonna be share-cropping your old master's land" situation for the former serfs. An improvement, sure. But not nearly as big of one as the history books tout.
Lucky for them that didn't last very long until the black death made labor way more valuable so a lot of the rules got eased up and once that unleashed a bunch more productivity at the margin, well there was no going back.
>Most peasants were nominally free but tied to the land, with obligations towards whoever owned the land. Peasants farmed land owned by the local lord and paid rent with labor. And if the lord sold the land, the peasants and their obligations went with i
I'm not saying they're equivalent, but there's a very good comparison to most professional licensure to be made here.
Serfdom was a huge improvement. Serfs could not be taken away from their homes and families. They could own things. They had far more rights.
These just-so narratives about how slavery was abolished for rational economic reasons can be quite frustrating. Obviously historically most people who owned slaves didn’t stop owning slaves because it was more profitable to give freedom and pay. Nor because they were competing with neighbors who had turned to cheaper wage labor. They did so because they were forced. Slavery was a topic of great political turmoil.
Is the argument that it would have come back if it were really cheaper? Or is the argument just so above the fray that the political turmoil is part of the supposed “costs” that were saved by abolition?
I’m not trying to directly engage the question whether slavery was more profitable than wage labor. It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history.
And vice versa, the people who pushed for abolition (in the US anyway) did not do it for economic reasons either. It was a deeply moral mission initiated by, basically, religious fundamentalists. Then followed on by more mainstream liberals, still for ethical reasons, and then followed on by the masses once war broke out over it.
A similar pattern in the UK, bar the war.
There was use of military force to suppress the slave trade but not actual war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa_Squadron
Contrary to what most people seem to think about the past, slavery was oft seen as naturally repulsive even thousands of years back. It required regular defense. In Aristotle's Politics [1], written some 2400+ years ago, he felt compelled to lay out just such a defense and it was, by far, his weakest argument. He clearly started at his conclusion and worked backwards from there, instead of working forward from first principles and he did in other topics. The reason it's relevant is that he did accurately predict the end of slavery:
"For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'Of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods.' If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves."
There were thousands of years of efforts to end slavery, some countries would occasionally succeed at such only to see it spring right back. Yet following the industrial revolution it began rapidly disappearing everywhere that had gone through industrialization + urbanization. The issue in your mental model is that you're only considering local effects over very immediate time frames. Think about the bigger picture.
Industrialization drove big money away from farms and into factories, away from rural scarcely populated rural areas into densely populated urban areas packed with very poor potential workers. As soon as the necessity argument for slavery became plainly absurd, to say nothing of the issue of industrialization also reducing the need for so many workers even on plantations, slavery wasn't long for this world. This says nothing about actual slave holders who, as you said, did not just go quietly into the night. But as their economic might relatively waned, so did their influence.
[1] - https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.mb.txt
> It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history.
Why? The economics of oil, cotton and silver, for example, are undeniably important forces in moving the history of many regions.
>These just-so narratives about how slavery was abolished for rational economic reasons can be quite frustrating. Obviously historically most people who owned slaves didn’t stop owning slaves because it was more profitable to give freedom and pay. Nor because they were competing with neighbors who had turned to cheaper wage labor. They did so because they were forced. Slavery was a topic of great political turmoil.
These sorts of ignorant narratives about how humanity abolished slavery out of the goodness of its heart can be so frustrating.
If slavery was so much more profitable that those engaging in it were the dominant economic force in society it never would have been abolished, at the very least because so much other economic activity would have depended upon that surplus (stolen from the slaves).
This isn't so say that moral factors didn't matter, they absolutely did but if we couldn't afford abolish slavery or or if we did despite not being able to afford to or if free workers were substantially worse than slaves at the margin we'd have been out competed by some other society that didn't make that choice.
>Or is the argument just so above the fray that the political turmoil is part of the supposed “costs” that were saved by abolition?
That's certainly part of it. It takes a lot of constant violence to keep people enslaved. You can shit-can all that administrative overhead if you make people "free" (well not all of it, but a lot).
>It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history.
It annoys me when people think we can just do what we want. We are fundamentally tied to what we can afford, in the most general sense of that word. Our freedom of action is limited.
Edit: We'd all be better off if everyone stopped thinking of slavery as a binary and instead as the fraction of a worker's surplus that is taken by threat of violence. Even if where one draws the line of "taken by violence" varies, this at least enables one to make better comparisons across centuries and locations. But that leads to some deeply uncomfortable questions for many so of course we won't do that.
> It takes a lot of constant violence to keep people enslaved
Or digital transaction cancel-sanction-kill switch tied to biometric identity of fugitive human assets.
Paper passport hostages are crude approximation.
The Quakers in New England in the 1800s were known for (1) being abolitionists and (2) whalers. They often bragged about employing freed and escaped slaves on their ships. It all sounds great when viewed through a narrow lens, but the whale boats had a system of paying the crew when they returned successfully. No whales, no pay. Yes, the Quakers would risk the cost of the ship and the supplies, but they didn't pay for the labor until the end ... and then only when the workers actually succeeded. The plantations had to capitalize the cost of the slaves upfront, a significant cost that often required large loans. Before the Civil War, places like New Orleans were big banking centers.
The late 1700s early 1800s British Army and Navy also drove a "famously hard" bargain when it came to the working situation of the former slaves they employed.
> I was convinced that slavery was mostly a thing of the past
Unfortunately, it's the opposite. There's more people in enslaved situations now than ever before in all of human history.
Slavery is alive and well in most part of the world, especially south asia, middle east, Russia and Africa,where children with no papers are trafficked all the time for the worse things you could imagine. I'm not sure what convinced you otherwise.
Also in the USA. We call it "prison labor", and over 1% of our adult population is "under correctional control."
Approximately two-thirds (about 61% to over 65%) of the 1.2 million people incarcerated in US state and federal prisons are employed in prison labor, totaling around 800,000 workers. These workers often perform maintenance tasks for, on average, 13 to 52 cents per hour, with many facing forced labor conditions https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-prison-labor/#...
There are also slaves you see outside your window without recognizing them as such. Homeless people are sometimes exploited by gang members who enslave them to either pimp themselves out or sell drugs.
One of the side effects of a society tolerating thousands of people living in nylon tarps with no real safety net.
drug addicts as well are manipulated by dealers into theft & other crimes to pay for their addiction, essentially a form of chemical induced slavery
I'm against for-profit prisons, but equating people who commit crimes and end up in prison and are forced to work as part of their sentence, to people who have committed no crimes is a bit ridiculous.
I understand your sentiment. Unfortunately, the history of America's legal system isn't simple. There are people in prison who never actually committed a crime, but who were convicted because they couldn't afford good legal representation during their trial. This disproportionately affects the poor, and there are correlations between poverty and minority status in America. Some people have been able to get their convictions overturned, but this typically requires very sympathetic people advocating for them.
There's also a very long history in America of laws and law enforcement being targeted against poor people and minorities. Vagrancy laws (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrancy#Post-Civil_War) and modern anti-homeless laws effectively criminalize homelessness, and the War on Drugs has had a major negative impact on poor people and minorities. Yes, in this situation those who have been imprisoned due to such laws did violate the law, but such laws, in my opinion, serve the function of kicking people while they are down rather than addressing the root causes of their poverty.
There's a good argument that having a system of convict labor creates a perverse incentive to fill that labor pipeline, similar to how well-meaning traffic laws (such as speed limits) can be abused (for example, "speed traps").
If you are open to a bit of reading I would recommend The New Jim Crow, Usual Cruelty, and Copoganda. The USA has a disproportionate amount of prisoners and armed law enforcement compared to every other comparable country - because it is a hugely profitable industry that self perpetuates itself really well- it’s similar in a way to how hard it is to get any consumer protections in USA from predatory and polluting entities.
children? how about adults?
After USA destabilized Libya, it turned horrible. In Libya there are open slave markets. Adults. Africans trying to who travel a great deal trying to get to Europe are often kidnapped and kept as slaves in Libya.
https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/the-scandal-of-a-sl...
I'm well aware of Libya and its open air black slave markets, don't worry, an absolute disgrace what happened in Libya, and we could talk about Syria too and how The Yasidi were enslaved by Daesh...
The West has largely snuffed the horror of slavery in its sphere but outside of that it's the wild west. There are horrifying things to read if you go down that rabbit hole.
China executes 11 members of Myanmar scam mafia
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2gdrvy9gjo
China executes four more Myanmar mafia members
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg4e9eqz4rxo
The BBC article is interesting:
With these executions Beijing is sending a message of deterrence to would-be scammers. But the business has now moved to Myanmar's border with Thailand, and to Cambodia and Laos, where China has much less influence.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked to run online scams in Myanmar and elsewhere in South East Asia, according to estimates by the UN. Among them are thousands of Chinese people, and their victims who they swindle billions of dollars from are mainly Chinese too.
Frustrated by the Myanmar military's refusal to stop the scam business, from which it was almost certainly profiting, Beijing tacitly backed an offensive by an ethnic insurgent alliance in Shan State in late 2023. The alliance captured significant territory from the military and overran Laukkaing, a key border town.
China exercising profound influence over their near abroad.
And they didn't even have to concoct a lie to justify it
They are Ethnic Chinese who were operating scam centers in collaboration with junta at northern area Laukkai.
There are more at shwe Koko area.
were they Chinese citizens?
They are usually Chinese triad gangsters who operate scam businesses and illegal casinos in south east asia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triad_(organised_crime)
China claims jurisdiction because 20 Chinese citizens were murdered, if that’s what you’re wondering.
They are Han Chinese, Most of those triad family come from Yunan borders a few decades ago. In Myanmar , thanks to military junta , they can easily buy citizenship by bribing authorities One of them is even a MP Senate in Military aligned party.
> The more senior boss, who went by the name Da Hai
Weird. In Wired's own graphic of the org chart, this person appears, but he's labeled "SEA" instead of "DA HAI".
In the chart, it says 大海 (dàhǎi, lit. big sea) above "SEA", which means 'ocean'.
Yes, I know, but the intended audience can't read 大海.
The chart and the article are both created by Wired; it's strange for them to refer to him one way in the chart and another way in the article.
I'm curious about the ethnic makeup of the "team leader" level. One of them is called "Ted", and seems to also be called 特德 ["te de"]. The 特德 could just be because everyone in the upper levels is Chinese, but the English-language post from Ted shown in the article doesn't really suggest a native English speaker. (And does suggest an emotional loyalty to China.)
Amani doesn't sound like a Chinese name or like the English name of a Chinese person.
"Amani" is an East African name
I'm surprised anyone here expects these things not to be happening. The world outside of our (frankly small) 'western bubble' varies from pretty rough to absolutely horrific.
I'm personally not too sure what anyone does about it. People left unchecked, to some degree, are awful.
While not as bad, MLM style companies share a lot of the same techniques as described in this article. Seems like a lot of them hold people primarily by indoctrination rather than actual force
> The world outside of our (frankly small) 'western bubble' varies
Even within our "western bubble" horrible like these things continue being exposed, at least once every year. Sex trafficking rings, slavery and more seems a lot more prevelant than seemingly some people like to believe here, even in our "western bubble".
One would think the whole Epstein affair that keeps growing would make people realize this, even more since there is still many individuals who are seemingly shielded for whatever reason. And that's what we know about, that they're "willing" to share, so imagine the ones who aren't as dumb and big as Epstein, they're still around and they're still in our "western bubble".
There's sadly forced labor within the 'western bubble', too. My experience from working in tech is the bubble is mostly a small set upper middle class people.
As a human it's not like you meet that many people so I think necessarily we have a very myopic view of how the world is. I mean hell, I often don't even know what people I see regularly are going through, there are people I talked to regularly that had severely abusive relationships or were going through a serious illness and it took a while for me to figure out.
That's why those "scammer gets owned" videos made by douche youtubers, full of people gloating in the comments about how superior they are, never sat right with me. Those people crammed into warehouses are obviously extremely desperate or coerced or both.
There is quite a difference between indians going to "work" in a shiny building in the business district and native chinese held captive in Myanmar and forced to scam people in China.
Don’t like that you’re being downvoted. I’ve always felt the same.
I don't - it's the same as people defending thieves and burglars because "they are just people and they have families to feed". I've had shit stolen from my house before and the emotional damage this causes is far greater than anything financial - to me, thieves could be shot on the spot, literally zero sympathy towards them, they are only one spot below actual murderers and rapists in my book.
These guys are the same - do I feel bad for their plight? Yes, for sure, I wish we could help them and make sure they can live their lives free and not in what is effectively slavery. But they are currently "employed" destroying peoples lives, so many examples of people losing their lives savings to these scammers, many commit suicide due to this. Fucking around with them for youtube videos is the least we can do.
You understand the front line of the pig butchering scam don't have agency, yet you call them thieves and burglars. They're not the ones doing it, it is those who control them. Having said that, I neither agree or disagree whether youtube videos should gloat about how they've wasted their time or whatever.
I think we need to make it practically impossible to run the scam by having social media / messaging operators shutdown fraudulent accounts, especially if reported.
>>They're not the ones doing it, it is those who control them
No, it is quite literally them doing it, not the people running the operation. Same as if there is an organised gang in my area it's the people who are in my house that are doing the burglaring, not the people running the gang.
And yes, I appreciate very much that they might not have any choice in the matter which is why I said, I am genuinely sympathetic to their position and I hope we can solve this.
Thank you for illustrating my point in a far more unhinged manner than I could have possibly expected. Someone from a first world country in 2026 unironically defending that "thieves should be shot" needs to take a hard look at himself. Probably a good idea also to read the first few pages of Utopia by Thomas More, a fucking 510 year old book where the author explains why this is such a crushingly stupid (not to mention morally repugnant) way of thinking.
>>needs to take a hard look at himself.
I do every morning, having moral integrity is something really important to me. I just still can't get over the trauma of having my own home invaded, burglared, and the people who did it getting away with it scott free - I sincerely hope they get hit by a train and die a very painful death.
>> Probably a good idea also to read the first few pages of Utopia by Thomas More,
I will do that, it's bedtime for me now but I'll have a look tomorrow.