The Journal. - The Slaves Sending You Scam Texts

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

Have you ever thought about who is behind your scam texts? WSJ reporter Feliz Solomon spent months investigating and discovered that many of these texts are coming from slaves trapped in scam dens in Southeast Asia. She talked to one person who had been imprisoned there and learned how he became ensnared in a growing criminal empire. Further Listening: - Pig Butchering: A Texting Scam With A Crypto Twist  Further Reading: - Posing As ‘Alicia,’ This Man Scammed Hundreds Online. He Was Also A Victim.  - ‘She Hooked Me’: How An Online Scam Cost A Senior Citizen His Life’s Savings  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When did you last get a scam text? I get them all the time. The other day, I got one that said, It's been a long time since we had dinner together. When are you free? I also got one that said, Hello, Mr. Chen. When will my piano arrive? The sender plays it off like it was an accident,

and they try to strike up a conversation. The goal, though, is to convince you to send them money or join an investment scheme, but it's all fake. Every year, Americans lose billions of dollars through these scams. It's often called pig butchering because the scammer fattens up the victim with compliments and friendship and then butchers them by tricking them into giving away their money. To a lot of people, these messages seem kind of ridiculous, and some even have fun toying

with them. I love, genuinely love messing with scammers. This is a scammer. My grandma has been dead for over a year. He sends so chill security numbre a guat. I kind of feel like you're a scammer. You're texting me like you're in the middle of a show. But have you ever really thought about who is sending these messages? Our colleague Felice Solomon has, and she's spent months investigating who's behind them.

A lot of people might not realize that the person sending these texts is also a victim. They've been scammed too. These scams have become a multi-billion dollar industry, and it's built on something truly horrific, slave labor. The United Nations calls this forced criminality. It's a relatively new phenomenon that we haven't really seen anywhere else before. There have been approximately 120,000 people trafficked into Myanmar for this purpose of forced criminality,

and another 100,000 people believed to have been trafficked into Cambodia for the same purpose Sorry hundreds of thousands of people are being trafficked and forced to do this. Yes Felice met one of the few people who've been able to escape from the system and he told her his story and They would punish you if you didn't deliver results. Yeah, every day you have a goal. So if you don't achieve your goal every day, there is a punishment. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson.

It's Monday, July 29th. ["The Journal," the show about money, business, and power. The show is a production of the American Film and Television Agency. It's a production of the American Film and Television Agency. It's a production of the American Film and Television Agency. It's a production of the American Film and Television Agency. It's a production of the American Film and Television Agency. It's a production of the American Film and Television Agency.

It's a production of the American Film and Television Agency. It's a production of the American Film and Television Agency. It's a production of the American Film and Television Agency. It's a production of the American Film and Television Agency. It's a production of the American Film and Television Agency. It's a production of the American Film and Television Agency. It's a production of the American Film and Television Agency. It's a production of the American Film and Television Agency. It's a production of the American Film and Television Agency. It's a production of the American Film and Television Agency. It's a production of the American Film and Television Agency. tests. Brought to you by the Ad Council and its pre-diabetes awareness partners. In June, Felice landed in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.

She was there to interview Gharacha Belichu Bersha. He's 41 years old and goes by the nickname Billy. They met at her hotel. Hello, how are you? Good to see you again. I'm good. Billy and Felice went back to where he lives outside the city for an interview. I guess we should just start from the very beginning.

Can you actually tell us a little bit about where you came from? Where did you grow up? I grew up in a very small city in Ethiopia. Billy's story and his connection to the scamming industry started with a job posting. It was from a company that called itself the HuiLong Network. The job was exactly what Billy was looking for, a customer service role at

a tech company, and it was based in Thailand. Billy was open to living abroad, and this company offered him $1,500 a month, way more than he could earn in Ethiopia. So it's a huge money for me. I said, let me do this. Was there anything in the interview process that made him at all suspicious?

No. Nothing seems suspect about this job recruitment process at all. He spoke to real people in multiple languages. They asked him questions relevant to the job he was applying for. They presented him with documents that looked real. And they had a website and multiple staff members that all propped up this illusion that it was a real company. Matthew Feeney

Feliz says Billy isn't the kind of person who's easily fooled. He's worked overseas before, and he's well-educated. Feliz He did his master's degree in Chengdu, China. He's got an undergraduate degree in computer sciences and a master's degree in automation engineering. He's multilingual. He speaks the dominant language of Ethiopia, as well as Chinese and English. This is a highly skilled guy. — Billy got the job and was flown to Bangkok, where he was put up in a nice hotel.

A few days later, he and some others were driven to a town in Western Thailand close to the border with Myanmar called Mesot. They were taken to a guest house and their passports were taken from them. Then, around midnight, they were told to get back in the car. They say, now it is time to go to work place. Tomorrow you guys have to start work.

This is when Billy started to get nervous. When they are calling us like in the middle of the night, we're just a little bit worried. And the driver and the guy who's like taking us to the company, they don't speak English or Chinese. So we can't communicate with them. It didn't seem normal to them, but they didn't protest too much. But because he was nervous about it, he did open up a map on his phone and he was monitoring

where they were going. He saw on his phone that they were headed towards a river and he could see that that river marked the border between Thailand and Myanmar. Billy was put in a boat and taken across the river. He found himself outside the gates of a huge compound. He was now in Myanmar. When I reached the gate, the gate was like the gate of hell. I mean, at the gate,

I thought like I'm gonna die here, I know. So what happened next? He realized pretty quickly what he had gotten himself into. The morning after he arrived, he and the other new arrivals were taken to an office and they were told pretty explicitly, you've been tricked. You're not here to do customer service. You're here to scam people. And they were given a set of instructions and said they'd be trained on how to do it.

And they were all in shock. At first, Billy refused to do it. I told them I don't want to work here. This is not my job. I didn't came here for this one. I came for e-commerce. The guards responded to Billy's protest by beating him up. He said he could barely stand afterward.

You know, after a few days of being treated very badly, he realized that he didn't really have any options, and he started to comply. Did he ever think about just running out the door and running back across the border into Thailand? I think he thought about it, but upon thinking about it, quickly realized that that wasn't an option. There are guards all over these places.

They have guns. And he just did not think that he could get away with going anywhere. not think that he could get away with going anywhere. — Feliz corroborated Billie's story with several people who were imprisoned with him. She also talked to others who escaped similar situations. So what was it that he was made to do? — First, he was what was called a screener, which is someone who just has a list of phone numbers and just blasts out messages all day. Just random messages to strangers.

And everyone who replies is then moved to a list of, okay, we got a live one. And then you're handed over to someone else who will engage with you. Billy and the rest of the people imprisoned there were forced to work 16 hours a day, sitting at a computer or with several phones. They weren't paid. And if they didn't meet their captors' daily goals, they were beaten.

They had really high targets of how many people they were supposed to get on the hook every day. And everyone got punished at some point or another. At the top of the stick, they have something, I don't know, it's like a rope, or they can beat you. It's like there is no any rules for them. They just want you to do what they want. You must do to survive. In the few hours a day he wasn't scamming people, Billy ate in a cafeteria and slept

in a dormitory. He was there with mostly other men who'd been trafficked. Some of them were from China, and others came from Ethiopia or Uganda. So everybody's scared. We don't talk a lot. So everyone was just so afraid that they didn't even try to communicate? No. You don't even tell your real name,

even if you are from the same country. It's strictly forbidden. Billy was given access to a phone, but like everything in his life, his use of it was controlled. He was allowed to contact his family every so often, but he knew that his communications were monitored. He also didn't want to frighten his family because he didn't think there was anything

they could do to help him. They're on the other side of the world. They had no money. So he calculated that the risk of telling them that something was wrong was very high. He would get caught and they wouldn't be able to help him anyway, so he didn't even bother. During Billy's imprisonment, he was made to trap people in different kinds of pigbuttering scams. One was a romance scam. With a laptop and phones with WhatsApp and Telegram

on them, Billy pretended to be a woman. He was given a document that profiled a character and a selection of pictures and all sorts of information about her so that he can make her sound real. And he's got a script of how to talk to people that he's trying to scam, what exactly he should say to them, what he should say on day one, what he should say on day two, et cetera. The character name is Alicia. what he should say on day two, et cetera. pictures which makes the male attractive. And then when they attract, we put them to fall in love with her.

And how long does it usually take to get a stranger to fall in love with you online? Three days. Three days? Yeah. Wow. And how long after that does it take for you to get them to commit some money? The minimum, I mean like five days or a week. And then how long does the scam last? How long do you fatten them up before you butcher them?

Until their pocket empty. Billy says over the 16 months he was enslaved, he would handle 15 to 20 victims a day. Some were poor and lost what little they had. Others were very wealthy. Did he tell you about some of the people that he messaged? Like, what did he learn about them? He did. He remembers a few victims in particular that were pretty traumatic for him.

There was one who was a Pakistani guy that had fallen in love with this character, Alicia, and he was married. He had children. He was a successful businessman with a lot of money, but he was just completely taken by this character. And he would write these long, impassioned letters to Billy. And Billy felt really bad. He didn't want to scam him.

Matthew 5 Billy felt so bad that he decided to stop talking to him and he dropped the scam. Beth Dombkowski And when he stopped talking to this guy, his heart was broken. And he sent Billy a video of him throwing acid on his face. He was trying to kill himself. He threw acid on his face because he was so heartbroken that Alicia had stopped talking to him? Yes.

He didn't die. He was okay in the end. This was Billy's life now. If you fall in love in three days, if you have money, you're gonna lose everything. This was Billy's life now. But what exactly was this place? And how would he ever escape? That's next. Don't you wish your life came with a warning app? Well, life doesn't always give you time to't know it, but he was being trafficked into one of the most notorious scam compounds in the region.

It's called KK Park. This is about a square mile of territory right along the Thai-Myanmar border on the Myanmar side where a bunch of buildings have been built basically for the express purpose of housing criminal enterprises like scam compounds. You're kidding. No this is real and I've been over there and you can see it from the Thai side. You can actually see the buildings. Felice saw KK Park for herself on a reporting trip to Thailand.

Wow. These are really big buildings. So we're looking at a few buildings that kind of look like warehouses. We're probably about 500 meters away right across the river. And we can see these industrial style buildings that look like warehouses. They're about four stories high. This part of the border is kind of beyond the reach of law enforcement. Parts of the border are ruled by rebel armed groups and parts of the border are ruled by the central government,

which since 2021 has been a military regime. The Eastern edge of Myanmar has become the beating heart of the scam industry. Since 2017, huge compounds like KK Park have mushroomed out of the dense jungle. And the Myanmar government isn't really doing anything about it. The land is controlled by powerful Chinese mobsters.

They rent it out to developers who build the compounds and then leased them to lower level criminals who run dozens of scam dens. This is a part of the world where criminals have enjoyed pretty much complete impunity. And after there was a coup in 2021 in Myanmar, this got even worse because that basically ended essentially all law enforcement efforts in these areas.

Myanmar's military government says it doesn't allow any illegal businesses and blames armed groups for allowing crime to thrive in the region. And this is good business for criminals. One estimate from 2023 says that approximately $64 billion was stolen by scam syndicates, mainly out of this region of Southeast Asia. Within this business empire, Billy was just a tiny cog. And as a slave, he was bought and sold twice, and moved around to different scam centers. Why do you think they sold you?

Because I didn't want to work there, and I was making trouble all the time. And they spent a lot of money to bring me in that company. And they want't compensate. He was sent from KK Park in Myanmar to another compound in Laos. After a few months, he was trafficked back to Myanmar to a center called Mountain View. Did he think that he'd ever be able to get out?

He went through highs and lows. At some times, he had hope that this would end, and other times he was completely hopeless. It was while he was at Mountain View that Billy managed to quietly build friendships with some of the other men he was enslaved with. In secret, they began to devise a plan to stage a protest. They felt that their punishments in this compound were really extreme. And they didn't see their situation changing at all.

And they thought, we've really got nothing to lose here. So they had organized what was essentially a strike, where they decided on a certain day they would all together refuse to go to work, and they made what they thought were the most realistic demands that they could, which is that they stop being physically abused and that they be paid.

So on, I believe it was December 21st last year, when they got up that day, they all just looked at each other and said, okay, this is it, we're not going. And they refused to leave the dormitory. When some guards came from their company to try to get them to move on to the office, they refused to go and they started chanting and they had a number of chants about giving them their rights, giving them their money, not beating and abusing them anymore.

We are a lot so they can hear our voice if we shout. And what were you shouting? Just like we wanna go home, we don't want anything. Like some of us, we just write what we need What were you shouting? So the guards weren't really sure what to do at first. So they told the guys, okay, okay, we hear you. We're going to give you what you want. Everybody just calm down, go back to work.

And then the guards came in while everyone was at work and just plucked out six people that they accused of being the organizers. Billy was one of them. They came and then they handcuffed us and they took us to the prison area and they hung us in the wall. Not sleeping, not eating, just punishment. For around a week, Billy was tortured and displayed for other captives to see.

Billy was tortured and displayed for other captives to see. And then they were moved to small, dark rooms where they were hung by their wrists with handcuffs. This Billy later realized was a bathroom stall. Inside that stall, it was dark. He didn't see daylight for days. He was beaten very badly. I got tired. My spirit is broken.

That's the main goal for torturing. And after that, they give us like, if you want to survive, you need to pay money and then leave this place. How did it ultimately end? So after a while, the guards and the management, I think they saw little use left in these people. They told them that if they paid a ransom of, in Billy's case, it was 7,000 US dollars, that they would just let them go.

And they would come in and they'd give them a phone and say, call your family and tell them to send the money and you'll be free. So Billy had called his friend in Ethiopia and told him what was happening. And then the friend spoke to his family and they scraped together the money. What happened, how did that go?

Oh my God. My dad was fainted. His pressure was high. Billy says his father was shocked to discover what was happening to his son, and he was determined to find the money. So he sold his house. They managed to cobble together $7,000. They sent it via cryptocurrency to his captors and they agreed to release him. How did Billy feel about his father selling his house? He feels horrible about it to this day.

He's very ashamed that he put his family through this. In some ways, Billy was lucky. In the past few years, few have managed to get out of the scam compounds. Some slaves have had to pay ransoms as high as $100,000. In January, Billy and a handful of other men were released from Mountain View. Disoriented, they were taken across the border into Thailand and dropped off at a hotel on the outskirts of Mesaat.

Once he was there, he had a whole new set of problems. He had no money. He was there illegally without a visa. So he was at risk of arrest. He didn't have a whole lot of options. At the hotel, Billy and the men were approached by a man who worked at a local nonprofit. He took them to a safe house where they were given medical treatment and legal help. While he was there, he met Feliz for the first time. She was there on her reporting trip, investigating the scam compounds.

And we were hoping to interview people who had been coming out. Unfortunately, very few people do manage to get out. We were lucky that a few, including Billy, had escaped recently at that time. At the safe house, Felice sat down with Billy, and they began their first interview. My hand is shaking because I have a lot of trauma inside. I am in a mirror. Felice also saw the physical toll the scam center had taken on Billy and the other men. All four of them had injuries from being strung up by their wrists with handcuffs. They all had open wounds on their wrists and other wounds across their bodies.

They had cuts and bruises all over their legs and their torsos from being beaten. Weeks later, in early March, Billy finally returned to Ethiopia. How did you feel when you got on the plane? Was it like, oh my God, this is it, it's over? Yeah. When I just go to the airport and then take the plane and leave Thailand, I promise

for myself not to go back to Thailand anymore. There have been some attempts to curb the scam industry that entrapped Billy. In 2023, China began a crackdown and has rounded up more than 49,000 people that they say were running the scams. Most of them were low-level suspects. But the scam centers are still operating. In fact, they're growing. There isn't just one KK Park.

There's also a KK Park 2, and a KK Park 3, and 4. And the fake job ads like the one Billy responded to are still out there. We found one online for a role at the same company Billy says he applied to. The job description says the successful candidate will be based in Thailand and quote, conduct online chats with qualified customers.

We reached out to the company, but they didn't respond. Back in Ethiopia, Billy looks for these ads too. If he finds one, he sends it to the police. Right now, he's sharing an apartment with a friend just outside Addis Ababa. And so you've been living here pretty much since you returned to Ethiopia in early March, right? Yeah, since March 1st I have been here like on and off because I don't have a place to stay. So what's Billy's life like now?

know. So Billy's life is slowly getting back to normal, but he and these other guys, they're not doing very well. None of them have found work since they got back. The economy is not great. They can't make a lot of money there, but they also have had difficulty finding jobs because potential employers want to know, well, what have you been doing for the past year and a half? And they don't want to tell them, I was tricked and enslaved and I was scamming people in a criminal compound for the past year. So they have this sort of unexplained hole in their work history.

And they're also having a lot of trouble just readjusting to society. He has difficulty engaging with people, connecting with people. They have a lot of psychological trauma. Yeah, sometimes when I close my eyes, especially night time, I can see all the trauma that happens to me. And I think it's not going to go for a lifetime. I mean, it takes time to process. So it's really like trauma for me.

And I feel that it's the same for the other guys. And it's really hard. So it's like our mind is like in a black hole now. It's like in a dark place, deep dark. You don't trust people anymore. I mean, I'm trying. But it's really hard. That's all for today, Monday, July 29th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.

Additional reporting in this episode by Rachel Leong. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.