Hundreds of thousands trafficked to work as online scammers in SE Asia, says UN

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/08/hundreds-thousands-trafficked-work-online-scammers-se-asia-says-un-report

by layer8 • 3 years ago

360 185 3 years ago

ohchr.org

skilled• 3 years ago

Related (as in a similar story but focusing specifically on Cambodia),

They’re Forced to Run Online Scams. Their Captors Are Untouchable (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37304188) (no comments)

shiftpgdn• 3 years ago

This isn’t new, but it’s good to continue to report on it. I remember even back in 2005 it was generally well known that the gold farmers in World of Warcraft were likely Chinese prison labor. There were even a few articles about it: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/chinese-pr...

logicchains8• 3 years ago

There's a big difference between prisoners (who at least in theory are locked up as punishment for committing a crime) and people who've been trafficked into slavery. Even the US uses prison labour, but it's people who committed crimes. What's happening in SEA is kidnappping innocent people, locking them in guarded compounds and forcing them to scam people, and they get raped or beaten if they refuse.

jacquesm4• 3 years ago

That's true in principle but the laws and legal system are set up in such a way that a very large percentage of particular demographics will end up in this situation and from an outsiders perspective it doesn't look all that different.

iterminate2• 3 years ago

"Even" the US isn't much of a moral barometer for prisoner treatment. The US uses prison labor because the US is one of the worst countries for prisoner (mis)treatment, certainly the worst in the west.

There's a big difference between prisoners (who at least in theory are locked up as punishment for committing a crime) and people who've been trafficked into slavery[...] What's happening in SEA is kidnappping innocent people

Lots of people in prison are innocent, especially in the US. Prisoners are no less deserving of rights and fair treatment than victims of trafficking. Likewise, I'm sure many trafficking victims are guilty of committing crimes (as are most people).

sidewndr46• 3 years ago

I don't think "Even the US" is a valid way to justify slavery. I mean, even the US had slavery at one point right?

giraffe_lady• 3 years ago

The difference is really not that large, if it exists at all which I don't find to be the case. What severity of crime justifies enslavement? You can have your sentence extended for refusing to labor, regardless of what you're originally in there for. Is that just? Is there "a big difference" between that and trafficked labor?

gentleman11• 3 years ago

The USA still uses slave labour, sorry to inform you. Bust somebody for pot possession, and to protect society, gotta force them to work for basically free? Give me a break. Your country is still a slave leasing one, if not a slave owning one

The ancient Greeks often used crime or war as an excuse to capture slaves. At least they had the honesty to call them slaves afterwards

steve1977• 3 years ago

There's a big difference between prisoners (who at least in theory are locked up as punishment for committing a crime) and people who've been trafficked into slavery.

Considering what can probably get you in jail in a country like China, I’m not so sure about that.

mistrial9• 3 years ago

Labor historically in a lot of places, was built on peasant-serfs, indentured servitude with a duration, or in many cases slaves. I believe that many educated people in the West are not aware of the extent to which this is true throughout history.

whimsicalism6• 3 years ago

I agree that this is true, however I also think that when we imagine slavery in the West we think of chattel slavery and the reality is that what we call slavery in these peasant-serf contexts was not the same thing, did not have the same mortality rates, etc.

whimsicalism6• 3 years ago

Sorry, but that is insufficient evidence to me for something to be "generally well known." It is well known that there are flawed incentives to testify in Western contexts to things that did not happen in East Asia, this is known among South Korean defectors (not denying that NK is objectively terrible, one of the worst countries in the world - but defectors to SK have been known to say outright false things because this is how they get paid and get media attention and many of these publications will pay for stories).

Something that is "generally well known" by contrast is that China almost certainly harvested organs from prisoners in the 90s and early 2000s.

jedmeyers• 3 years ago

My friend in Eastern Europe ran a bot farm in WoW. He ran bots on his computers that farmed resources, then sold resources for gold and then sold the gold to Chinese for end-user resale. The only labor involved was hiring some college students and paying them for each top-level character they progress that can be used for farming. He even bought my character for $50 when I stopped playing.

kazanz• 3 years ago

The scam centres generate revenue amounting to billions of US dollars each year. Revenue in 2021 from scamming globally amounted to USD 7.8 billion worth of stolen cryptocurrency.

Crypto has made scamming easier than ever. Ironically, it probably is making it easier to track how impactful it is too.

delusional• 3 years ago

It's a nice honeypot. All the scammers are busy scamming each other.

throwaway677438• 3 years ago

This is not new at all, there are US companies facilitating this (see: Tinder e.g) with zero regard for the lives of the people forced into doing this. They actively ignore these things and profit off it, absolutely disgusting.

naillo• 3 years ago

What is tinder doing to facilitate this? I assumed bots on there were just financial scam bots not of the trafficking kind

Nextgrid• 3 years ago

"bots" don't run on their own. While the initial message might be from a bot, leads need to then be coached into falling for the scam which involves human labor and can very well be such enslaved victims trapped in third-world countries.

popularonion• 3 years ago

Tinder has become totally swarmed with these kind of scammers. It’s way worse than it was a few years ago.

It’s becoming basically unusable unless you communicate with photo verified users only, but I’m sure a lot of photo verified accounts are run by these scammers too.

logicchains8• 3 years ago

LinkedIn and various job boards have much more responsibility than Tinder; most of the victims described in the article travel to SEA for what they've been led to believe are high-paying white-collar jobs, not because they're romance-scammed into going to meet a partner there.

throwaway677438• 3 years ago

LinkedIn has a much lower hit rate, because people tend to search for region specific jobs, whereas Tinder you can send any location you desire with your fake profile (but they're very easy to spot).

The Tinder things are very rarely romance scams, they pivot to crypto scams immediately, "I work in the finance industry scoping out markets for crypto" etc - then I'd imagine they'd encourage someone to invest but they usually see through my attempts at scamming them back, one day I'll figure it out.

alephnerd2• 3 years ago

LinkedIn isn't common in ASEAN. It's a uniquely North American phenomenon (194m Americans), though there is some traction in India (94m), Brazil (60m), and China (57m).

Most users offered the jobs are getting them via everything apps like WeChat, Zalo, WhatsApp forwards, Viber, Line, etc.

troglotit• 3 years ago

Tinder slave-labour is used also for assembling drones in Russia that attack Ukraine. Source (RU): https://istories.media/news/2023/07/24/studenti-dolzhni-stra...

1-62• 3 years ago

Unsure if it's related to the same region but in general, scammers are getting sophisticated with their attacks finding local churches and email phishing with unusually detailed information about church members. Posting videos asking prayers for specific individuals online is a bad practice since it exposes not only that individual but everyone around them to scam.

ConfusedDog3• 3 years ago

Just saw a documentary interviewing escaped trafficked labors – just men, women ain't even capable of escape. They are falsely promised for "entrepreneurial opportunities," promptly got locked up and financially deprived to do scamming, prostitution, etc. One guy escaped, bystanders took him to the police and the police was part of the traffiking ring and sold him back. He finally paid off somebody with promise of ransom payment from his relatives, and upon entering Chinese border, he was fined by Chinese border control for violations. These local traffik orgs are armed with AKs and well connected politically. What a crazy, crazy world.

andrethegiant• 3 years ago

Link to documentary?

ConfusedDog3• 3 years ago

I couldn't find the exact video I saw on YouTube. It's funny if you search "escape Cambodia," a lot of Gordon Ramsey's food videos pops up, but if you search "逃出柬埔寨" in Chinese, you find all these terrible trafficking cases.

aaron695• 3 years ago

This is the best for Cambodia - "Forced to Scam: Cambodia’s Cyber Slaves" by Al Jazeera - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-EtdC4zQso

local traffik orgs are armed with AKs
police was part of the traffiking ring

These statements are not representative of Cambodia, local/Chinese gangsters don't run around with AKs, and the documentary is a little exaggerated like all documentaries but I don't doubt there were suicides and beatings.

Some Facebook ads were very clear what you were doing. There were not 100,000 working in Cambodia and most were not trafficked.

This UN statement is garbage, liars bore me. It's why this is progressing to organ harvesting and other rubbish because the UN is bringing it to fantasy.

Watch the doco and they mention the amounts they were making, then times that by 100,000 trafficked then all the ones who answered the Facebook ads and it doesn't add up.

It's the Chinese doing this, which the UN page doesn't mention. Maybe the report does. But it's a main point for a summary... if the truth mattered.

Video of 40 people escaping a Chinese run Cambodian casino https://e.vnexpress.net/news/news/40-people-swim-back-to-vie...

renegade-otter• 3 years ago

Perhaps not as dramatic, but this is not uncommon.

HBO is right now running the documentary series Telemarketers, about a US operation that is clearly a fraud, but it's protected by corrupt and bribed police union management.

adhesive_wombat2• 3 years ago

They are falsely promised for "entrepreneurial opportunities"

From what I heard, which I cannot verify, it's more sinister then that. People take completely normal-sounding jobs in normal-looking and functioning offices. After several months of being paid normally for normal work, they're invited to a team-building event in SE Asia. There, they lose their passports, are interned in huge camps and are press-ganged into being scammers, and tortured or killed if they refuse.

This isn't your usual "can't cheat an honest man" tale where you sucker in greedy rubes with a promised free lunch.

ConfusedDog3• 3 years ago

Yeah, I saw that, too. If they refuse, they claimed that they are going to be "harvested" of cornea, plasma, kidney, etc. What I don't understand is that they said they were threatened to be taken to international water for organ harvesting procedures, but was that even necessary? Those camps are pretty criminal already, seems to be an unnecessary extra step.

brucethemoose2• 3 years ago

The entire chain that enables this is disturbing, but fascinating.

For instance, the scammers would need some kind of credibility in the job market before the team-building exercise. Do they just start up new legtimate businesses with new people just for this purpose?

And the SE Asia slave camps need a huge amount of compliance from the locals.

And what happens when none of the employees return from the original country?

soared• 3 years ago

Source? That sounds straight from a Facebook group

l33t73322733• 3 years ago

I don’t believe this happens with any degree of regularity; it’s like the plot of a movie.

If it happened even once, it would be noteworthy. Do you have any reference to an article about it?

b0afc375b5• 3 years ago

After several months of being paid normally for normal work, they're invited to a team-building event in SE Asia

Holy ####. This reminds me of my previous software developer job when we were supposed to go to South Korea for God knows what[0]. The reason why we had to go there wasn't really explained well to me, and I didn't care enough to ask because I was just excited to go to another country. In the end our application was denied by the embassy, and I always felt a bit disappointed by that.

Perhaps the possibility of my case being sinister is miniscule, but maybe I shouldn't feel too disappointed.

[0] the owner of the company I worked for was South Korean

hef19898• 3 years ago

Sounds like an industry ripe for disruption, AI, LLMs and AI voice generators to the rescue! /s

In all honesty, if AI is killing those organisations, that might be the only half way decent thing coming of the current AI use cases.

whimsicalism6• 3 years ago

I don't believe you, to be honest. Provide a source or delete if you can't substantiate.

coconut_crab• 3 years ago

The usual story here (Vietnam) is that the victims are often promised a job with high earning prospect in Cambodia, or they are in debt after playing in casinos over there. Since Vietnam economy isn't in a good shape, there is no lack of potential victims. They don't really get killed either as it will cost the kidnappers, they will just get sold to another scam center. Oh and the victim can buy their freedom back if they scam enough people (my friend lost 10k USD in one such scam), not that there is many people who can do that though.

appleflaxen• 3 years ago

It's the modern day slave trade.

granshaw• 3 years ago

Where there is no opportunity, there will be crime

brightball• 3 years ago

The well connected politically is the weird thing about this to me.

I think we can all agree that trafficking is…bad. Yet there seems to be this strange political push back against anti-trafficking efforts.

I’ve seen it for years to the point of pretending it’s not even a problem. The recent political reaction to Sound of Freedom, which was not a political movie, is just the latest example.

It’s one of the most worrisome aspects I’ve seen in general “politicize everything” trends.

xwolfi• 3 years ago

Politics is a fancy name for "controlling the rules well enough to be able to prospect my little business". Politicians are not all ideologically positive and benevolent, or even patriotic or nationalist, some are really just trying to find a way to do business better.

One of the worst banana republics in that regard are the USA: here in China we'd never let a frigging casino operator rule the country, we have a small pride still.

gumballindie4• 3 years ago

Not even scam bosses allow for remote work i see. Cant they just like hire willing scam workers instead of trafficking people?

differentView• 3 years ago

It's harder to beat the workers into working harder remotely. Remote workers can also more easily work with law enforcement, quit, and start competing scams.

gumballindie4• 3 years ago

A bit like legitimiate workers minus the beating part. That's replaced by hazing, harrasment, gaslighting and bullying at the work place. Same end goal, worker control, for both types of businesses, legitimate or scam.

bboygravity• 3 years ago

The scams with willing people are just called multi-level marketing.

brap4• 3 years ago

I wonder if low quality scams (made by humans) are still going to be a thing given advances in AI.

I bet a human sounding bot can already make a phone call and scam most of our grandparents far better than the average human scammer. Add the ability to mimic the voice of a relative and you can get pretty high success rates, even with more tech-savvy victims I bet.

1-62• 3 years ago

Eventually, it's going there but at the moment, people are mostly using low-tech methods to scam others. Oftentimes we'll overestimate/underestimate the abilities of scammers. It's important to realize that access to cloud services and sophisticated AI requires money for that infrastructure and these paltry scammers won't do that unless it's a part of a bigger org.

brap4• 3 years ago

I'm guessing that most of these scams are coming from large orgs as described in the OP/comments, this seems like a fairly expensive operation. I'm also guessing that for about the same cost they could use AI to cast a much wider net, making it more profitable even if the quality is lower. The paltry individual scammers will probably go out of business soon.

slig• 3 years ago

Low quality and obvious scams are a feature, they filter only the most gullible.

brap4• 3 years ago

I think you only need to filter when your scale is very limited due to the effort involved. A human can only make so many calls per day. AI makes these attempts much cheaper.

lr4444lr• 3 years ago

First it was Kenyan academic ghost writers for hire, now AI putting traffickers out or business too? What's this world coming to....

brap4• 3 years ago

Sadly I don't expect things will get better for the trafficked victims, this only lowers their "value" in the eyes of criminals. They will probably find even worse uses for them.

aunth067• 3 years ago

it's already happening at scale, there was a 60 minutes segment on this recently https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-being-targeted-by-grandpar...

The "ethical hacker" shows them how to use an AI to spoof the 60 minutes host's voice, then use it to scam a 60 minutes employee on camera, in real time. It works.

boeingUH602• 3 years ago

I’ve had a random person contact me out of the blue on Telegram and try to build a friendship that obviously ends in a pig butchering scam.

Fortunately, I have a rule to never make online friends. If I’ve not met someone in a personal or professional setting before, I assume they’re a robot unless proven otherwise.

Some pig butchers have also tried to contact my parents, but my parents are careful, and I immediately block any such number.

Pretty sad to see that these operations could easily be stopped, but the perpetrators live in extremely corrupt places/semi-failed states where they just pay bribes to the local authorities to leave them alone.

apetresc• 3 years ago

Sorry, is "pig butchering" a euphemism for something, or am I missing out on some new scamming trend?

boeingUH602• 3 years ago

It’s the name of the scam where they trick people into investing in fake platforms and steal their money.

The scammer starts first by building a romantic relationship with the target (this part can last weeks or months). Along the way, they start suggesting cryptocurrency investments on trading platforms that look legit at a glance but are fake underneath. They instruct the target to deposit money into a wallet, like any exchange, but the perpetrators just steal the tokens and show the mark fake figures.

It’s a long term thing that takes a ton of work…I have no idea how the scammers even pull it off at scale.

This site goes into more detail; https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Pig-butchering-sca...

btseytlin• 3 years ago

"take it all" - https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-pig-butchering-scam/

cottage-cheese• 3 years ago

Both, for instance https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-pig-butchering-scam/

heja2009• 3 years ago

The term was also new to me. From [1] I understand it is a class of cryptocurrency scams starting by building a cordial relationship via social media or dating apps and then suggesting financial investment.

[1] https://www.michigan.gov/ag/consumer-protection/consumer-ale...

illwrks• 3 years ago

"The pig butchering scam is a type of fraud in which criminals lure victims into digital relationships to build trust before convincing them to invest in cryptocurrency platforms. Unbeknownst to victims, the fraudsters control the platforms and will eventually take all the money and vanish. "

I've taken it from the article here: https://www.aura.com/learn/the-pig-butchering-scam

bettercallsalad• 3 years ago

Can relate. I was in a dating app and there were so many of them pretending “nice looking girl looking for husband” that then tried to befriend you and tried crypto scam. It’s so smooth that even as someone who is relatively well versed in the crypto world and associated scams I couldn’t tell at least in first two or three attempts. Their first few messages leading upto this would be “do you believe in financial freedom as for a happy life?” I would play along just to see what their strategy is and it would almost always end up trying to lure you into yield farming asking to deposit in some random wallet address promising 15% monthly yield.

It was so frustrating at some point, my first questions to someone matching me would be are you a crypto or onlyfan scam? Man the online dating world has turned completely shameless.

soco2• 3 years ago

Just try Tumblr nowadays, which is not even a dating app. But those scammers don't mind, they "only want to make friends" and push ahead with one fresh empty profile after another. And I'm sure it brings them profit, otherwise you wouldn't see them swarming you by dozens.

devoutsalsa2• 3 years ago

A quick way to spot one of these is once you establish a nominal connection, ask to meet or video call. The standard scammer response will be something like “I don’t like video calls” or “let’s get to know each other online” first.

smeyer• 3 years ago

That's a nice way to avoid scams, but the cost doesn't seem worth the benefits to me as someone who otherwise has good awareness about scams. I've made some nice friends off the internet and yet to fall for a scam, so it doesn't seem worth locking out that possibility of friendship just to reduce the odds of being scammed slightly more.

I could easily see giving very different advice to a friend with less scam awareness, though (like an older friend with limited knowledge of technology).

fortran77• 3 years ago

Are they scamming Westerners? (TFA wasn't clear). They'd have to be pretty fluent in idomatic English to do that.

Do the 5-10 messages I get each week "Hi! This is Irene. Are you going to the party?" come from trafficed people?

Avicebron• 3 years ago

If it's not automated, it could easily be some sort of pre-defined script. I don't get many anymore, but I've definitely had mysterious text messages from different numbers supposedly across the country that were nearly identical. Usually it was "hey is this [random name], where were you last night?" I assume this was meant to draw me into some sort of dialogue. It happened enough that I can't really believe it was just a misdial.

knodi123• 3 years ago

From what I understand, initial messages don't come from the slaves; instead, you get connected to one if you reply. So the english skills might shift drastically between the first and second message.

alephnerd2• 3 years ago

They started off targeting Chinese speakers (Mainland China, Taiwan, HK, Malaysia, Singapore) but expanded into English and Thai over the past few years.

em5002• 3 years ago

I'm guessing that they're mostly targeting the richer Asian countries, including China (which is on average is poorer than the West, but in the aggregate has comparable spending power as North America).

magic123_2• 3 years ago

A relative of mine got scammed for tens of thousands of dollars exactly this way. They are college educated, COO of the company they founded in the US, and thought they were just making a new friend over several months after receiving a message that was addressed to them by error.

tropicaljacket• 3 years ago

"Many of the victims are well-educated, sometimes coming from professional jobs or with graduate or even post-graduate degrees, computer-literate and multi-lingual." (from the report)

aphroz• 3 years ago

A good thing that soon AI will be able to scam us as good as humans so they won't need to traffick people anymore.

lacrimacida4• 3 years ago

And would that make life better for traffick victims in any way? They’ll brutally be repurposed for some other dirty work

logicchains8• 3 years ago

There's a recent Chinese blockbuster about this called No More Bets, inspired by a true story. But in the movie the victim is saved; in real life he's still enslaved

em5002• 3 years ago

Another one is Lost In The Stars.

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/haven-for-scams-hit-movies...

elric• 3 years ago

Hundreds of thousands? That's a mind boggling scale. That's at least the size of a decent city. How do you even cope with the logistics of dealing with 100k+ scammers?

yalogin• 3 years ago

They torture people to do online scams? What a bizarre world this has become. Never thought we would see trafficked and online scams in the same sentence. Effectively, I guess, they don’t want to pay the employees and so force them at gun point.

csomar2• 3 years ago

I don't know about Myanmar but I am a little bit skeptical about "hundreds of thousands" in the rest (Thailand, Laos, Cambodia). I've traveled the region extensively and am in a remote place in Laos now.

I think the UN is using the word "trafficked" way too liberally. While I heard stories from fellow travelers and citizens (only in Cambodia, be careful in Phnom Penh and don't go to Sinahouk); my guess is that the majority of these are in some kind of situation (like owing money to the boss) or maybe justifying what they are doing (it's not a crime if you are forced!).

For some reason, I find this "hundreds of thousands" quite sinister. It devalues the whole issue as it normalizes it; while there are some people now in real need of help and in real danger.

cheeze• 3 years ago

I mean, these aren't people locked up on slave ships and hauled to a new world or something, but they are absolutely trafficked in that they are forced to do the work against their will without a way out - literally modern slavery.

This comment feels mega weird to me, like you're trying to downplay the plight of these hundreds of thousands of modern-day slaves because it doesn't meet your definition of trafficking.

I'm certainly going to trust official figures coming from the UN over someone on HN who happens to be traveling in SEA

Eridrus• 3 years ago

Many advocacy groups (particularly those making claims about human trafficking) fudge their numbers to make their cause seem more important, and you can see why, we would probably not be discussing this article without such an eye catching statistic in it.

If you try to see how they got this number in their report it is "credible estimates/sources" that are "on file at OHCR". So there's no way to independently verify this, you have to just trust them, which doesn't breed confidence in their estimates.

hungryforcodes2• 3 years ago

I don't see in any country in SEA -- and I live out here -- how you could hide 100K people in concertation camps to do high tech scamming.

There is a comment above about someone's Laotian wife working hard conditions doing these scams because it pays much better than local work -- this seems much more convincing.

Even the issue with the Vietnamese casino workers was only 40 people -- though not to minimize it's importance.

mithras• 3 years ago

My wife's niece is from Laos and works for one of these chinese scam shops in the golden triangle. She is there voluntarily because it makes 5 times more money than her best alternative. Morally repugnant of course.

vishnugupta• 3 years ago

Related; 130 trafficked Indian workers were rescued last year.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/8/indian-workers-resc...

freedude• 3 years ago

Slavery is an old, detestable practice. There are more slaves worldwide today than in any other time in history. Welcome to modern civilization. Contemplate that the next time you use something made in China or another third world country. This is a common practice.

https://www.un.org/en/delegate/50-million-people-modern-slav...

dangus2• 3 years ago

This is why I discourage people from playing games with scammers to “waste their time.”

I always assumed that they were not really doing this job by choice, whether it’s modern slavery or not.

You’re not saving someone else from getting scammed, you’re messing up a quota for someone who might be physically punished for missing it.

lacrimacida4• 3 years ago

If everyones quota goes to zero perhaps the master behind these scams go down with it.

dangus2• 3 years ago

If I don’t pay the prostitute it’s definitely not the pimp who is going to get bruises.

mcpackieh5• 3 years ago

It's sad that these scammers are victims themselves, but measures that reduce the extent to which these victims can victimize other people are a clear net good for society. You won't save a trafficked scammer by hanging up early so he can move on to easier marks, but you can prevent him from using the next hour to make a new victim out of somebody else.

Or to put this in other terms; you're a Ukrainian machine gunner. In the distance you see Russian soldiers. You know that many of them are from the Russian gulags, unjustly imprisoned in an oppressive autocracy, quite likely for a crime they didn't commit, and now forced to invade a foreign country. You pull the trigger and mow those victims down, because if you don't those victims will make victims out of your friends, family, and fellow countrymen.

jstarfish2• 3 years ago

You’re not saving someone else from getting scammed, you’re messing up a quota for someone who might be physically punished for missing it.

At some level, starving the beast is the only way to stop it. The more crimes they commit, the more likely it is they get caught. You can't account for the disposition of victims in the hands of thugs, and there's no guarantee victims won't get fed to pigs even if they were consistently Employee of the Month. If you already have a viable way to dispose of bodies, why let anybody leave?

The better reason not to play games with scammers is that you're antagonizing someone who does not respect rule of law. Consider what someone overconfident in their ability to commit crimes unchecked might do to you in retribution.

blurbleblurble• 3 years ago

This is an extreme and poignant caricature of the labor market in general as vast numbers of people experience it. Not to minimize what's happening here: extreme financial pressure with very high stakes is not rare. It's disturbing to see the extremes because there's no hard line between normal labor and this, it's really a continuum.

Aside from enforcement and regulation, what really prevents these exploitative forms of labor from spreading?

momirlan• 3 years ago

i remember an article about people from Moldova trafficked to Turkey, where they promptly had one or two organs harvested and then sent back home. the horror...

kirillzubovsky• 3 years ago

Hi, this is UPS. Your packages was the wherehouse due to an error in the shipping address. Please contact our customer service immediately at http://scams4you.xyz

lost_tourist• 3 years ago

The people doing this and anyone supporting it should be put away forever. Still a person's liberty and making them a slave is one of the worst possible lives for anyone and should be relegated only to the worst of criminals like murderers, rapists, and enslavers. I have zero tolerance for those types of people and think the international community shouldn't either.

charlysl• 3 years ago

JFK files: How a Soviet lie that the CIA shot the US president became the original 'fake news' story

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/jfk-files-how-soviet-lie-that-cia-...

Hundreds of thousands trafficked to work as online scammers in SE Asia, says UN

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