The Hidden Abuse Behind Those Spam Texts You're Getting – Slate Magazine

Transcription

Lizzie O'Leary: Just a quick heads up that today's episode talks about human trafficking and is not appropriate for kids. All right. Here is the show. When I got ProPublica reporter Sizwe Podkolzin on the line from Hong Kong, I asked him to tell me the story of a man named Fon.

Speaker 2: He's a young guy, 22 years old, Chinese, who was looking for a job last year. And he came across a job ads that looked really promising.

Lizzie O'Leary: It was for a food delivery company in Nam, Penh, Cambodia. The salary was good, and the company even offered to fly him there from China.

Speaker 2: He applied for the position. He got it. And next thing you know, he flew to Cambodia and he was so excited about this job. He also told his brother, who was already there for work and the two of them have reported for duty. And it was only after they got there that they realized that this wasn't at all what they had thought that it was going to be.

Lizzie O'Leary: That marketing job with the food delivery company had never existed. Something much darker was happening.

Speaker 2: Basically, in that first month after he started at the job and was doing the training. He realized that the training wasn't for anything that he thought it was going to be. The training involved basically learning how to defraud people online.

Lizzie O'Leary: But by that time, Fon and his brother were deep in debt to their captors for bringing them to Cambodia. At one point, they owed $31,000 and there was almost no way to earn it back, which of course, was by design.

Speaker 2: They're given these steep prices to buy their freedom. They don't have it. So they basically are forced to, you know, keep labouring until, you know, they can, you know, try to win back their freedom by paying off their their captors.

Lizzie O'Leary: Fon realized they were trapped victims of a new and high tech kind of human trafficking. Today on the show, how desperate people are forced to become cyber scammers. I'm Lizzie O'Leary and you're listening to what next TBD a show about technology, power and how the future will be determined. Stick around.

Lizzie O'Leary: The playbook used by Vonn and other people who are forced into scamming is relatively simple.

Speaker 2: They're just given a list of WhatsApp numbers to just just go after. When we talk to fun, we ask like, What was your usual opener? You said It could be anything. Just get the conversation going.

Lizzie O'Leary: Usually it begins with a text message or a greeting on WhatsApp. Hello. Hi. Or maybe pretending they have the wrong number.

Speaker 2: Oh, is it Susan? Oh, no, it Lizzie. I'm sorry. Lizzie know I've met Susan, but. But you know what? Acquaintance is fate. Since we're here, China, let us talk. Right. And that's a very common line you actually see in these in these scam chat messages is it's quite acquaintance is fate. Right. Because we're here, let's just chat. The goal in that initial stage is just to basically muscle in on a person's life muscle and start talking to them, get them talking about their life. Because, you know, the way these scams are structured is, you know, anything and everything you say to a scammer can and will be used against you.

Speaker 2: Right. Any information given about your personal life, what's going on in your life? You know, they have a parent who is dying. Do you have a struggle, some sort of financial struggle? Did you just break up with your boyfriend or girlfriend? Just have a divorce? All these things are information, extremely, extremely valuable information that then gets used, if not by the human trafficking victims themselves, then certainly their bosses who then step in when the money gets serious and they try to really muscle muscle in and get those huge amounts from you. So that's the goal in that initial stages is just get the conversation started any way possible. And a lot of that is actually being done by these people who are doing this because they want to, but because they're forced to.

Lizzie O'Leary: Let's talk about how they do it. You wrote about this method called pig butchering. I wonder if you can describe what that is and and where that name came from.

Speaker 2: Yes, it comes from China. In Chinese, it's shot coupon, which is a pig butchering scam. And it was a very widespread scam in China that the Chinese government cracked down on. They started educating people about it because it was, you know, just ruining people's financial lives. The idea in the name comes from the analogy to a farmer, you know, fattening up a pig before it gets butchered. Right. You want to have lots of meat, you have a big meal. So fatten up the pig pork before you kill it. And that's what the scammers are taught to do with the people that they're targeting for these scams. They're trying to fatten them up by getting them, first of all, to trust the scammers. Right. That's what they're going to ask you.

Speaker 2: All these personal questions. They want to get to know Lizzie like who is Lizzie? What makes her tick, like so that they can become friendly with you. You trust them. And because you trust them, when they tell you to download a certain app or go to a website, you'll follow their directions. And when you do follow their directions, you will do as they say, and you'll deposit hopefully larger and larger and larger amounts of money until they realize that you're no longer willing or able to deposit any more. And at that point, that's when they're going to do the butchering, which is they're going to make you aware that you've actually lost control of this money. In reality, you lost control of it the second you transfer it to the scammer.

Lizzie O'Leary: Insofar as reporting he found that pig butchering happens all over the world, Chinese citizens may now know to look out for it, but other people clearly don't. It's not uncommon for victims of these scams to lose astronomical amounts of money.

Speaker 2: Hundreds of thousands was extremely common, but millions was definitely not uncommon. And when I got the complaint, consumer complaint data from the Federal Trade Commission tied to these scams, I was just shocked at the amounts, too, because, you know, the money and, you know, it was very much routinely in the hundreds of thousands of dollars that people were losing. I mean, people were just depositing their life savings into these scams.

Lizzie O'Leary: Can you tell me a little bit about some of the technology that's used here? Because presumably, once you've started replying to this number, you have, what, a fake profile that you're talking to.

Speaker 2: So this is very much a 21st century scam. This is the kind of thing that really couldn't be going on, you know. But for all the technology that we have available these days, now let's start with with language translation software. The reason it's a global scam is because they can translate into any language they want to. So, for example, one find was one of one of the scam companies that that fund was held captive in and was targeting Germans. So at the time that he was there. He had to talk to German people and they asked him, Do you speak any German? And of course he laughed because no, he doesn't speak a word of German. Chinese. He grew up in China, but language translation. So it was all done by a language translation software.

Speaker 2: Secondly, if they're not reaching out to you cold, they're going to find you on whatever social network, social network you use, whether that's something professional like LinkedIn, something you know, for romantic purposes, if you're looking for to find a boyfriend or girlfriend on the dating website or, you know, like even the strange ones, like I found someone who got scammed. When she came across a profile on a language learning app, another person came across a scammer on a an a pen pal app. One of the craziest stories I came across was this man in Canada who the reason he got scammed was Facebook recommended a friend to him. Oh, my God. He logs on to Facebook and he's like, Oh, you might want to be friends with this person. And he looks at her profile and they start talking and next thing you know, he's investing in crypto and then investing more and more and more and more until, you know, too late. He realizes it's a scam. And between him and his friends, it cost him about $400,000.

Lizzie O'Leary: People during scams are also extremely sophisticated. Cesari read about one man who will call you an which is his middle name, who was scammed by someone going by the name of Jessica. Jessica first reached out to you and on WhatsApp with an oops wrong number approach.

Speaker 2: So at the time the scammer reached them, he was at a vulnerable point. In this time his father was dying and it was up to you and to decide both his end of life treatment as well as to handle his estate. So there was just a lot on him. He felt a lot of pressure and the scammer just sort of bustled into his life and started talking to him and offering him at first, you know, sympathy and a distraction, really, from from daily life. You know, here's this person who you can just chat with and kind of escape from all the troubles you have going on in life.

Speaker 2: Right. You can talk about whatever. So that was sort of the initial entry. And then one day in October, she just, you know, showed him a screenshot and said, Do you know what this is? And she said, Well, I just need $100,000 right now. Wow. Congratulations. That's great. Right. And then she offers to teach him like, hey, you know, I can actually share the secret with you how I'm doing this. And she shared this story of a rich uncle she has in Hong Kong who has this team of analysts who are working for him. And they know exactly where the gold market is going to go. And she can teach him how to trade, you know, gold contracts on this app that she's using, this app called MetaTrader. And that's how it started, you know, and from there, you know, once he agreed to start learning and become a student, it snowballs from, you know, an initial investment to 10,000 to what ultimately became $1 million, just a little over $1 million.

Lizzie O'Leary: When did he realize he'd been scammed?

Speaker 2: Not until well after it happened. It seemed so real to him. During that time and asking this question many times. Because one of the things that I sought to understand when I was doing this was how is that affected? This is a man who is a conservative, lifelong investor. He was petrified of putting even $2,000. So how does a man like that go from being afraid to put in $2,000 of his savings into. Within the span of like several weeks, like, really, you know, six weeks depositing, burning through $1,000,000 of savings and borrowed money. Well, the way it happens is through psychological manipulation. And that is the number one thing that makes these scams just so devastating. And so I was really puzzled at this when I was doing this reporting because, you know, very often we talk about scams and people falling for various scams. They tend to get caricatured. You know, I think a lot of people think.

Lizzie O'Leary: Well, I'd never steal for that.

Speaker 2: I never. Yeah, exactly. I never fall. How could you have done that? Right. And this wasn't what I was seeing. I mean, these were very smart people. I interviewed people and, you know, close to 30 victims of these scams in seven countries, you know, Peru, France, Australia, Singapore, United States, Canada, wherever I talk to them, I was talking with people who were, first of all, shell shocked by this, just absolutely shocked that they, you know, that this happened to them and and trying to figure out pick up the pieces and how it happened. And it happened because of the psychological manipulation, because they were tricked into believing that this was real. And the methods that were used were very convincing.

Speaker 2: I interviewed people who know like PhD level, you know, type of research out of university, down to one person I interviewed was like a parking lot attendant in York City. Just people from all levels, walks of life, all different education levels, you know, different kinds of jobs, blue collar, white collar, you know, black, white, Asian, really any race, ethnicity.

Lizzie O'Leary: In the course of reporting this story says Ari spoke to a researcher who has written about the psychology of scamming to share chat transcripts with her.

Speaker 2: And funny enough, you know, I called her up and I said, Have you heard of these pig butchering scams? Like have I? Because she was actually getting these messages. Really? Actually, yeah, she was getting these messages for self on her phone or she's keeping these in some cases hilarious conversations going with the scammers because they're trying to scam a psychologist who studies like how this psychological manipulation.

Lizzie O'Leary: This psychologist, Martina Dove, identified several techniques that Jessica, the scammer was using on Ewin. One was something called alter casting.

Speaker 2: Which is basically kind of taking the opposite position instead of basically putting the the scammer in a position of trusting the victim so that the scam victim, the target, the scam target feels like, okay, the, this person is trusting me. So therefore, you know, when they ask you to trust them, they reciprocate trust later on. Right? So she asked them when she shared the secret of her uncle in Hong Kong, who has this team of analysts trading on inside information? She asked, What can you keep a secret for me? And she said, Of course I can, you know. Can I trust you? She asked. And can you? Can I trust you? And you said, Yeah, you can trust me. And then later on, when it became a question of trusting her, when she said, trust me, this is this is a good investment, you're not going to lose any money. He trusted her because she had already you know, there was this reciprocal trust going after this altar casting technique.

Lizzie O'Leary: There was a part of you in story where I was just shaking my head where Jessica, let's call this person Jessica sort of withdraws her affection. And you wrote about how that, too, was a tactic because it then was on you in to kind of go after her, you know, chase her, re-engage and that she had him hooked, wanting to say, well, wait, let's invest some more.

Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Martin dubbed the psychologists who helped me study this. I think she called it a scarcity. Scarcity where basically a first right showers him with attention. She's constantly giving him attention. And when they're talking about money, she gives them attention. But then later on, if she wants to talk anything but money, you know, it's kind of a cold shoulder, right. Even to the point where when he's confiding that is that his father had died. You know, he gets kind of a perfunctory response. Everything becomes like, let's bring it back to money. And when he does bring it back to money, she's very happy and she engages. Right. So that's that. So he's hooked on that this scammers attention he she she becomes used to it know he misses those days when the scammer doesn't message him and he she feels like he's missing something and it's like, you know, where where is she know? Because it's someone who's keeping him companion during a difficult time in his life. And so once they get you hooked on that attention, that that's when they withdraw it.

Lizzie O'Leary: Then there's another tactic that this. Gamers use something Martina calls prize vividness.

Speaker 2: Give the person some some vivid prize in their mind, something they're saving and striving toward. Right. And you, in this case, obviously, was, you know, his father was dying. And she you know, she she was worried about the costs that would be involved be involved in moving his father to a hospice. She also had some older siblings that he wanted to take care of. So it was save money for your for your family and for your father, you know, do it for them. That was sort of this tangible reward that the scammer gave him. And after his father passed away, then it turned to sort of, you know, talking about real estate, like, wouldn't it be nice if you want to have some real estate, you know? You know, think about that. And so it became like this tangible reward, like a home in New York can be yours if you only deposit more money.

Lizzie O'Leary: How did these criminal syndicates find someone like you? And I mean, we talked about sort of messaging. Hello. Hi. But do they just have random lists of numbers or are they seeking out vulnerable people?

Speaker 2: You know, if you want a person's phone number in the United States, it's not hard to get. And so these numbers, they're they're they're traded, they're publicly available. They can buy lists of numbers very easily and just hand to a human trafficking record and say, here you go, you know, these are your numbers. You know, get as many of them chatting as possible.

Lizzie O'Leary: Unlike ten phones at once.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Ten phones. Yeah, exactly. You might have ten phones going at once and just keep messaging. Messaging. And some of them have quotas. Like one person I talked to would have like a quarter of like X number of lines a day. I forget the number, but they would have to have, you know, a specific number of lines of conversation a day with people, you know, and or they would have to convert like a person, you know, to signing out to the the fake platform for investing. Or if you want to just go fishing for people online, just create a fake profile on Facebook or LinkedIn and go fishing that way, you know? And many people have gotten scammed that way, you know, where they just get a message on LinkedIn from someone and they start chatting. They think it's a professional contact and it's not romantic at all. It could be just, let's talk about business. You're a business person. I'm a business person. I've got something in common, by the way. I'm a good investor and it goes from there. Right. Anything in life, you do it enough times, at least once, you'll be successful. Sometimes that message will land at the right person at the right time.

Lizzie O'Leary: After the break, how scammers use trusted portals like the App Store to make you think everything is fine.

Lizzie O'Leary: How do the companies whose services are used, whether it's social media or Telegram or WhatsApp or even some of these companies that have these sort of fake brokerage accounts online? How do they respond when faced with the evidence that that their services help facilitate crimes?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So MetaTrader. That's the trading app that I mentioned earlier. They didn't respond at all.

Lizzie O'Leary: And that's where there was a fake brokerage where you and deposited this money.

Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So the way to think about it is sort of MetaTrader is a is a trading platform that basically allows brokerages to use it to access for clients, to access various brokerages and to use those brokerages to trade. Right. So similar to kind of how Amazon is a platform and you can find various other resellers through Amazon MetaTrader you can find other brokerages through MetaTrader. And one of the reasons scammers like MetaTrader is because it's easy for them to basically sign up a fake brokerage, unload it onto the platform, and have people sign up and access a fake brokerage through this app in the lab. The app is it's a legit it's a legitimate app, right? There's legitimate brokerages that use this app, but there's also these fake brokerages that also can sign up and have their fake brokerages on there. So you find they're fake brokerages. They tell you to type in the name of it, and they're often running.

Lizzie O'Leary: Using real platforms and real apps lends the scammers an extra layer of legitimacy and lulls victims into thinking it's safe.

Speaker 2: If you're an Apple customer, if you got an iPhone want, you will hear your scammer tell you, hey, you know, just download it from the App Store. You know, they like saying download from the Apple App Store because they know that people trust Apple. Right. And they they use that patina of legitimacy. And the fact that it's an actual it's an app that does have some you know, does have, you know, some legitimate use that they they use that to do basically, you know, to cover up the scam and make you think that it's real.

Lizzie O'Leary: Cesari also reached out to Apple to show them what it found.

Speaker 2: Apple did say that they are aware of these complaints against MetaTrader, but they have made the company aware of them and said that the company quotes the parent company MetaTrader is taking actions to fix this. They wouldn't elaborate and tell us what actions they're taking to fix it. But again, last time I checked, these fake brokerages are still accessible on the app. So, you know, this is still an issue.

Lizzie O'Leary: The victims of human trafficking who are forced to perpetrate these scams have tried to alert the Cambodian police and various officials with mixed success. And it's hard to imagine that local law enforcement doesn't realize that workers are trapped in these jobs, often in very visible places like the seaside city of Scenic Ville.

Speaker 2: One of these facilities, these scam compounds where a fund was held, was located catty corner, just like less than a block away from the prime minister's summer residence in Senegal.

Lizzie O'Leary: It's just this big building that looks like an office building or a casino.

Speaker 2: In the center of town. Yes, the next to a casino in the center, in the heart of town. And, you know, and if you go through that city, it's on. It's like unlike anything else I've ever seen. You know, there's just buildings everywhere that are they just have you know, they have bars on the windows. The balconies are completely barred up so that, you know, people can't jump out of the balcony, can't jump out of the window. And there is you see very often barbed wire fencing all around, sometimes two levels of barbed wire fence cameras all around guards. And you wonder what goes on inside.

Speaker 2: Right. And when you talk to some of the people who have escaped routinely, you hear these stories of being forced to perpetrate scams like Ameritrade, the MetaTrader scam or other forms of pig butchering scams or other, you know, forms of like online gambling scams. Just all kinds of various scams that I never even heard of until I went to Cambodia. And so the government is aware of this problem. They've been aware of it for months and they've been really up until August denying it for months.

Speaker 2: I think what changed is, you know, there's been enough attention and enough light shone on this, including, I must add, by VOD news, which is an excellent news outlet that you should all be reading if you're interested in this issue. They started acknowledging that this is happening. That's the first step in August. They acknowledge that this is actually happening. A senior government official there, Interior Minister SA Kang, said he regrets that this is happening and and they've pledged that they will do something about it. But again, it's one of these things where, you know, we'll believe it when we see it because they've been aware of this problem for months and months and they haven't really done much apart from some limited rescue operations here and there to get people out there. There really hasn't been a concentrated, you know, nationwide crack down on these scam companies which are operating, you know, not just in scenic but many other cities across the country.

Lizzie O'Leary: I think one of the things that I took away from your reporting was that obviously human trafficking has been going on for a long time and scamming has been going on for a long time. But there is something about this combination of those two things and the pandemic and the accessibility and. Frankly cheap price point of these different kinds of technology that has just supercharged this and. I wonder if there's any way to stop it now or if it just feels like this is growing.

Speaker 2: Over the last two years, a lot of criminal syndicates in Southeast Asia have gotten training in how to do this new form of cyber crime. And they've learned that it's very cheap to do, especially if you have human trafficking recruits, people that you basically enslave into doing it. It's very cheap to do. And the return on investment can be vast. And until the international community and law enforcement really take concerted efforts to really crack down on this and root out this this crime, it's you know, they're going to keep doing it because the financial incentive is certainly there.

Speaker 2: So I think in the near term, this is something that's the main thing we can do is to keep raising awareness of it, I think. So that people are aware that this scam is out there, it's growing very quickly, it's very financially devastating. And I think the more people understand where it's coming from, how it works, how it operates, the more people can sort of defend themselves. But unfortunately, the last 18 months have been this great training ground, you know, in places like Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, where these scams are originating.

Lizzie O'Leary: In funds case, he was eventually able to escape when his captors moved him to a new compound with less security. His brother also got out by alerting the Cambodian police, but he was made to sign a letter saying that he had borrowed $31,000 from his captors and that he was treated well. Still, nothing will ever erase the physical and mental trauma that the brothers went through.

Speaker 2: I cannot underscore how, you know, how devastating this is, not just for the victims in the, you know, in the US and other countries who are fleeced and scammed by these pig butchering scams. But for the people who are forced to do this, you know, under duress, you know, if they don't do this work. Very a very common form of punishment that you hear about is the electric shock button. And I've seen photos of the wounds that people suffer when they're just shocked with an electric shock baton or they get beaten. In one case, I heard of a guy who was refused a scam, so he was punished and starvation wouldn't feed him. Beatings are extremely common and the beatings are severe. I mean, the wounds that I've seen are just nothing that I would ever wish on anyone to to have to endure.

Lizzie O'Leary: What Fon endured changed him forever. He no longer wants to pursue a lucrative job, just have a simple life surrounded by friends and family.

Speaker 2: So one of the most poignant things that I think he said that really stuck with me was when we just asked him, what do you want to do when you finally go back? You know what I want to do with your life? Like once here, you know, now that you're free and then go back to China. And he wants to work on his parent's farm. And, you know, they tend to have a little farm where they have like ducks in their family farm, they have ducks and chickens. And he wants to just, you know, tend to the ducks and chickens and work for his parents and the safety of his home. He doesn't want to venture off to work for someone else anymore. He said there's no future working for other people. And that just shows you how scarred he is by this whole experience. Right. And you would be, too, if you respond to a job ad that you think is legitimate. And next thing you know, you're you're in this nightmare situation in a foreign country you've never been to before, being forced to, you know, scam people in Germany or other countries. So it's a really scarring experience, not just for the people who experience the scam, but for the people who are forced to perpetrate it as well.

Lizzie O'Leary: So sorry, Pascal, thank you so much for your reporting and for talking with me today.

Speaker 2: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Lizzie O'Leary: This is our report. Cole is an investigative reporter for ProPublica. A link to his story is included in this show's description, and that is it for our show today. What next? TBD is produced by Evan Campbell. Our show is edited by Tory Bosch. Joanne Levine is the executive producer for what next? Alicia Montgomery is vice president of Audio for Slate. TBD is part of the larger what next family, and it's also part of Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, Arizona State University and New America. And if you are a fan of the show, I have a request for you. Become a Slate Plus member. Just head on over to Slate.com, slash. What next? Plus to sign up, we will be back next week with more episodes. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks for listening.