Judah Tanner
Appearances
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Their people have never had enough to eat. They've never had enough to build proper roads, have infrastructure. They're now in a position where the first time in the history of their people, they've got enough money to feed everyone, for everyone to have houses, to bring in electricity, oil, to have cars, roads, infrastructure. They've never had any of this before.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
And now we're asking for them to give away the one thing, that has given them their own independence and some level of assurity of tomorrow, some survival of tomorrow. I think that's where we have to look and say, if we're asking them to close these down, what alternative are we offering them?
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Is the alternative that they go back to hand-to-mouth subsistence living, where their people have no idea where the next bowl of rice is going to come from? Obviously, that can't be the result because we're not going to see that happen.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
I remember talking and chatting to him and to his group and being like, we're trying our hardest, but we could not give any assurances until the day that they actually stepped onto that barge.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
The interesting thing is she's got a lot of bravery. And if you read her bio, she has not been afraid of walking into the African warlords area, into the jungles, into the bushlands and negotiating with the worst of the worst in order to save her people. It wasn't very different. We asked her, would she consider a conversation with a militia group?
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
And in that conversation, she had shared about how her Ugandans actually shed blood in Myanmar, that they fought for the same thing that this Karen group were fighting for. And so she came at that very level with him and she pleaded with him for her people.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
We were talking to many people within the compound, texting, messaging, trying to get passport numbers, names, identification. We really had to be able to pinpoint exactly which building they were in.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
So Thai military accepted the job of receiving these victims of human trafficking.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
At 7 a.m. in the morning, we were running around that area just trying to find a military leader that would agree to receive them that morning. And we didn't even have the okay yet.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
It took an extra like maybe 45 minutes to an hour for an engineer to come down and fix the motors so that the barge could come across. And we had actually be given a timeline. If this does not happen at this time, they will be sent back to the compound. And we were down to the wire. Like I'm holding my breath.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
And I just remember seeing the group and they're waving. I mean, they're just, it's historic, their freedom, their walk of freedom.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
They came across and, of course, we had to shake hands with each person as they come and identify who they were, look at their passports, made sure we had them checked off the list so we weren't leaving anyone behind, making sure we had the right numbers and the right people.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
I remember seeing him sitting by himself at the back and I just wanted to connect personally with each person. I sat beside him and he looked at me and he goes, my name's Small Q. And I was like, oh, cool, you know? And he said, oh, the other part of it was that I'm actually this semi-famous musician and I'm on YouTube.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
My backstory is obviously being in the music industry as well at some points in my early youth. And so we sit there on my iPhone, just watching his YouTube clips. And I was like, just amazed. that this guy, he, he didn't show off, you know, he just spoke simply. He was just this young kid in the back of this room and, and, um, he was subtle. Yeah, he is.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
And I'm watching him on stage and I'm watching him with this, this bravado and I was like, wow.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
It's beyond, you know, anything that we've seen before. And it's true, I stood with my colleagues, co-workers at the border one day, and my colleague says, is it wrong of me to be slightly awed at what they've managed to achieve in this amount of time? Is it wrong of me to be slightly impressed by their business model? And I said, it's the same. I'm the same.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
There is a point of me, this entrepreneurial Judah, that looks at this and says, it's absolute brilliance. It's the way that they've marketed it, the way that they've planned it, the way that they've moved into technologies, the way how they sophisticatedly built this when an entire world was closed down.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
So tell me about who you are. You know, my name is Judah. I originally came from Australia. And through, I guess, just life, I ended up moving to Thailand and living on the Thai-Burma border. And, yeah, I've come to the day where trafficking, human trafficking, is just something that's in my life now as a daily occurrence or anti-human trafficking work.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Yeah, so there was a global summit earlier this year that was held in Taiwan that looked at the AI technologies. It had law enforcement from so many countries that came to listen to speakers and to dive into what was happening with AI.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Um, and one of the, the key points, the takeaways from this meeting was that the technology is about two years more advanced inside the scam compound than any government agency in the world has. And what they did when they started this scam center, I mean, this is where you see the brilliance of their business mind.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
They started the scam centers by running these scam programs, you know, like internet cafes. You go to work and you work within your little cubicle and you have your computer and you've got your phones and you're just connecting with people all over the world, whether using dating websites or whatever. On the other hand, they brought in
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And they focused on, in the beginning, in the first year of this, they bought in and they focused on those who had the right degrees. So we saw people that were PhD holders in IT. There were computer programmers. There was just everything that you can imagine that they needed, they went after.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
They brought these people in and then essentially they tortured them in order that they would work 17 hour days. developing AI softwares that were never seen before. I remember with one young lady that we helped get out of the scam compound. I mean, she was brought in and she had a PhD in computer engineering. And she said to me, I've never seen technologies like this ever in the world.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
We never studied anything like this, but yet I was asked to make something that didn't exist. And the compounds themselves gave her access to anything she wanted. Whatever she wanted, they could get in for her so that she could develop these AI technologies. So that today we see it, you know, different agents, different news groups and stuff have reported on it.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And you kind of hear, oh, well, there's this new technology that shows like, you know, you could have a conversation with a robot, an AI, you know, graphic. And you would never even know that they're AI. You wouldn't know that they're not real.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
they already had the most horrific forms of torture. It is becoming so much worse. There is no humanity left there. So where we saw it was beatings and tasers and black rooms and being strung up by your arms for days at a time, it was never enough.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And it kind of went through this period of time where there was, um, grown men would be spanked all day long until they were black and blue, um, on their backsides. It became this almost sadistic fetish of the, the, the bosses that they had to punish them and they were no longer being tasered or beaten, punched, bruised. They were being spanked on a daily basis until they were so black and blue.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Also the females, not just the males. It took on this really like disturbing kind of almost fetish sexual fantasy, and then that led to the increase of sexual abuse and rape.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And it's horrendous when a greater percentage of people that come out no longer just testify, and that's male and female, that no longer just testify to beatings or testify to tasers, but testify to the fact that they have been raped while they are there. And it is now such a common occurrence inside that scum compound.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
So we saw what was, um, abuse by, uh, more psychological and then psychological went to just absolute physical trauma, which then went to this kind of sadistic level of, uh, fetish fantasy and now moved into, um, rape from their, their leaders. And that's, it's horrendous. and,
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
If you can dream it up or think about it, or even the worst, the worst of the worst horror movies you've ever seen or, or thought of, they go far beyond that. It's just never enough. They're always looking for the next way in which they can make it worse for somebody.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Yeah, it is, and I've been so unfortunate to have witnessed even the murders that have taken place because there are chat groups where those of us that are deeply within the investigation side of it or deeply within the victim side of it and the criminology side of it, there are chat groups that go around where the leaders or the criminal bosses or those inflicting the crimes actually murder individuals and then post about it.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
I got to the point in 2006 where I thought about where I was at and where I really wanted to be, and I realized that I had become the... you know, selfish Western Australian person that was really just about living for themselves. And I kind of forgot where I'd come from and I had this identity crisis. I was going to give a year to, to somewhere that I loved.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
They share the torture, they share the, um, what happens to their victims and then they share pictures of their dead body and they almost celebrate it. So it's exactly what you said. It's like the profiling that it just gets worse and worse until they actually celebrate the torture in which they commit. And then they post it online.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
They post on these chat groups between other bosses of other companies in order to almost say like, meet me at this place or do me one better. How can you do the next one? And they joke about where they can bury the bodies and where nobody can find them and nobody cares.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
One of the victims that came out had asked me one day, did you hear about the red rooms? And I had not at that time. And he said it's a room where they actually put the deceased persons or the victims that have passed away into those rooms until their corpses rot. And then they lock people in those rooms with the either rotting corpses or they remove
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
the corpses and, and leave them, but there is the smell, the stench of that room. He said, even when the door opens, you are, you cannot stop yourself from, from vomiting. You cannot stop yourself from being physically ill, just at the smell of those rooms. And they lock, they lock people in there for days.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Everybody has their story and their injuries. A lot of the scam compounds actually don't let the victims out until after many of their injuries have healed in some way. So even if you paid a ransom of $5,000, $10,000, it's likely the compound will keep you for several weeks later until all your bruises settle or your cuts close or your marks from the handcuffs are much lessened let you out.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
So the rescues, I mean, you use the word rescue loosely sometimes. So often now the victims actually have to negotiate their own release. They're being asked to pay ransoms. So you're explaining that it's one of the only ways out. But then one of the problems is, is even if they pay the ransom, they're either not necessarily released.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
So that takes a negotiation to get them out or they're released and unable to They don't know where they're going, they don't know how to get out, and so you're trying to meet them at that place where then you can walk them through the process.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Or they're sold to another compound, and that's really where we try to intervene in that, in that moment of time between one compound and another, and that's really where the rescues I think take place.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
I always say that it was going back to my first love. It's like Thailand, the country and the people. And I grew up for many years knowing it and having friends here. And, um, so I came in 2006 and, uh, that one year very quickly turned into three, five, 10. Now we're going on to 20 years.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
I just remember hearing her story and being wowed at her experience. Um, I always have this saying, there's nothing new under the sun. So after a thousand victims of human trafficking personally coming to me and me personally speaking to them, there is almost nothing new that a victim can tell me.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And, um, so when it doesn't sound the same at, or there's not, there's parts of it that are not, you know, don't make sense. I usually will say to them, look, let's, let's stop, you know, kidding with each other. Let's actually get to, um, the, the honest truth. I'm not here to prosecute you. I'm not here to, um, you know, find out what you did or didn't do.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
I'm here to make sure that you have the best advocate possible and you are taken care of all the way until you are home. And, uh, it usually brings about a lot of truth, but with her, um, hearing her story, I questioned it. I really did. I pushed her. I was like, could this be real?
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And, um, she stuck to her guns and she just looked at me one day and I remember her saying, I have no reason to lie to you, which is why I'm not. And one of the parts, the unique parts of her trafficking story was that she was actually taken over a land bridge into Myanmar, which was just unlike anybody else's story.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Our mission, our aim was really to support children into schools and then into further studies and also help with primary health care within communities. And it's been a fantastic kind of two decades.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
One day we were just sitting, my family and we had a friend over our house and we're sitting around the dinner table and my friend, she manages a Facebook account for our area for expats that want information, knowledge. They're not sure, you know, where to buy something or how to get, you know, transportation and things.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And there was a young lady that was a Kenyan national that reached out on this Facebook group and uh you kind of get used to seeing scams you know we're all somewhat used to it somewhere in our lives and so you read this and this young lady had asked about visa um a visa question there were some things that she asked that really triggered um a red flag in the situation.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
But my friend, so we said, okay, we'll just message her back and say, you know, what's going on. And so there was this conversation that took place after that. And the young lady revealed that she was a victim of human trafficking and she was trapped in Myanmar and she needed 5,000 US dollars to get out. And I thought for sure she is a scam artist then because, you know, it's absurd.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And I thought, okay, this scam is going to run for the hills. And she started to answer every question. And I thought, gosh, there's got to be a 3% chance now that this is real. From there, we really asked, you know, to find out if we could get pins for locations, those kind of things. And kind of asked her what it looked like. What was the scam center like? How were you trapped?
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
What was your situation? And she was forthcoming with all the information. And we were able to then actually just take a drive.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And so we stood there and we saw these handful of buildings and we thought, how is this possible? How is it possible that there's somebody trapped? We discovered very quickly how real it really was, and um, just how many people were already involved, and the countries that had citizens trapped there, and the desperation that was happening.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And we very quickly learnt just how horrific the situation was.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
I started to receive tens and then hundreds and now into, you know, hundreds of hundreds, if not thousands of messages. And you very quickly got asked, you know, help me, I'm from this country, I'm from that country.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
I learned so much about what was happening inside the compounds, how people were being brought in, where they were being brought in from, what was the technologies, all this kind of information, because the victims themselves were reaching out. And there was not that information available anywhere else in the world. So we became this, I guess, a place of, a source of information to the world.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
At that time, in all seriousness, nobody had a clue. Not us and not any government agency in the world. As we started to reach out, we very quickly got connected with UNODC, who was doing major research on the scam compounds, and they knew nothing at all. So it's the group that were given the job, I guess, to really find out what was happening.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
There were previous acts like this in Cambodia and countries like that that had had scam centres similar to this, not to the same extent. extent or size, but similarly to this in Cambodia, that they were shutting down or they were moving around. And so there was some information that you could gather from what had been in these other areas.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
You know, it's very hard to tell. So you're not talking about a scam center that's a single entity. You're talking about a group or collection of buildings that are built over, you know, 100 acres. And within that fence line, there could be 40 companies operating. Each one of those companies have an investor. Each one of those companies are driven by different bosses.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
They have different protocols. They have different, you know, uh, focuses on which areas they're scamming, who they're scamming, how they're scamming and their employees, the human trafficking victims, their employees, um, they are sold between the companies. So you've got companies within companies when you trace them.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
I mean, you've got shell corporations, you've got dead ends, you've got, you know, involvement. It. The idea is that they are untouchable and that they're untraceable. And truthfully, they're doing a great job at being able to stay in front of everything.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to fathom, and I'm not in the position to be able to kind of answer those speculations. I do ask the same questions, though. How is this possible that it's running today? How is it possible? And so you've got China, then, that you would think would have some power because, of course, their people are investors. But... They don't necessarily still live in China.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
So you've got Chinese investors that are in Singapore and Taiwan, different places around the globe. And it's, it's just this shuffling game. If you think about it kind of like that, that old, you know, gambling game where you put a ball under the cups and the cups are moving and whatever, and you're trying to follow which cup has the ball and then it suddenly disappears.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
It's really one of those, while the world is trying to figure out what's going on, these crime groups are just shuffling the cards or moving the cups around and they're very hard to follow.