Julian Morgans
Appearances
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
Hey, Julian Morgans here. I'm the host of Scammerland, but I'm also the host of a weekly show called What It Was Like. And the basic idea is that every episode I talk to someone who has lived through an extreme event. So think cults, serial killers, ghost stories, Princess Diana's paparazzi, Kurt Cobain's manager. And in all cases, you'll find out what it was like to be there.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
And the good thing, the phone had battery. Q was able to download WhatsApp and he immediately contacted his family.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
And in a way, that tragedy of his death was kind of overshadowed by everyone's private pain. The agony in their arms and of hunger and extreme dehydration.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
As Q told me your story, I was wondering how this ordeal felt, especially how it would feel to hang from your arms for just so long. And I know it's morbid, but I was curious. So I asked.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
Are you willing to work? What would you say if it was you hanging from a hook for five days and nights? Personally, I'd have just said, sure, whatever, get me down. But Q, he's stronger than me.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
This is a common problem. Myanmar has very few diplomatic ties with the rest of the world, so most governments say there's just nothing they can do. No one is willing to send their diplomats into a chaotic war zone or risk an armed extraction. So Kew was told, you're just going to have to wait. And meanwhile, his friends and family continued to contact anyone and everyone they think could help.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
When Q opened his eyes, he was back in his dormitory on his bed. His clothes were still crusty from five days of blood, feces and urine, and his arms ached and he smelled terrible. But he was alive. Just.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
Q, can I ask, do your arms still give you any problems? Have your muscles returned to their full functionality?
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
As the weeks trickled past, Q got into a routine of texting friends and family at night and then charging his phone while he was working during the day.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
I mean, it's sort of like the worst place in the whole world, but these little glimmers of solidarity, of like human care, like the care that you guys showed each other, that's beautiful.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
God. Okay, so then did they make you go and you had to get back to work?
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
We're gonna take another ad break here, but when we come back, we're gonna look at how Q's message finally made its way to someone who could help. Welcome back. So as you'll remember, Q and his friends spent five days and nights in the dark room. But during this time, his SOS message had finally made its way to someone who could help, a Ugandan woman named Betty Begombi.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
And Betty's kind of a big deal. For a while, she was the senior director of fragility, conflict and violence at the World Bank. And now these days, she's the high commissioner of Uganda to Malaysia. And she contacted Q on WhatsApp.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
So the Chinese owners of the scammer farm wanted a ransom for each slave that they let go. But Uganda is a developing nation. So asking an average family to fork out $10,000 makes about as much sense as asking for a billion. So no one could pay and the weeks dragged on.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
We've moved on here and we're now in the early months of 2024 and the compound management is still trying to figure out who has the phone. And eventually they tried a new technique. They decided to split up the group of Africans and sell them off to different farms around Myanmar.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
Isolation was bad, but getting booted out of Taichung was pretty scary because they thoroughly searched everyone as they left. But again, Q was able to smuggle out his phone. They checked us on the gate.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
Q says that his new scammer farm was dilapidated and part of their job was to repair the buildings that had been damaged by war and weather. And he spent a lot of his days scamming too, but the bosses, they were never happy and punishments were arbitrarily dished out.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
Through all of this, Q kept talking with Betty from the Malaysian embassy. And she kept reaching out to new people and trying new efforts to get the Ugandans released. And she kept saying, just hang on. And Q says that his religious background really helped him through this period.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
Now Kew wasn't really across this, but something was happening in Uganda. His friends and family, they'd failed to arouse much interest in the case from the government. But the country's media had taken up the story. In fact, hundreds of Ugandans had vanished into Myanmar over the last three years. So suddenly the story was all over the nightly news.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
But the thing that really helped Q's cause was slacking off at work. In the long run, this made him a less valuable slave, which means that his bosses were less determined to keep him, even if, in the short term, it meant that he was being punished constantly.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
Q says that his memories from this time are kind of scattered. The punishments and the days in the dark room, they just sort of became background noise. But he does remember the day that his bosses gave him a taser, just as a sick kind of punishment, and they made him punish his friends.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
You understand? The people running this compound, they were actually Taiwanese, which is interesting because as we're going to learn later in the series, it was the Taiwanese who largely pioneered this business model. But from Q's perspective, they were somehow even more chaotic and even more violent than his Chinese bosses.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
Wow. It's chaos. Q saw violence and death almost every day. But he remained resolute, read his Bible, and barely scammed anyone. And around that time, his SOS message made his way from Betty, the Ugandan commissioner, to a man who works in Thailand named Judah Tanner. And Judah is kind of a big character in this story.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
He's an Australian guy, like me, and he'd left his corporate job in Perth to live in Thailand years earlier. And then one day, he just happened to find himself living over the border from Myanmar, watching their very first scammer farms getting built. And since then, Judah and his organization, Advanced Global Projects, they've managed to rescue around a thousand scammer farm survivors.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
In fact, this whole series and its interviews with survivors, it would have never happened without Judah. And Judah just happened to get wind of Q's story.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
On the next episode of Scammerland, we're going to meet Judah and hear how Q's rescue went down. But we're also going to learn about the twisted history behind Scammer Farms and how people like Judah and Troy, they're actually leading the charge against this industry. That's next week on Scammerland. Thanks for listening, and please follow.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
And that's how the people running the scammer farm figured out that one of the Africans must have obtained a phone.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
If you're enjoying this and you'd like to offer some support, the single easiest thing that you can do is follow the show. Scammerland is produced by Rachel Tuffery. Editing is by me, Rachel Tuffery, and Jamie Snyder. It's mixed by Jimmy Saunders, who also did our sound design. Our cover art is by Rich Akers. Our interns are Nina Fussell and Ellie Dickey.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
In fact, Scammerland actually began as an episode on what it was like. So if you're enjoying this, you're probably going to love our other show. That's what it was like on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Just a quick trigger warning on today's episode. It's got some pretty graphic descriptions of torture, so it's probably not suitable for young ears.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
Through all these raids, they never found Q's phone. He kept it with him in the office, or he managed to hide it. But that still didn't help. The mood was really tense, and his management team kept reiterating just who was in charge.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
The dark room. Also sometimes known as the black room. Every scammer farm has at least one. And they're not called dark rooms because they're actually dark. The name just refers to a mental state that these rooms create.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
A place where you stop thinking, where your mind goes dark. These rooms are modern torture chambers, and they're central to the power structure that allows scammer farms to operate. Most of the survivors that I've spoken to while making this series have spent some time in a dark room. And Q found himself in one after he and his friends came up with a plan to storm the fence.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
They were facing more and more scrutiny as the story of the kidnapped Ugandans ran in the news. But meanwhile, their diplomatic efforts to get released, they just, they seem to be stalling. So their next plan was an old school jailbreak.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
It was a very loose and pretty desperate plan and they were going to do it at night after lights out but they never even got a chance.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
Q doesn't know whether management was tipped off to their escape plan, or if they just got sick of all of the information leaks and the lackluster work performance. Q said that he and the others had been refusing to work to make themselves less valuable as slaves. So it was basically a unions track alongside an escape plot.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
So it's understandable, if they're under surveillance, why management decided to come down on them heavily.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, Q and his gang enter the dark room. Hey, welcome back. Sir Q and about 25 other Africans from a range of countries have been refusing to work while plotting an escape. And now they've been asked, will you work or do you want to go into the darkroom? And this seems insanely brave to me, but most of them chose the darkroom.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
And the dark room in the Taichung Scammer Farm is actually open to the sky. It's a strip of land between the back of a building and the compound's outer wall. It's basically like an alleyway with a series of hooks bolted to the walls.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
So this is episode four, and over the last three apps, we've looked at how online scams are run by people living in modern slavery through Southeast Asia. We're following the stories of two people who have been abducted into this system, Catalaya and SmallQ. And at the end of the last app, we heard how SmallQ has come up with an escape plan.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
When Q told me this story, I kept trying to imagine how it would feel to be hung by your arms for days on end. And I think it would be the kind of thing that just might be bearable for an hour, but after that, the pain would just become all-consuming. I mean, imagine all of your body weight transferred to your arms and your wrists for days.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
And yet, that wasn't even the worst of it, because Q and his friends, they weren't even allowed to sleep.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
He's stolen a phone from his boss, which he's managed to smuggle back into his dormitory. So now the first thing he needs to do is to connect to the Wi-Fi.
SCAMMERLAND
Enter the 'Dark Room'
I've never experienced the kind of pain where I've had this out-of-body experience. But somehow, it got worse. The man hanging on a hook next to Q was Ethiopian. And Q noticed that this man was kind of wiggling around, trying to get his handcuffs off.
SCAMMERLAND
Trailer
Here's something that you may not know about scams. Every time a stranger hits you up online, like on WhatsApp, and they're trying to draw you into a conversation, that person is probably living in slavery. They're probably trapped in a high security compound somewhere in Southeast Asia, and they're forced to run scams or they face torture. I'm Julian Morgans. I'm the host of Scammerland.
SCAMMERLAND
Trailer
And in this new series, we're going to take you inside these compounds. This is a multi-part documentary podcast in which we'll follow the journeys of people who are kidnapped into scamming, the brutal torture they endure, and their rare instances of rescue. We'll also explore how Chinese organized crime has created this vast network of factory farms for human beings.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Hey, Julian Morgans here. I'm the host of Scammerland, but I'm also the host of a weekly show called What It Was Like. And the basic idea is that every episode I talk to someone who has lived through an extreme event. So think cults, serial killers, ghost stories, Princess Diana's paparazzi, Kurt Cobain's manager. And in all cases, you'll find out what it was like to be there.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
So in summary, the criminal groups are, in the words of Mark Zuckerberg, moving fast and breaking things. And the UNODC is doing their best to move fast as well, but they're not allowed to break things. In my mind, when I'm like, how are we going to stop this? I think, oh, we need like the world sort of police. What is that? Oh, that's kind of the UN.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Let's just send in the jet fighters and boots on the ground and let's dismantle these compounds. Like, why can't we do that?
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
And in this last episode, we're following Small Q as he makes a break for freedom. But we're also going to be looking at what all of this means for the world. What do we do now that we know these things exist? Scammer farms are costing us billions of dollars every year. So how are the world's governments trying to deal with this ballooning new threat? Welcome to Scammerland.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
i'd like to point out here that the thai government has recently started cracking down on myanmar in the start of february this year they cut electricity internet and fuel supplies to five areas along the border in an effort to choke out the scam of arms and this was a big event it was widely announced by the thai government to appease any suggestion that they were complicit so thailand has started doing their part but in the long run power cuts are pretty ineffective
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
as we've discussed these are huge conglomerates they can just build their own power plants but the other complication is that these regions in myanmar have become pretty financially dependent on scamming this is something that judah actually pointed out to me and what he said was that these are regions that have been dirt poor for decades and now now finally they have money and they're not going to let a simple power outage get in the way of that
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Judah's point here is an incredible exercise in empathy. On the one hand, he's asking us to sympathize with the people who are scamming us. But on the other, he's illuminating why this is just going to be such a hard thing to stamp out. It's not just an illicit business. It's bringing wealth and opportunity to an impoverished war zone.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
And with that in mind, I asked John whether the world would just have to accept slavery-powered scamming as the new normal. Um, I don't want to sound like a pessimist, but it sounds like this is going to be hard to beat.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
So I'm kind of imagining like the old Silk Road, you know, like a marketplace where you go and buy drugs and guns. Is it like that, but just more sort of technologically advanced?
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
We're going to take a quick ad break, but when we get back, I'm going to talk to John about how people like you and me, people who are getting scammed, can do things to protect ourselves. Welcome back. So we've been talking to John at the UNODC about what can be done with scammer farms. And the answer is, not much. Which is all kind of depressing, right? It's just so big.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
So I figured if the world really is at a loss to stop online scams, the least I can do is ask John how we individuals can protect ourselves.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Should I just click on nothing, trust no one, just stay off the internet as much as possible and never go to Myanmar?
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Alright, let's start this episode with Small Q. As you'll remember from the last episode, he's been brutally tortured. But he's managed to text a Ugandan ambassador using a phone that he stole from his boss.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
i think after talking to john and after talking to judah and troy and small q and catalaya i'm bringing us to a pretty somber conclusion i don't think this industry can be stopped it's in this era of rapid expansion and i think just even slowing it down is impractical so that's brought me to this place of wondering what purpose this podcast serves i mean sure it's entertaining in a morbid way but but what are we trying to do here
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
And I think the answer is education. As in, now you know what's happening. Now you can be extra weary about starting an online conversation with someone who refuses to meet or clicking on a link from an unknown source or moving to Southeast Asia for a job that seems too good to be true. That's ultimately what this series is about.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
It's just spreading the word about what's happening so that hopefully scammer farms find it harder to recruit and harder to scam. And I think that's the best we can aim for. Small Q is home in Uganda now, and he's doing everything he can to warn people from traveling to Asia. He's talking to media, he's posting on social media, and he's writing music about scammer farms.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
In fact, some of you watching this on YouTube or Spotify, you might have noticed right at the very beginning of this series, in Ep 1, we used this video clip from one of Q's songs, which included shots of him tied up on a wall. This song is about his experience in the scammer farm. And this video clip references his experience in the dark room.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
In fact, he says that he wrote some of the music in his head just while he was suspended on hooks by his handcuffs.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
I didn't really understand what we sang. But the mood, honestly, the mood got me. And although we've covered some of the worst parts of humanity through this series, I feel like Small Q represents some of the best.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
This ambassador is a woman named Betty Begombi and she contacted a man named Judah Tanner, who we heard from in the last episode. And they got to work rescuing not just Q, but 22 other Ugandans who had been sold into slavery. But it was taking a while and Q was trying to work as little as possible, just hoping that they'd give up and let him go. We are not productive.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
So Q is getting his life back on track in Uganda. And if you'd like to help out, he has a GoFundMe link and we're going to put it in the show notes. And last thing, just before we go, Judah and his team at Global Advance Projects rely on donations to do the work rescuing people from scammer farms. It's vital work and they're not connected to any government, so it's all independent.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
So if you're looking for a way to help, this would be it. Global Advance Projects donations. Just Google that and you'll find their page and anything you give is tax deductible.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Special thanks to all of our guests, Katalea, John Wojciech from the UNODC, Troy Gerkenau from the Global Anti-Scam Organization, and a special thanks to Small Q and to Judah Tanner, without whom this series would have never been possible. That was the final episode of this season of Scammerland. Scammerland was produced by Rachel Tuffery, editing by me, Rachel Tuffery, and Jamie Snyder.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
It was mixed by Jimmy Saunders, who also did our sound design. Our cover art is by Rich Akers, our interns are Nina Fussell and Ellie Dickey. And this whole thing has been a Super Real production.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
to get our money back. This wasn't an empty threat. The UN has seen cases where scammer farm victims are murdered and their organs get sold on the black market. So Judah was doing everything he could to get Q out, but it was just taking time.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
In fact, Scammerland actually began as an episode on what it was like. So if you're enjoying this, you're probably going to love our other show. That's What It Was Like on Apple, Spotify and YouTube.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Meanwhile, what was happening was that Betty Begombi, the Ugandan ambassador, had asked to meet with the Burmese militia leader running the scam farm region. Her plan? Basically, she was just going to ask him to release the Ugandans.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Judah, through some people who knew some people who knew some people, was able to set up this meeting. And Betty went in to meet this general who is orchestrating this war against the official Myanmar government. And he's a pretty dangerous man.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
And this actually worked. Betty's pleas efficiently moved this warlord and his team took a list of names into the scammer farms to confirm that they had these people.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
The next step involved arranging transport and accommodation for 23 people. And this involved assuring the Thai government that these people wouldn't become their problem.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
So this very delicate diplomatic dance is being choreographed between the local militia in Myanmar, the Thai government and the Taiwanese scammer farm owners who they just have to play ball because they're renting the land from Myanmar. And everyone agreed to this exchange. And the big day arrived.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
That morning, on the Thai side of the border, Judah's team had been frantically trying to find someone who'd meet the Ugandans outside their compound. Because he'd been told if anything went wrong or if there were any delays, all the Ugandans would go straight back into the compound.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
The stakes are very high here and very real. Judah told me he's seen lots of people on the cusp of freedom get sent back into the scammer farms just due to a delay in the handover or because of some small, very minus crop. And he managed to find someone to meet the Ugandans who were being marched out.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Q and his friends were driven to the river that marks the border between Myanmar and Thailand. And they could see freedom. But the barge motor to bring them across the river, it had broken down. And for Judah, this was a really tense moment.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Finally, the engine in the barge coughed a laugh and 23 Ugandans piled on board and then the barge chugged across the water.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
And, of course, among that crowd was Small Q.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
You can see the smiles on our face that day. And Judah, he also remembers meeting Q for the very first time.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
I really like this layer to our story. Small Q is this musician, you know, this rapper with 11,000 followers on Instagram and this big YouTube channel. But he's also gone through hell and he arrived home bruised and battered and much thinner than when he left. But he was alive, which he says was a gift.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Yeah, but it was a complicated one because he found himself right back where he'd started, but just much worse off.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Q now has a new mission. His role, as he sees it, is to warn his fellow countrymen from traveling to Southeast Asia for unverified jobs. He's been on many news programs throughout Uganda for this reason. And it's why he wanted to come on this show to tell us his story.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
We're gonna come back to Q at the end of this episode, but we're gonna take an ad break here. Stick around because when we're back, we're gonna dive into the global effort to combat scammer farms.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Hey, welcome back. So throughout this series, we've been pretty focused on understanding the problem. And I think throughout so many of these interviews, I've been like, oh, we just got to send in the troops, you know, we got to blow this thing up. But we can't do that.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
And to find out why we can't, I'm going to speak to a man named John Wojciech, who's a regional analyst based in Thailand for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. This is the UNODC, and I've spoken about these guys before. They're basically our first line of defense against global drug trafficking, cyber fraud and money laundering. Hello, John. Welcome to the show. Thanks.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Thanks very much for having me. Can we start with a bit of an introduction?
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
I'm trying to place your accent. Are you Dutch? Polish Canadian. Polish Canadian. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. The Z, the Z in your last name was a bit of evidence I ignored, but okay.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
One of those sort of kinky letters. Yeah, yeah. So after that really smooth start, I asked John what the UNODC is doing about scammer farms, or what any intergovernmental group can do about scammer farms.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Yeah. So I'd say the way that we look at it is sort of from four pillars. For the sake of brevity, I'm just going to summarize the four pillars or what John really means is the four ways that the UNODC is combating scammer farms. So first up, they're collecting information about how these farms work and who runs them. And then they're sharing that information across Asia.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
So, for example, Cambodia has all the same intel that Thailand has.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
So that's the first two ways that the UNODC is trying to deal with scammer farms. Then their third method is something that they call convening. And what that is, it's basically bringing together governments with people and NGOs.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Hey, I'm Julian Morgans, and you're listening to Scammerland. This is our final episode of the series. And over the last five apps, we've been looking at how online scams are run by people living in slavery in Southeast Asia. We've been following the stories of two people who have been abducted and are trying to escape.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Then their last pillar is offering forensic services to developing nations that don't have the resources to do it themselves.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
So the UN can step in and offer their experts to developing countries. And that is the four ways they're trying to combat scammer farms. I guess what I'm hearing is that the problem is this sort of fast moving decentralized industry. But it sounds to me like the UNODC's response is quite formal.
SCAMMERLAND
Small Q’s Escape and the Fight to End Forced Scamming
Like you've got these pillars, but it doesn't sound nearly as nimble as the adversary that you guys are taking on. Like, am I right here? Is this a problem?
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
Hey, Julian Morgans here. I'm the host of Scammerland, but I'm also the host of a weekly show called What It Was Like. And the basic idea is that every episode I talk to someone who has lived through an extreme event. So think cults, serial killers, ghost stories, Princess Diana's paparazzi, Kurt Cobain's manager. And in all cases, you'll find out what it was like to be there.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
We got loads of DMs and emails from people being like, what? I didn't know anything about this. Tell me more. So that's what this is. This is a multi-part series to really unpack the topic. But how did I find my way to this story? Where did this all start? Well, it started about a year ago when I got a message on WhatsApp from a number that I didn't know. It started out pretty innocently.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
So quick history lesson here. Myanmar was called Burma up until 1989 when the ruling military regime wanted to distance themselves from their colonial past and they changed the name. In these days, Myanmar is basically a patchwork of territories controlled by ethnic rebel groups all at war for ground and governing legitimacy.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
And the country is basically at risk of becoming a failed state, which for organized crime makes it an ideal location to run highly illegal businesses. For example, much of the world's methamphetamine is produced in Myanmar, and they're also the world's largest producer of opium poppies. And since 2021, they've become ground zero for the global scams industry. But Kew, he didn't know.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
As he was getting bundled out of the boat and put in another car, he didn't even know that he'd left Thailand. All he knew was that wherever he was, it looked dangerous.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
And finally, they rolled up to the gates of what looked to Q like a small city. Picture a high fence topped with razor wire and beyond that a complex of multi-story buildings. And then there were various shops and a basketball court. And Q looked around and he saw lots of people. But he knew something was wrong.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
Keeping their heads down. From the car, Q was forcibly dragged inside into a large room full of computer terminals. They took his phone and they took his passport and then they emptied his bag onto the ground and left him to pick up his things. No one looked at him. And then Q, he was told to sit and wait.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
Of course, it was a scam. I knew it was a scam. Someone just wrote to me and they said, hey, do I know you? Like I said, I've got this podcast. I've got to feed it content every week. So... I don't know. I kind of thought, all right, look, I'll engage. Maybe there's a story in this. So I was like, hey, what's up? Who are you?
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
What's happened here is that Q has fallen out of the frying pan and into the fire. His bosses at the last scammer farm decided he was going to be trouble, so they've sold him off. And they've sold him to a place known as Taichung. And it's a deceptively beautiful area.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
If you stood on the Thai side of the Moi River and looked over, you'd see stunning green mountains and a picturesque village below. And at the foot of the mountains, massive scam centers sit along a winding river. But the area is controlled by the DKBA, which is a militia that answers to no one but their own leaders, who operate like psychopathic kingpins.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
And don't get me wrong, all scam centers are brutal. But everyone we spoke to while making this podcast warned us that Taichung is basically run by sadistic monsters.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
And this person, whoever they were, they claimed to be this rich Eastern European lady who seemed really keen to tell me how she got rich. And she sent me a photo of herself like hanging out next to a Lamborghini. And I was like, hey, nice Lambo. Okay. tell me how you got rich. And then she's like, crypto, I'll teach you. And then I was like, all right.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
He had no hope. He'd given up. Yeah, man. He'd been broken.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
Hey, we're going to take another ad break, but stick around because when we come back, Q is going to walk us through how we got through the next few days. Hey, welcome back. So as you'll remember, Q's decided to work. And when I asked him, what's the worst thing about scamming? His answer actually surprised me because he said that it wasn't the scamming itself.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
And then honestly, she started telling me about Ethereum and coin wallets. And I, at that point, I got kind of bored and told her to get a real job. All pretty normal, all pretty standard, but then I got a response that stopped me cold. And it was just one word, and it said, help. And I was like, what? And I was looking at this, and I was like, help. That seems off-brand.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
I mean, I ask if you hated it because I think the setting in which you hear music can really affect your perception of it. And I think if I was afraid for my life, listening to Chinese electro all the time, man, I would come to a place where I really hated Chinese electro.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
Just a quick note here. Most transgressions at Q's scammer farm were remedied with a taser. But they also had this thing about running. When Q didn't meet his daily scams quota, he'd have to run laps around the compound. And maybe that sounds okay, but all of the Africans received a diet that was well below the normal calorie intake for an adult.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
And that's something Hugh discovered on his first day when he saw a fellow Ugandan and got to ask some questions about where they were.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
Yeah, man. That's like, that smells of just straight up racism. Yeah.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
Okay, like a shed. Yeah, that's right. Okay, and these were like dormitories or bedrooms?
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
I was in the middle of texting back, hey, what do you mean, when this person just blocked me, and their half of the conversation just froze. And that single word, help, sent me down a rabbit hole.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
God. Is that a regular workday? Like you had to work 20-hour workdays every day?
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
The human brain can't survive that. You must have just gone a little bit insane. You must have just had severe sleep deprivation at all times.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
Tune in to the next episode because we're going to look at how this isn't an isolated experience. Many hundreds of thousands of people from countries all around the world, they're getting smuggled into Myanmar to scam. And we're going to meet another one. This time, we're meeting a woman from the Philippines who was recruited and sold into slavery actually by a friend.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
That night, I stayed up for hours reading all these reports from the UN and I discovered that the person that I was talking to, they probably weren't some shady individual from Russia or North Korea or whatever. No, that's all changed. And the new business model, it's vast and it's industrialized and it's powered by slavery.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
And we'll continue to follow Q's journey as he settles into his new reality. Thanks for listening and please subscribe. If you're enjoying this and you'd like to offer some support, the single easiest thing you can do is subscribe. Scammerland is produced by Rachel Tuffery. Editing is by me, Rachel Tuffery and Jamie Snyder. It's mixed by Jimmy Saunders, who also did our sound design.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
Our cover art is by Rich Akers. And this whole thing has been a Superreal production.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
i was appalled so we did this episode that i was talking about and and that was almost a year ago and actually in that time in the last 12 months things things have only got worse so these compounds these compounds across southeast asia they've now ballooned into these walled cities and they're sucking in tens of billions of dollars every year so we knew we had to do more and this show is the result of that over the next few episodes we're exploring the world of scammer farms that's what they're called like factory farms except for human beings
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
In fact, Scammerland actually began as an episode on what it was like. So if you're enjoying this, you're probably going to love our other show. That's What It Was Like on Apple, Spotify and YouTube. Hey, I'm Julian Morgans and this is Scammerland. This is the show about the modern state of scamming because it's changed.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
We'll hear from a guy who thought that he landed his dream job in Thailand, only to end up enslaved and tortured. We'll also hear from an Australian guy who now lives next door to one of Asia's biggest scammer farms, and he's rescued about a thousand people. And I'll talk to an American guy in Ohio who got scammed and now spends all of his time trying to get even.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
This is a story about humanity at its absolute worst. But it's also a story about humanity at its best. But it's also quite a familiar story. We all know scams. They're on our apps, they're in our emails, and they're all over Facebook Marketplace. And yet, most people know nothing about them. But there's this whole secret world of human suffering behind scamming.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
And it's vast, and it's terrifying, and it costs the world over a trillion dollars annually. So, let's get started. Our first step in this journey is to meet a scammer, someone who got sold into slavery to run scams, but survived.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
That was Q singing. And I think something I like about Q is he's got dreams.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
So that's what he did. Q managed to scrape together enough money to buy one computer at a time. And over a few years, he had enough to open an internet cafe. And that was his life. Every morning he'd open the shop, people would use the internet and they'd need clothes. And it was fine, but it wasn't really fulfilling.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
And Q was always struggling to pay the bills until one day someone came in and they offered him more.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
Data entry. That was the job he was promised, working for a company in Dubai. But Q had never been overseas. So initially he brushed off the idea.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
All right, right now in 2025, if someone hits you up on Telegram or WhatsApp and they're getting a little chatty and you don't know them, the chances are that you're talking to someone living in slavery. You're probably talking to someone who's one of about 400,000 people living in a high security compound somewhere in Southeast Asia and being forced to scam the world.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
Q had no idea, but this man was one of hundreds of recruiters that are currently funneling tens of thousands of Africans into slavery in Southeast Asia every year. In fact, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, this movement of people might constitute the largest human trafficking event in recorded history, bigger than the transatlantic slave trade. But Q didn't know this.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
It felt like this could finally be your big opportunity. That's right. So Q paid for his own flight to Nairobi, which was the nearest Thai embassy. And there he got a visa for Thailand. And then he went back to Uganda, where he was told, actually, we're not going to fly you to Thailand. You're going to have to pay for your own ticket.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
So quick note here on exchange rate, that's about $1,000 USD for the flight to Thailand.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
This right here is another reason I wanted to feature Q in this series. Because his story kind of represents globally a worst case scenario. Because scammer farms recruit slaves from Asia and Eastern Europe as well. But places like Uganda offer so few opportunities that Ugandans will leap at a chance for a better life. And recruiters exploit this.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
They know that they don't even have to offer plane tickets. People will just sell everything they own to get to Thailand, where they quickly become victims of human trafficking. So you weren't just excited for yourself. Yeah. But like your whole family was excited for you, that this was like the family's big moment, not just yours.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
He said goodbye to his family and he boarded the plane and he arrived in Bangkok at 2 p.m. on the 21st of November, 2023.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
These compounds, they're run by Chinese organized crime, and they're like these huge black boxes that absorb money and human lives. And in this show, we're going to take you inside these compounds. Welcome to Scammerland. So about a year ago, we ran a two-part episode on Scammer Farms on our weekly podcast, What It Was Like. And I think they were some of our most impactful episodes yet.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
Q followed this guy through the airport, not saying anything. And then they went through customs and found themselves outside in the tropical sun when a car pulled up to meet them.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
but suddenly he didn't know English well. Every time the queue tried to get some answers, the guy driving, he'd say a couple of words in Thai into his iPhone translator, which parroted back, don't worry, we're about to reach our destination.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
At this point, they're speeding down an unmade road. Around them is a mix of forest and fields. And then they pull up at what looks like a warehouse among the trees. And Q peers through the windscreen to see several guys approaching.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
And then the driver got back in his car and spun off, leaving Q crouched on the ground. By this time, it was around 9pm and it was dark and Q lay on the ground while the guys milled around him smoking cigarettes.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
And you were just sitting there on the ground? Yeah.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
Hey, we're going to take a quick ad break here. But when we're back, Q is taken to the scammer farm that's going to become his home. Hey, welcome back. So our guest Q has arrived in Thailand, but it all went south as soon as he got off the plane. And now he's surrounded by armed thugs kneeling outside a warehouse in a forest miles from anywhere.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
Like on the center console, like to make it clear that he had a gun.
SCAMMERLAND
How a Fake Job Offer Landed Me in Slavery
up to when we reached our river. Kew didn't realize what was happening, but they'd just got to the Moi River, which marks the border between Thailand and Myanmar. It was about two in the morning and pitch black, which was deliberate. Kew thinks they probably stalled at the warehouse just to get to the river in the dead of night.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Hey, Julian Morgans here. I'm the host of Scammerland, but I'm also the host of a weekly show called What It Was Like. And the basic idea is that every episode I talk to someone who has lived through an extreme event. So think cults, serial killers, ghost stories, Princess Diana's paparazzi, Kurt Cobain's manager. And in all cases, you'll find out what it was like to be there.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
I think Troy has enough distance to this event that he can now discuss briefly toying with suicide in a somewhat casual manner, but it must have been devastating. He welcomed this scam into his life because he was already feeling lonely and a bit inadequate. So I can only imagine how it must have felt adding shame and debt into this mix.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
And I think that explains what he did next because he went looking for answers and culpability.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
And was that a lot within the context of the people that you were talking to in this Facebook group?
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Can we start with an introduction? Just tell me your name and what you do with yourself.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
That's tragic. So when you first heard about these walled compounds in Myanmar and Cambodia, what was your response?
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
In 2022, Troy became one of the first people to speak publicly about what was happening in Myanmar. The Washington Post was the first big newspaper to share his story. And from there, the world took an interest. Later that same year, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime published the first major report on forced criminality, as they called it.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Public awareness of pig butchering scams has only grown since, and Troy, he's a major reason why. These days, he sees himself as kind of like an information curator. He's across all the local reporting from NGOs and media in Southeast Asia, and he distills this stuff into updates on his LinkedIn and his Facebook.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
So he's a big resource for journalists, law enforcement, and anyone who's been scammed. In fact, at the end of this episode, I'm going to provide details on how you can reach Troy if you've been scammed and you need some guidance. But right now we're going to take a break. And when we're back, we're going to check in on Q because he is plotting an escape plan.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
welcome back okay so you remember small q right our ugandan rapper who flew to thailand thinking that he'd landed the job of his dreams only to end up enslaved well at this part in the timeline q has been incarcerated for a few months he's got into the rhythm of survival but but he desperately wants to get out and he's considered climbing a fence but the problem is they're huge and they're topped with razor wire and also he's stuck in a country in the middle of a civil war
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Q actually told me he could hear gunfire and explosions most days, so you can imagine that kind of headspace. He's decided that the best bet is to try to get an SOS message to the outside world. But that's hard too, because the scammer farm uses AI to monitor all outgoing messages on the computers, and all of the phones that he's running scams on, they're checked all the time.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
100 iPhones, just unused, sitting on this guy's desk. And Q figures if he can just pocket one of them, he can get word out to the outside world.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
So Q decided that he'd refuse to work, so they'd take him upstairs to the boss's office to be punished, where hopefully he was going to be able to swipe a phone.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Small Q was bundled into this upstairs office where he found the boss was already punishing a teenage boy. And I just want to warn you, from this point, the story gets pretty violent.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Just for anyone who is unclear about what a taser is, it's a stick with an electric current coming out of one end and it's used to electrocute people. Tasers are the most common form of punishment through all scammer farms, so you're going to hear about them a lot, which is why I want to play you a short clip.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
It's a clip that was shot on someone's phone and it's been smuggled out of a scammer farm and it's of a prisoner getting tasered. And I want to show you this just to highlight not just what Q went through, but what everyone in these compounds goes through. And heads up, it's horrible. But it'll be over in about 10 seconds.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
In New York, Trey was getting roles in stage shows, and maybe you can still hear a bit of the thespian in his voice. But in 2020, COVID struck, and the world ground to a halt. The auditions all dried up, along with his day job, and Trey moved back home to Columbus, which really wasn't easy. Did it feel like it was sort of the end of an era when you arrived back in Columbus?
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
I mean, animals don't behave like this. They're far worse. These guys are sadistic.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
How did you do that while you were getting electrocuted?
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Hearing Q tell this story makes my hair stand on end. In this compound, if someone had decided to frisk Q as he left the office, it wouldn't have ended well.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Yes, my brother. Really? People would just disappear and you'd never know what happened to them.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
This is the phone that saved your life. Wow, that's the best looking phone I've ever seen. I mean, it's like an iPhone S from like what, 10 years ago, but it's a life-saving phone.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
In the next episode, we're going to continue to follow Q's story of escape. And heads up, it's very exciting stuff. So subscribe, don't miss the episode. And if you find yourself a victim of a romantically related crypto scam, or maybe you know someone who is, and you might be looking for advice, Troy says he'd be happy to help. In fact, here's what he said.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Thanks for listening. And if you're enjoying it and want to support in a small but very meaningful way, please subscribe. And a big thanks to Judah Tanner from Global Advance Projects, without whom this series would not have happened. Scammerland is produced by Rachel Tuffery. Editing is by me, Rachel Tuffery, and Jamie Snyder. Mixed by Jimmy Saunders, who also did our sound design.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Our cover art is by Rich Akers. Our interns are Nina Fussell and Ellie Dickey. And this whole thing has been a Superreal production.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Something you might be noticing is how the scams industry targets people who are at a crossroads. Think about Q, who was working in his internet cafe and dreaming of something more. And Katalia, who had just lost her dad. And Troy, who found himself broke and a bit directionless. At every level, this industry, it just feeds on vulnerability.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
In fact, Scammerland actually began as an episode on what it was like. So if you're enjoying this, you're probably going to love our other show. That's what it was like on Apple, Spotify and YouTube. Just a trigger warning on this episode. It's got some pretty graphic descriptions of violence, so it's probably not suitable for young ears.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Troy didn't realize, but whoever he was talking with in Myanmar had just got to the part of the script where they had to send a selfie. Because all of these scammers, they're pretending to be women. Most of these scams, they're romance scams and they're directed at men.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
So people like Q and Catalia, they've got to send a photo of some random model or a woman from the compound and they claim it's a selfie. And according to Q, this strategy works nearly all the time.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
These photos of these girls, where did you get those from?
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Oh man, that's horrible. But like I said, Troy, he didn't know any of this. He thought that he'd actually met someone, someone special, who just happened to be really attractive.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Right, okay. Okay. Tell me about what, like at its best moment when you were getting scammed, but you thought that you were starting a relationship. Like what did that relationship feel like? Was it, was it pretty exciting?
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Hey, I'm Julian Morgans, and you're listening to Scammerland. This is episode three, and over the last two episodes, we've looked at how most online scams are run by people living in modern slavery through Southeast Asia.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Are you saying that you told this person stuff that you'd have struggled to articulate in real life?
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Hey, we're gonna take a quick ad break here, but when we come back, Troy describes how the scam shifted gear and he found himself borrowing money just to keep up. Hey, welcome back. So Myanmar has become infamous for pig butchering scams. That's what all of these dating scams, that's what they're called.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
And the idea is that the people like Troy, they're being fattened up like pigs before they're slaughtered. And by that, I mean scammed. And Troy, right now in this chronology, he's still in the fattening stage and he's enjoying it.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
We've followed two people who have been abducted and sold to run scams, Catalaya and Small Q. And at the end of this episode, we're actually going to check back in with Q as he comes up with an escape plan. But first, I want to look at the other side of the equation, the people who are getting scammed. So we're going to start this episode by meeting an American guy named Troy Gokinawa.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Again, this was all carefully orchestrated by the scammers. So in these scam compounds, if you're working as a typer, you've got to communicate with about 20 people every day. Just keep them on the hook. Just checking in. How was your meal? How was your sleep? Good morning. You know, that kind of thing. But what's interesting is that Troy eventually asked for a phone call and this was refused.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
I was explaining in the previous episode how scammer farms, they've got this whole customer service center of like young women who get on the phones. But for whatever reason, Troy requested a phone call but didn't get patched through.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Oh, geez. So how did the conversation pivot from you're so handsome, you know, romance stuff to, hey, can you send me money? Like, where did that come in?
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Alright, I'm not going to go really deep on how this scam worked because honestly, it's dense. But basically, Troy fell for a subgenre of a pig butchering scam. It's known as a liquidity mining scam. And if you're confused by those words, don't worry about it. You're supposed to be. The whole scam works by confusing people.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Basically, Troy was told that he'd be making money by investing it in a kind of fund. So he exchanged his real money, US dollars, for a real currency, real cryptocurrency called Tether, which he kept in his own online wallet. But he thought it was his own wallet. But actually, his online girlfriend had set it up for him. And the wallet, it had a hole in it.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
So every time that Troy deposited money, it was immediately withdrawn by the scammers. So did you realize what was happening immediately or did it take you a while to clue on?
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Back in 2021, Troy got scammed and ended up almost bankrupt and considering suicide. But then he discovered that the people that scammed him were actually victims themselves. And since then, he's been working to expose Asia's scam farm system. Welcome to Scammerland. Hey Troy, welcome to the show.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
So he went and took a loan from an online money lender, one with a really nasty interest rate on repayments. And these like financial institutions, you know, loan companies, banks, whatever, there was no kind of like warning process or there was no stage in that application process where they were like, what is this for? Are you being scammed?
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
So you told your friends what was going on at the time? I did. Not a single person even voiced any concern or like nothing like that?
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
So Troy borrowed all this money and then messaged customer service to say, okay, I've got the money. It's in my wallet.
SCAMMERLAND
Escaping Starts With Stealing a Phone
Why that moment? Why was that finally the straw that broke the camel's back?
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
Hey, Julian Morgans here. I'm the host of Scammerland, but I'm also the host of a weekly show called What It Was Like. And the basic idea is that every episode I talk to someone who has lived through an extreme event. So think cults, serial killers, ghost stories, Princess Diana's paparazzi, Kurt Cobain's manager. And in all cases, you'll find out what it was like to be there.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
To be clear, this is the kind of work that Q is doing as well. Cold messaging hundreds of men every week, pretending to be a sexy yet lonely woman, to lure them into an online relationship. But there's a level above this work called customer service, where scammers actually got on the phone with their victims.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
Because as you'd imagine, people get sick of texting, and especially when they think they're forming an intimate relationship. So they say, hey, can we talk on the phone? I want to hear your voice. And at that point, the conversation gets elevated to the slaves in customer service who would sweet talk to their victims. And these people need good English. And Katalia, she speaks great English.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
And that's actually why she'd been recruited in the first place.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
From a Scammer Farm boss perspective, Katalia was a disappointing recruit. Instead of being this star customer service member, she was told to start sending out cold texts, like someone lower down in the hierarchy. And just to be clear, the company that she worked for, it specialized in targeting Europeans and Middle Eastern men using the crypto platform Binance.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
And every day she had to reel in 10 people and get them engaged in conversation. Do you remember scamming anyone in particular that you felt sorry for?
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
But we want to illustrate the scale of this issue, the way that Q's experience is being mirrored through Southeast Asia. bringing automation and scale to what used to be a cottage industry. And in this episode in particular, we're going to show you the world of scamming from the perspective of scammers. Welcome to Scammerland. So we're going to come back to Q from the previous episode.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
She really wasn't overstating the risk here. Catalina's scammer farm was just slightly less brutal than Q's, but still, she saw people violently punished for far less.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
Across the board, people in scammer farms are treated abysmally. And we're actually going to do a full episode on the way that death and torture has been just baked into the business model later in the series. But for the moment, we're going to stop for a quick ad break. And when we're back, we're going to check in on Q, who's also been thrown into this world of scamming. Hey, welcome back.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
So we're now going to leave Catalina and we're going to go back to Q, who is about 100 kilometers north in another scammer farm known as Taichung. And he's also thrown himself into work to survive.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
There's a few differences, but also some similarities between Cattleya's compound and Q's. So the similarities are that they both have two departments doing scamming. So people doing cold outreach and people talking on the phone to warm leads. And Q, like Cattleya, he was doing cold outreach with daily KPIs.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
Q had to hit no less than 60 conversations or he'd be beaten up, tasered, or made to run laps for several hours. And when I say conversations, what I mean is that he had to extract personal information such as a full first and last name, location, age, and occupation of 60 people every day or he'd get punished.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
And then that information was passed up the chain onto the next department responsible for sort of fostering intimacy with the victim. The owners of Q's company specialized in scamming American men aged over 40 on WhatsApp. So for 20 hours a day, every day, he was trying to initiate conversations. But actually, in most cases, the men, they kind of knew what he was up to.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
But right now, let's head to the Philippines to meet another woman named Katalia. Like Q, Catalaya was also a victim of human trafficking. And I think her story is important because by hearing different perspectives of abduction and the work they're expected to do, we get a fuller picture of how this industry works. I wanna show you how formalized it all is.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
And so when you got someone on the hook and they seem to believe that you're like some hot woman who wanted to like start a relationship or something, would you hand that conversation up to another department or what would happen?
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
Again, I want to highlight how streamlined and formalized this all is. Just like telemarketers in the West, these criminal groups in Myanmar have developed a script for every possible conversation. And I think that helps to explain why so many people are getting scammed every year. In 2023, Americans lost over $10 billion to fraud, and that was a 14% increase on the year before.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
Here in Australia, the numbers are a little bit lower, of course, but we still lost $476 million the same year. And in 2024, the world collectively lost a trillion dollars to scammers. And that was a record. And loads of this money is pouring into Myanmar, where new scammer farms are going up every month. But next episode, we're looking at the situation from the other side of the scam.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
We're going to meet a guy named Troy from Ohio, who in 2021 struck up a relationship with a woman he thought was living in Seattle. And he then lost every cent to his name, plus about $25,000 that he borrowed from the bank. And we're going to look at how scams like this go down from Q and Catalina's perspective. Thanks for listening and please subscribe.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
If you're enjoying this and you want to offer some support, the single easiest thing that you can do is to subscribe. And just a huge thanks to Judah Tanner from Global Advance Projects, without whom this series would have never happened. Scandal Land is produced by Rachel Tuffery. Editing is by me, Rachel Tuffery, and by Jamie Snyder.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
The audio is mixed by Jimmy Saunders, who also did our sound design. Our cover art is by Rich Akers. Our interns are Nina Fussell and Ellie Dickey. And this whole thing has been a Superreal production.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
These groups running the scammer farms, Chinese organized crime, they've got scamming down to a science. It's become an industrialized process, just like any other business at scale. And to make it run smoothly, they need to recruit people with specific skill sets. So they're recruiting people out of Africa, like Q, to be laborers, to just do the grunt work of initial outreach.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
But they also need workers with really good English skills to carry the victims across the finish line. And that takes us to the Philippines. And the Philippines was a US territory, so a lot of high school classes, they're still taught in English, which is leaving many Filipinos with like a slight American accent.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
And that's why the Philippines has become a global hub for Western call centers, but it's also become a target for scammer farm recruiters. Actually, I should point out that some Filipinos travel to places like Myanmar intentionally to work at scam centers. But Katalia, she wasn't interested in this life. She didn't want to be a scammer.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
In fact, Scammerland actually began as an episode on what it was like. So if you're enjoying this, you're probably going to love our other show. That's What It Was Like on Apple, Spotify and YouTube.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
In fact, she'd studied criminology and she actually wants to be a police officer.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
Maybe this story already sounds familiar. Like Q, Cataleya was just trying to get on track. She was educated, but she couldn't get a job in her field. And she was grieving the death of her dad. And this, it kind of made her vulnerable in ways that she didn't realize. And it all started when she met a friend working at a call center. And we're going to call this woman Vale.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
Actually, I should point out that Cataleya, it's also a pseudonym. Our guest, she still fears for her safety. So she asked if we could blur her face and change her name.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
So it's a pretty good deal, right? This guy is saying to Catalina, hey, come to Thailand, shoot a video of me proposing to my girlfriend and I'll pay for all the flights and accommodation.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
But when Kadalaya got to the airport, she knew something was off. Her friends had arrived with huge suitcases full of clothing, despite the fact that they were only going for a three-day trip. But Kadalaya, she just kind of brushed it off. And it wasn't until they got to Bangkok that things really got weird.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
So Cataleya goes to this other hotel. They arrive at night, and the next day her friends say they're getting some private couple time. So Cataleya, she hangs out at the hotel, alone. She's got no money, so she feels a bit trapped. And then finally, towards evening, her friends call her and they say, hey, we're going to pick you up in half an hour.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
And I just want to highlight here that Katalia, she wasn't completely naive to the dangers that she was in. The existence of the scamming industry, it's common knowledge in the Philippines. They call it POGO. And one of the reasons that scammer farms first appeared in Myanmar is that lots of the operators got flushed out of the Philippines where they'd been operating originally.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
We're going to look at the history of Scammer Farms later in this series, but for the moment, Katalia, she called her mom just before the friends arrived at the hotel, just to let her know what was happening. Also, her mom was looking after Katalia's young son, who's only nine, so she wanted a chance to say hello, and after the phone call...
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
catalia went downstairs to the reception area where her friends rolled up in a minivan and then catalia opened the door and she found an older thai man driving and her two friends were in the back seats and they and they kind of beckoned her in and they told her they're headed to meet a wedding planner and catalia she reluctantly climbed in but the mood was heavy no one wanted to talk
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
And just like Q, Katalia got worried when they drove out of Bangkok and were on the road for hours.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
Finally, they pulled into a service station to take a break, and everyone went to the toilet except for Katalia, who slipped inside to buy a SIM card. And it was kind of tense because she could see the others return from the bathrooms while she was still inside fumbling around trying to get her SIM card to work.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
But finally, it fired up, and Google Maps loaded, and a little blue dot placed her right on the Thai-Myanmar border. Katalia, she looked up through the window at her friends standing around the van and she suddenly understood what was happening.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
So feeling like she had no other choice, Cataleya got back in the van and they headed for the Myanmar border. We're gonna take a quick ad break here, but when we come back, Cataleya is smuggled over the border to the scammer farm that becomes her home.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
Hey, welcome back. So our guest, Katalia, she's arrived in Thailand and she's pretty clued on to what's happening. She knows that she's about to get recruited into scamming. But the thing that's unique about her situation is that she's not smuggled across the border in a boat. Almost everyone gets in that way.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
But Katalia, she was actually just driven across the border and told to duck her head down as they went through the checkpoint. And she watched through the window as each of the border guards were handed a big wad of cash.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
They were getting paid off. Exactly. And then they drove for another two hours and pulled up outside the enormous gates of a scammer farm. Can you describe what it looks like?
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
How many people were there? Like, would you say like hundreds or thousands?
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
The van rolled through the gates, which closed behind them. And again, Catalina started yelling at the people that she'd previously considered her friends.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
So far, we've been focusing on the human element of this story. You know, it's been all about Kuen Cataleya's experience of abduction. But let's pause here, just for a moment, for some quick stats on the scammer industry. Actually, it's a quick lesson in geography. So I keep saying that there are scammer farms throughout Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, but these are all big countries, right?
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
With farms operating in very different ways. So for the sake of simplicity, we're going to focus only on Myanmar throughout this series. And in Myanmar, what you need to know is that there are two main regions where scamming has become their primary industry. First, let's start with Mayawati, which is a town in southeastern Myanmar.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
It's separated from Thailand by the Moi River, and that was the river that Kew was smuggled over in the previous episode. And this is the main region for scammer farms. It's where Myanmar's first scammer farm was set up in about 2020. And this place, it's enormous. It's called KK Park, and it's become so large that over the last five years, it's been split into four suburbs.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
And so you've got KK Park number one, KK Park number two, so on and so forth. They're suburbs with their own identities and their own governance. And then a little further up the Moy River, stretching about 100 kilometers north, there are an unknown number of scammer farms of different sizes and business models. Most of them are massive, walled compounds.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
Some of them are multi-story buildings, three, four, five, even six stories high. Some of these compounds can have row upon row of buildings, 10, 20, 30, even 50 buildings that have just sprung up seemingly overnight. It's an industrialized operation, all in plain sight.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
Hey, I'm Julian Morgans, and you're listening to Scammerland. We established in the last episode how most online scams, they're being run by modern slaves living inside a network of walled compounds through Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. And you'll recall, we just followed a Ugandan guy named Q as he was smuggled into Myanmar and taken to a notoriously brutal scammer farm known as Taichung.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
And each farm usually houses a range of different companies that all target different demographics of victims in different countries. For example, slaves in a particular building in KK Park, they might be scamming Americans on dating apps. While scammers in another park, they might be scamming Australians on Facebook Marketplace.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
So this, this is Myanmar's original scammer region, and it's estimated that somewhere between 100 and 200,000 people have been brought in as victims of human trafficking. And this area in southeastern Myanmar is where both Kew and Katalia were taken.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
Now, the other area in Myanmar that's sprouting scammer farms, it's further south at a different border crossing with Thailand known as Three Pagoda Pass. And it's a bit more remote as it's hidden between two mountain ranges.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
But along this route, clusters of scammer farms, they're cropping up in the valleys and they're nowhere near as large and the area is not as developed as that around the Moi River. But the farms are going up fast because it's much easier to smuggle in victims via the land border than trying to get them across the river.
SCAMMERLAND
Inside the Gross Business of Scamming
Okay, so that's the geography overview, but Katalia, she'd found herself in a massive scammer farm near the Moy River, but unlike Hugh, she didn't resist work. For the sake of survival, she agreed to just start scamming.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Hey, Julian Morgans here. I'm the host of Scammerland, but I'm also the host of a weekly show called What It Was Like. And the basic idea is that every episode I talk to someone who has lived through an extreme event. So think cults, serial killers, ghost stories, Princess Diana's paparazzi, Kurt Cobain's manager. And in all cases, you'll find out what it was like to be there.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Hey, welcome back. So we've been speaking with a man named Judah Tanner, and he watched as the first scammer farms got built during COVID. And he knows more than almost anyone in the Western world about how they originated and how they operate. And he admitted to me that he's actually kind of in awe at the cold brilliance of their business model.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Welcome to the show. Hi, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
This is something else that keeps coming up as we've been investigating this story. Just how technologically advanced these scammer farms have become. I said in an earlier episode how each farm has a department of young women who get on the phones with their victims.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Well, they can also get on FaceTime or on Zoom because the scammer farms have this custom AI technology that allows them to digitally wrap completely convincing looking faces over their models. So you might be on a call looking at a woman whose facial expressions seem completely natural and convincing.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
But actually, you're just looking at a digital mask superimposed over the actual face of the person that you're speaking with. According to Judah, it's this kind of technology that's impressing even people who are working in AI.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Hearing Judas say this makes me feel a bit hopeless. It's just the sheer scale and power of this industry. The way it's so untouchable, yet in plain sight. Scamming is really, really lucrative. And these shady organizations and military junters, they're experiencing this period of fantasy wealth and freedom. They want some custom cutting-edge piece of AI technology? Not a problem.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
They just get it built. Or they want some new complex of multi-story office buildings in a field? No worries. They can get that built too. Anything they want, they can do it. But actually, Judah was telling me that for some of the farms, all of this power seems to be going to their heads in kind of weird ways. And one of them is how they approach torture and punishment.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And especially in the farm that Q got sent to.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And so, yeah, that's really where I'm at. Judah hasn't always worked combating human trafficking. He actually went to a private school in Perth, and then he got into the corporate world. But then he decided to blow it all up, and he moved to Thailand.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
It's so bizarre. When you're saying this, I'm thinking about criminal profiling that I've read. Books by FBI criminal profilers who talk about how serial killers, their behaviors evolve as they mature into their careers in homicide. It's got that ring to it. This isn't really doing it for me anymore. I'm going to try some rape. That sounds pretty flippant, but it's a bit like that.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
That's just one example of the way these groups are becoming more depraved with time. But there's another. And just a heads up, dark rooms and black rooms, they're the same thing.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
God. How often are you seeing, so you're getting these people out, you're doing these extractions. How often are you seeing people sort of permanently disabled or, you know, like, is it quite frequently that people are really injured when they get out?
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And that sort of brings us to a more positive note. Judah's main job these days is rescuing people from scammer farms. So here's where we're going to lay the foundations for how he helped to get both small Q and cattle out. But I should flag, we're not going to go real deep on the details.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Judah's ability to get people out kind of rests on his private relationships and his local knowledge, which he doesn't want to give up for obvious reasons.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Judah was pivotal in freeing both small Q and Katalia. In our next and final episode, we're going to come back to Q and his rescue. But for now, let's revisit Katalia to learn how she got out and how she got home to her nine-year-old boy. That's after the break. Stay with us. Welcome back. So you remember Catalina, right? She was the Filipino mother from episode two.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And just like you, she's been fighting for survival. She's been scamming all day, every day, and she's also faced violence and punishment. Although luckily, she never ended up in a dark room, but she was still desperate to escape.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
The social order seems very defined in these compounds. And according to Katalia, the Thais, they're the top dogs, second only to the Chinese.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
What this Thai guy is saying is that if Katalia can provide $1,000 USD, he'll get her driven out of the compound. And by some miracle, she did actually have $1,000. Remember, Katalia was recruited under a very different process to Q. She was recruited by friends who were actually earning money. And initially, Katalia was too, or at least for the first month where she was paid in crypto.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
But then they stopped paying her as she became less obedient. So when this guy from Thailand asked for $1,000, Kadalia was actually able to pay. And then he promised to meet her at 8am the next morning, but warned her, don't be late.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Oh my God. So are you saying that they're like, you either need to get in that car and it's going to cost you a thousand USD or if this somehow doesn't work, we're going to kill you.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Judah moved to the town of Mysot, which these days is just over the border from the largest concentration of scammer farms on the planet. But this was back in 2006, so the scammer farms hadn't yet been built. At that time, some of the region's biggest challenges were in education, so Judah set up an organization to help kids. It was called Global Advance Projects, and Judah still runs it today.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Oh, God. That's so normal. Yeah. I won't kill you.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Amy works with Judah at Global Advance Projects, and they often do rescues together. Can you tell me about that moment that you saw Judah?
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
What Kadalia is talking about is the way that she was driven across the Thai-Myanmar border in a van. Most people are trafficked into Myanmar via a boat, but Kadalia, she was just brazenly driven across the border. And this is important because it illustrates just how closely the border police and the scammer farms are working together and how corrupt they are.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And Judah remembers hearing this story and just being shocked.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
I asked Katalia how it felt to get back to the Philippines, stepping off the plane and knowing she was finally safe. And her answer kind of cracked me up.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
I think you'd be forgiven for crying. This is a completely reasonable time to cry.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
But a few years ago, something started to change. And for Judah, the first indication was a whole lot of mysterious construction work over the border in Myanmar. He and his friends all talked about it and no one had any answers until about mid-2022 when something unexpected happened.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
So that is how Katalia got out. And I'd just like to highlight that she really does want a job in law enforcement. She has a degree in criminology and she's got some fairly unparalleled experience working inside these scammer farms. So if anyone listening could use those skills, please get in touch with us via Instagram or TikTok. Links are in our show notes.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
In fact, Scammerland actually began as an episode on what it was like. So if you're enjoying this, you're probably going to love our other show. That's what it was like on Apple, Spotify and YouTube. Hey, I'm Julian Morgans and you're listening to Scammerland. Over the last four episodes, we've been looking at how most online scams these days are run by people living in slavery in Southeast Asia.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
On the next and final episode of Scammerland, we're going to follow Q as he finally gets out. Also, these farms aren't going away. They're getting bigger as more people fall victim to scams. So we're going to look at how the world is coming together to combat the industry. That's next week on Scammerland. Thanks for listening and please follow.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
If you're enjoying this and you'd like to offer some support, the easiest thing that you can do is follow the show. Scammerland is produced by Rachel Tuffery. Editing is by me, Rachel Tuffery, and Jamie Snyder. It's mixed by Jimmy Saunders, who also did our sound design. Our cover art is by Rich Akers. Our interns are Nina Fussell and Ellie Dickey.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And this whole thing has been a Superreal production. Superreal.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Judah thought it was a ridiculous story. Some new African prince type scam. So he told his friend, hey, why don't you ask for more information? Tell her that we're going to need some national ID numbers, maybe a passport number, date of birth, just everything that you can think of.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Judah says that he drove to the top of a hill overlooking the Muir River into Myanmar. And he looked over at the area where this woman claimed that she was being held, and he saw that all of the construction was finished. And what stood there now was a cluster of four-story buildings behind a huge wall.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
It kind of looked like a university campus, except that it was floodlit and eerily silent, and he couldn't see anyone moving outside.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Judah spent the next few weeks working with his local network and the Kenyan government to get this woman out. And it worked. They got her out. And from there, Judah's phone number got spread around inside the scammer farms.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Remember, this was 2022, and the world was just recovering from COVID. While the world had been distracted, Chinese organized crime had thrown together these buildings and smuggled in all of these thousands of people to run scams. And Judah, living right next door, he was one of the first to realize what had happened. And so the world's governments, they turned to him for answers.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
We've been following the stories of two people who have been abducted and are trying to escape. And we're going to get to their escape. But first, I want to introduce you to the man who makes escape possible. His name is Judah Tanner, and he's an expert on Scammer Farms. He's probably one of the only experts on Scammer Farms.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
In that year, 2022, the UNODC, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, published the first major governmental report on scammer farms, which managed to piece together some information about where these things had come from.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
What I want to do now is give you a brief history on scammer farms. And it's going to be a bit incomplete because their origin, ownership and financial structure, it's all murky by design. But here's what we do know, thanks to people like Judah. It all started with COVID. When the pandemic hit, a lot of things shifted around.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
For one, millions of tourists and gamblers couldn't visit the hundreds of casinos set up along the Mekong Delta region. If you've ever traveled through Southeast Asia, you might have seen these really shady casino towns set up in so-called special economic zones, or SEZs. And these are places where tourists come to gamble, take drugs, hire sex workers, and they're largely owned by organized crime.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
But all the tourists disappeared in 2020, leading to a massive revenue drop for the casino owners. So they started looking around for new ways to make money. At the same time, the pandemic made a lot of people across Southeast Asia unemployed.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Thousands of foreign workers, many of them previously involved in the gambling industry, they were laid off, which made them much more vulnerable to exploitation. But here's the clincher, and you might remember this. During lockdown, we all started buying stuff online. Digital payment systems, e-commerce companies, cryptocurrencies, they all boomed.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
You might remember that the price of Bitcoin went through the roof. And Asian crime groups realized that they could scam people by leveraging these technologies. Not just in Asia, but around the world. But it wasn't just about scamming people online.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And he's going to help us to unpack their shadowy, bloodstained business model. Where did these things come from? Who owns them? And how does he help to get people out? Welcome to Scammerland. So in the last episode, we followed small Q as he was tortured for refusing to work. But while that was happening, an SOS message that Q had sent via a stolen phone found its way to Judah. Hello, Judah.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
To run these operations, they needed workers, so they started offering young, educated, multilingual people, often from these really struggling areas, to come into these empty casinos to run scams. It's thought that this model first emerged in Singapore and the Philippines, but it wasn't long until a group in Taiwan had the bright idea of bringing in people to work, but then just not paying them.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And really, it was slavery that made this industry explode. Taiwanese crime groups adopted slavery, and then the others followed. And from there, scamming became stupidly, irrepressibly lucrative. These days, the UN estimates that farm operators in Southeast Asia alone steal up to $36 billion annually, which is around the same turnover as the US oil giant Chevron.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
So imagine, Asian scammer farm operators now have the resources at the scale of an American oil company. That's where we are now. That's the scale of this thing. But when I asked Judah about who runs these scammer farms exactly, he was reluctant to give me a definitive answer. So first of all, this Chinese crime organization, you know, who's at the top of this pyramid? Who are these guys?
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
He's right. The industry's opaque management structure is by design. But still, we do know some loose things about who owns the scammer farms. For example, we know that KK Park was the first one to be built in Myanmar, and I've talked about this place in episode 2.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
It's actually the scammer farm that we feature on our podcast cover, and its origin story helps to illustrate how these places are bankrolled and managed. So according to a big investigation by the German state media company DW, the seed capital for KK Park came from a Chinese triad, which is a pretty notorious criminal organization.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
At the top is a guy named Wan Kwok Khoi, also known as Broken Tooth. And this guy is a big deal in the Chinese underworld. But he's also involved in China's Belt and Road Initiative, or the BRI, which is this huge infrastructure effort to increase China's global footprint. Then the next party involved in KK Park's management is a medley of military groups in Myanmar.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
Now, the compound is in a region that's run by a military group that's kind of like the state government, and they're called the Karen National Union. And they run this area, this sort of state, with another group called the Karen National Liberation Army. And the leaders from these two groups, they actually attended the opening ceremony of KK Park in 2021.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
And then the third group, making money from KK Park, are just the individual businesses that sublet its buildings. Some of these are Chinese, some of these originally from Taiwan or Hong Kong, and it's not totally clear if these interests are connected to the Chinese triads or if they're just operating in the same space. It's all very complicated, multi-layered and deliberately murky.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
But this is indicative of Myanmar's scammer farm management structures just in general. I mean, it sounds to me, this is wild speculation on my part. It sounds to me that they're being somewhat sanctioned by the Chinese government. The scale, the sort of the audacity of the thing makes it sound to me like if the Chinese, you know, if the Chinese Communist Party wanted to shut them down.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
I don't know. It just doesn't sound like a purely black market thing. It sounds a little bit gray market to me.
SCAMMERLAND
The Man Helping People Escape Scammer Farms
As you might have noticed by now, Judah has an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of scammer farms. He really is one of the few people on the planet who knows the intricacies of this hidden world. But we're going to take a quick ad break here. And when we return, we're going to dig in even further with him as he describes how the farms are adapting and developing AI in terrifying new ways.