Additional reporting by Koh Ewe and Gavin Butler
This story contains accounts of physical abuse and human trafficking.
Shortly after 2 o’clock one Friday afternoon, a notification popped up on Cindy Tsai’s phone. It was a WhatsApp message from an unknown number, simply stating, “Hello.”
Tsai ignored it. Three hours later, another message: “Are you Linda from the pet store?” She felt she should respond.
“I have never gotten a wrong message on my U.S. WhatsApp,” she told VICE World News from her Boston home. “I thought it was legitimate. I came back and said, ‘Sorry, wrong number’.”
That three-word message, delivered as a courtesy to the individual on the other end, would prove the most costly she’s ever sent. Within two months, she would lose more money than the average American earns in a lifetime.
“I met my scammer on October 15, 2021,” she said of that Friday exchange. “All said and done, I lost about $2.5 million.”
What unfolded was an online quasi-romantic relationship with an intelligent, handsome younger man named Jimmy, whom she believed lived in Los Angeles. Their daily conversations spanned life, sports, economics, literature—and, eventually, cryptocurrency.
After a tentative start buying and selling Ethereum through a website Jimmy recommended, initial profits prompted Tsai to take the plunge, buying vast quantities of the cryptocurrency. She had invested huge sums by the time the crypto investment platform alerted her to an unending labyrinth of audits, fees and taxes she’d have to navigate in order to cash out.
But it was all a hoax—the platform wasn’t real, the money was gone, and the audits were attempts to squeeze those final thousands out of Tsai. (She provided VICE World News with financial statements showing her losses.)
Her losses represent a strikingly high figure, made more notable by the fact that Tsai is a successful project finance lawyer. But what she didn’t know at the time was that she had become ensnared in a sophisticated scam that has exploded over the past 18 months, one responsible for the theft of billions of dollars worldwide.
From industrial-scale scam centers in Southeast Asia, criminal syndicates have spent the pandemic perfecting an intricate romance-meets-investment fraud called Shāzhūpán (pig butchering scams). Teams of scammers use sophisticated scripts to “fatten up” their targets, grooming individuals like Tsai and enticing them into investment schemes increasingly centred on cryptocurrency, before going in for the “slaughter” and stealing their money.
But while this narrative of duped victim and online predator is as old as the internet, the scale of human suffering sustaining pig butchering is unprecedented in the world of online scamming. Propping up the industry are thousands of people trapped in a cycle of human trafficking, debt, forced labour, and violence; people from across the region lured by fake job adverts to scam centers in Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia, where they’re forced to perpetrate the kind of fraud used on Tsai.
It’s the structures underpinning pig butchering that one NGO worker told VICE World News is creating a “humanitarian crisis.” Piecing together the global harm that has come with the industry’s rise, VICE World News spoke with those on all sides of the scam: individuals robbed of their life savings and plunged into debt, as well as those on the other side of the screen, imprisoned victims forced to groom others and scam.
In Tsai’s case, her grooming by Jimmy was catalyzed by a devastating series of life events. In September, a month before they began chatting, Tsai was told by doctors that she had terminal gastric cancer. Then, weeks later, she officially parted ways with her husband.
“I was definitely more vulnerable than I ever had been,” Tsai said, describing how Jimmy became a comforting presence. “It was touching… When I had my immunotherapy appointments, they were there, talking to me. When I was getting my allergy test, they were there.”
“They were there the entire time.”
But even in a case as clear-cut as Tsai’s—a terminally ill woman robbed of millions of dollars—this largely novel dynamic, victims scamming victims, complicates the narrative. She says she holds no hope of recovering her funds, nor bringing her scammers to justice, with her attention now turning to the other side of the industry.
“The immunotherapy has controlled the spread of the cancer, but am I ever going to be cured? No,” she said. “In the meantime I’m doing what I can to try to help victims. My focus right now is really on the trafficking victims.”
Lu Xiangri is one figure working on the front line assisting trafficking victims in Cambodia, where scam operations have proliferated at the fastest rate over the past two and a half years. He runs what is for all intents and purposes a safe house in Phnom Penh for those who’ve escaped scam centers but aren’t able to immediately return home.
A gold sign behind the desk advertises hourly rates of $15, as well as mahjong rooms at $25, but paying customers are few and far between at the run-down hotel down a dingy alley on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital. Instead, residents within the repurposed hotel are around 30 Chinese victims, biding their time until they can raise enough money to leave the country.
“They are all waiting to go home,” Lu told VICE World News through a translator. “Nobody dares to go out. They are scared that if they go out, they will get kidnapped back into the scam compound.”
Lu, from southern China, was himself held inside a scam center in early October last year. He had applied for a job on the recommendation of a friend as his restaurant in Cambodia was hit hard during the pandemic. Realising the nature of the work once inside, he called local police seeking help and was released after 10 days.
After posting about his experience on Facebook, he was met with a flood of responses from others. This led him to join the Chinese-Cambodia Charity Team, a volunteer-run group that has become one of the very few helping scam center victims on the ground in Cambodia. The requests for help haven’t stopped in the months since.
“I don’t have a choice, these people tell me every day that they don’t want to be a scammer anymore,” Lu said. “If they can’t scam anyone, they are beaten.”
Lu estimates that he and his volunteers have helped rescue at least 50 people—many from mainland China, but also Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia—from scam compounds since November. When contacted, he collects their personal information, where they are being held and why they want to be rescued, before reporting their cases to authorities.
“If we don’t save them, they will die,” he said. “We just want to see them go back home alive.”
Lu’s fears are well founded. The past year has seen a stream of news reports detailing slave labour conditions, threats of rape, and extreme violence perpetrated against victims inside scam compounds in Cambodia. Video footage has emerged showing young men being imprisoned, beaten, and tased at the hands of their captors. More concerning are a spate of mysterious deaths near areas known to host scam operations—most recently last week.
Bilce Tan feared he would succumb to the same fate during his ill-fated stint in Cambodia last month.
“Those three weeks were like a Hollywood movie,” the Malaysian man told VICE World News. “I was scared every day, I was frightened every day. But I still needed to be very clear in my mind.”
“I know that if I did something stupid, I would die, I would not be able to see my parents anymore.”
It was in April when Tan spotted an advert for a team leader role in Cambodia paying 12,000 Malaysian ringgit a month, around $2,700. He had heard rumours about scam centers, but felt reassured that the advert, posted by an alleged Malaysian digital marketing firm, was vetted by the job site. Two video interviews later, he was on a flight to Phnom Penh.
Tan’s unease began almost immediately. He was met at the airport by four men who put him in their car and told him not to ask questions on the five-hour drive to Sihanoukville. The once-sleepy town on Cambodia’s southern coast was transformed around 2016 by a Chinese-led construction boom which saw more than 100 casinos built catering to tourists from mainland China, where gambling is illegal. Today a half-finished city of construction sites and skyscrapers, Sihanoukville’s associations with criminality grew after its economy was ravaged by Cambodia’s 2019 online gambling ban, and then the pandemic.
Over the past two and a half years, reports suggest businesses that once earned their money from gambling or tourism have now pivoted toward hosting nefarious activities within their walls, including online scams. This includes, Tan says, the Victory Paradise Resort and Casino, the hilltop hotel with views of Sihanoukville where the alleged digital marketing firm was located.
The entrance to Victory Paradise Resort. Video: Bilce Tan
The job advert promised “surrounding facilities… complete [with] massage therapy, gymnasium, football field, and badminton courts.” In reality, the paradise resort, which opened just before Sihanoukville’s crash, would become his de facto prison for three weeks. Tan says his passport was confiscated and gun-wielding men across the complex prevented him from leaving. The bait-and-switch with the nature of the work became immediately clear.
“When they assigned me a job, it was totally different from what I had discussed with them,” he said.
For his new role, Tan says he was given two days training to familiarise himself with intricate scripts he’d use to build a rapport with strangers online. He would also be taught to navigate different platforms used to part people from their…
