Nop’s online advert offering land for sale outside Bangkok almost immediately caught the attention of the wrong people: scammers.
Within hours, they had tried to reel him in with a tale of an Afghan family fleeing the Taliban, with millions of dollars to spend in a hurry in Thailand.
Scam networks have tapped the power of the internet to target victims in Asia and beyond. They sift through social media profiles to hook their marks via adverts, posts or pleas for work.
Experts say the criminals understand the emotions of their victims – trust, guilt, greed, love and loneliness – and weaponise an online space where their targets interact most freely, giving away clues to their desires and habits with each tap of the phone.
“People are hard on the victims, asking ‘why would they fall for these scams?'” said Jan Santiago of US-based Global Anti-Scam group that has taken thousands of calls from people fearing they have been caught up in Asian scams.
“We shop, bank, date and invest online…scammers are really good at taking advantage of this – it is their full-time job to gain your trust and fake all these things,” he said.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been made by the Chinese gangs that dominate the trade, who target victims in Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and China, and have enslaved untold thousands into working at scam call centres across Cambodia, Myanmar, the Philippines and Laos.
Security experts say crackdowns, rescues of trafficked victims and…
