Pig Butchering

‘Hey it’s Sandra from the bar how are you?’ ‘Pig butchering’ begins with a text message like this; millions of them are sent every day. If you’ve ever received such a message, it’s likely that, in common with most potential pigs, you didn’t respond. But perhaps you did, and proceeded to get fattened up. ‘You seem so polite and friendly,’ one version of the conversation runs. ‘Can we at least be texting friends?’ Over the following days your new friend will probe your interests: ‘I like tennis, do you like tennis?’ You feel obliged to respond after getting a text saying ‘I hope you can send me a message when you wake up tomorrow,’ and before long a scene of future happiness is being dangled before you: ‘Also the aurora in Iceland is also very beautiful. I want to see it with you too.’

When a pig butcher senses that they have won enough trust, they’ll mention a recent cryptocurrency investment. The target will be invited to upload a token amount of money into a cryptocurrency application covertly controlled by the butcher. At first the investment spikes in value; the prey invests more cash, then even more. The genius of pig butchering is that, when the victim finally becomes suspicious, it’s too late. The perpetrator blocks the conversation, vanishes, and converts all of the invested money into a ‘stablecoin’ such as Tether, which helps conceal any trace of the transaction. Victims have almost no legal recourse. An experienced butcher won’t have revealed a single detail about who they really are or where they come from.

If it were a national economy, cybercrime would be the third largest in the world, behind only the United States and China and growing by 15 per cent a year. By 2027 scams are expected to cost the world $27 trillion a year; roughly a third of the planet – any English or Chinese speaker with a phone number or email address – is a potential victim. In the UK, a financial scam is committed every fifteen seconds. Cocaine cartels shift a product that must be painstakingly grown and chemically processed, then transported thousands of miles; they rely on relationships built up over years and put millions of dollars at stake with every shipment. But scammers don’t need farmers or dockworkers or the crew of cargo ships. No physical objects have to be moved. Cash comes to them. In the case of pig butchering, much of the money is looted from ageing Western men with a hankering for human connection. Between 2020 and 2024, an estimated $75 billion – equivalent to the GDP of Belarus or Slovenia – was swindled through the ancient art of feigning romantic interest.

It isn’t an effortless process. According to some studies, fewer than one person in five responds to unsolicited text messages from someone like ‘Sandra’. Establishing credibility can take weeks, perhaps months: butchers can spend up to seventeen hours a day speaking to pigs and have dozens of conversations running at once. Any earnings are likely to be modest – male victims lose £3500 on average and women lose about £9000, though more men report having been scammed. For romance scams to be worth organising a crime syndicate around, they need to be conducted on an industrial scale, with thousands or even tens of thousands of desk workers proficient in English or Mandarin toiling round the clock. They need managers who can give advice on digital seduction, typing classes, tech support, cleaners, accountants. They need dormitories to house all of these employees, cafeterias to feed them. And – most important – they need security guards to stop workers from leaving and exposing the reality of what their work involves.

Scam centres have appeared across the borderlands of Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos over the last decade. In Scam, Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li and Mark Bo show that the industry depends on a second layer of deception. Most scammers have themselves been scammed. The tens of thousands of Chinese, Ethiopians, Ugandans, Filipinos, Pakistanis and others who carry out the grunt work have been tricked, kidnapped and enslaved. It starts with an advert on TikTok, Douyin, LinkedIn or Jiandanwang: ‘Fantastic opportunity with Amazon Web Services. Offers competitive compensation, remote work flexibility, and opportunities to attend industry events. Interested? Let’s connect!’ Those who respond are flown to Bokeo International Airport in Laos or Kang Keng Airport in Cambodia, where they are met by a group of men, pushed into a van, then taken to a compound somewhere along the Mekong River and told they can’t leave. They are now pig butchers. Or fish butchers, tasked with luring internet shoppers into submitting prewritten reviews on spoof websites before entrapping them into pyramidal cryptocurrency investments. Or bird butchers, ordered to post fake ads – bird nets – on dating websites or shopping platforms and lure victims into sending them money.

According to USAID’s Counter-Trafficking in Persons programme, 150,000 people are enslaved in scamming compounds across Cambodia. In Myanmar the figure may be as high as 120,000; there are tens of thousands more in Laos and Thailand. They have been brought from the villages of Xinjiang, the slums of Manila and Nairobi, the secondary schools of the Czech Republic. Scamming is no less grotesque an example of globalisation than the seafood slave industry operating out of Thailand or the cargo-ship dismantling business devastating the shores of Bangladesh. One particularly striking aspect of cyber-slavery, as the authors of Scam point out, is that its victims are trapped in remote compounds, isolated from their friends and family, even as they remain constantly connected to the outside world through the internet.

What little we understand about life inside scamming compounds comes from those who have escaped them, either by jumping out of windows or as a result of military operations to free them. Scam is based on interviews with several former inmates. Stories of sexual assault and torture are common. The authors speak to a young Taiwanese woman, ‘Alice’, who was lured to Cambodia on the promise of employment at a tech firm. Within hours of her arrival at a scamming compound in the port of Sihanoukville, her new bosses threatened her with a stun gun, locked her in a room, then raped her. Over the next month she was sold from one compound to another and sexually assaulted multiple times. Eventually she was saved after she smuggled pleas for help onto an Instagram page, but her problems had not ended: like many of those who have been enslaved in fraud compounds, Alice had to prove to the Cambodian authorities that she hadn’t knowingly entered the scam industry.

Scam compounds are run according to a strict hierarchy. A department head oversees a dozen or so core managers, who are responsible for teaching butchering methods and acquiring targets. Team leaders impose discipline. On the lowest rung are the scammers, who typically number in the hundreds at any given compound, but are segregated by nationality and divided into groups of around seven to make them easier to control. Most pig butchers learn scripts from manuals. ‘You need to make the customers feel happy and comfortable,’ one manual instructs. The goal is to ‘create dependency’, ‘show solicitude’ and ‘make him fall for you.’ Scammers are told not to use too many emojis – they don’t invite a response – and to locate problems in their interlocutors’ lives and ‘provide support’. Butchers who fail to memorise or stick to the scripts are ordered to copy out their contents by hand ten or twenty times, while those who reply too slowly are sometimes forced to stand in the sun for hours on end. In February, one of more than a hundred Ethiopians rescued from a compound on the border between Myanmar and Thailand told the Guardian that those who failed to meet their daily quotas were shocked with electric probes. In Cambodia’s Kampot Province, the bodies of tortured scammers have been found stuffed into dumpsters, wrapped in blankets. The authors of Scam interviewed a Chinese man who was sold to three different scam factories in northern Myanmar. He claims that bounties are placed on the heads of recent escapees; they are captured by locals who carry out patrols and delivered back to their former masters. ‘It is not possible to escape,’ he says.

Despite the recent crackdowns in Thailand and Myanmar, scamming compounds make little effort to disguise themselves. Myawaddy, a town on Myanmar’s border with Thailand, has at least forty of them. The compounds usually contain squat, red-roofed structures, with barred windows, barbed-wire fences and a watchtower occupied by armed guards in fatigues. In February, when the Thai military cut such compounds’ power supply and internet access in a bid to drive them from the region, diesel generators were brought in and the scamming resumed via Starlink satellite.

Franceschini, Li and Bo trace the origins of the online scam industry to Taiwan in the 1990s. In 1996, much of the island’s personal data – addresses, phone numbers, bank account passbooks – become more easily accessible. In Taiwan, as in most other places, scamming had long been a face-to-face activity; ruses included the sale of fake scratch cards that duped elderly citizens into believing they had won the lottery. But digitisation enabled more elaborate schemes to be conducted anonymously over the telephone. By the late 1990s, Taiwanese gangs specialised in cons such as stealing bank details by impersonating government officials. Over the next decade, however, following a crackdown by the Taiwanese police, many fraudsters made for the Chinese mainland, where they had access to a billion Mandarin speakers who were rapidly acquiring mobile phones and internet access. In the early 2000s, Taiwanese gangs turned former tea-growing areas such as Anxi county in Fujian into hotbeds of scamming; one victim was a retired professor in Beijing who, having been informed that he’d won a Samsung television, paid the equivalent of $17,700 in ‘taxes’ and ‘service fees’ to what turned out to be an 18-year-old woman.

By the mid-2010s, when Beijing began its own anti-scamming campaign, an important shift had taken place. The Taiwanese groups had been overtaken by thirty-odd gangs from the mainland. Some of these were offshoots of the Triads, who had until then specialised in gun-running and smuggling. But many were smaller organisations, run by entrepreneurs with connections to organised crime or the Chinese Communist Party, or both. Like the tech companies whose harvesting of our information made their existence possible, these groups were early to recognise the value of personal data. But unlike those companies, they weren’t constrained by geography; they didn’t seek out favourable tax zones or pools of highly educated labour. An internet connection – and perhaps some corruptible local partners – was all they needed.

One of these gangs was led by Wan Kuok-Koi, also known as Broken Tooth. Born in Macau in 1955, he dropped out of school, worked in a dim sum restaurant, then found his way into the underworld. By 1998 he was one of the leaders of the Triad group 14K. A year later he was sent to a high-security prison on Coloane Island, on charges ranging from money laundering to loan-sharking. After his release in 2012, he moved to Cambodia, then to Myanmar, where he pushed his way into the emerging industries of cryptocurrencies and romance scams. Wan is alleged to have financial links to KK Park in south-eastern Myanmar, where as many as ten thousand people live in a set of compounds covering more than five hundred acres. More than $100 million of cryptocurrency deposits were traced to KK Park between 2022 and 2024. The Myanmar military raided the compound last month, detaining more than two thousand people and seizing thirty Starlink satellite internet terminals. Despite being sanctioned by the US Department of the Treasury, Wan continues to operate with seeming impunity; last year he was filmed on the tarmac at an airport in Laos wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of the Wagner Group.

By the late 2010s, hundreds of gangsters had relocated from Taiwan and China to the river valleys and borderlands of South-East Asia. The region contains several devolved areas, such as Myanmar’s Kayin State, run by the Karen National Army, and the Golden Triangle in western Laos, a special economic zone under the thumb of the Chinese casino magnate Zhao Wei, who has signed a 99-year lease for the area from the Laotian government. It was contested by methamphetamine kings, Buddhist warlords, insurgent groups and casino bosses. Scam gangsters took advantage of the decentralised power in border areas, infiltrating immigration units and funding private security forces such as the Golden Triangle ‘public security bureau’. In Cambodia, where butchering profits exceed $12.8 billion a year (a quarter of the country’s GDP), compound bosses are tipped off about police raids, have connections to prominent senators, and have been unexpected beneficiaries of the border dispute with Thailand: any Cambodian attempt to close down scam centres along the shared border risks being perceived as a military incursion. In the town of Shwe Kokko in Kayin State, the scammers have enlisted the support of Buddhist monks, who organise public ceremonies for compound owners.

The arrival of the scam gangs was made easier by the spread of scamming’s semi-legalised sibling, online gambling, which had begun establishing ‘spinach’ cities across the region years earlier. (In Chinese, ‘spinach’, bocai, is a homophone for ‘gambling’.) Historically, Macau was the gambling hub for Chinese mainlanders, but the Chinese government’s crackdown on money laundering there in 2014 helped turn South-East Asia into the next frontier for Chinese illicit capital. By 2020, Sihanoukville in Cambodia had at least a hundred high-rise casinos catering to an ever richer Chinese middle class. The casinos’ relationship with the scam compounds is symbiotic: the pig butchers bring in cash, while the casino infrastructure helps launder the proceeds of scamming and occasionally hides the compounds – since Covid-19, when the casinos emptied out, compounds have been built inside or under them. In Laos’s Golden Triangle there are now at least four hundred compounds. At first most of the labour was brought in from western China, but by the early 2020s new groups of workers – from the Philippines, India, East Africa – were being tricked into travelling to South-East Asia.

While some observers have argued that the CCP deliberately fails to crack down on China’s scam gangster diaspora, encouraging the theft of billions from Westerners every year, the authors of Scam point out that the greatest number of scam victims are Chinese citizens. The industry is hardly in need of support from Beijing. Even as crackdowns on compounds intensify in Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia, as a result of increasing pressure from Western governments and international organisations, the scam industry remains uncontrollable, capable of quickly relocating, deeper in the mountains of Myawaddy, moving from Cambodia’s border with Thailand to its border with Vietnam.

Despite​ the remarkable growth of South-East Asian compounds, the international scam industry is still, for many people, synonymous with West Africa. According to the historian Stephen Ellis, the first recorded example of the 419 scam (also known as an advance-fee scam or Nigerian prince scam) dates to 1920, in what was then the British Gold Coast. The early targets tended to be members of the emerging local elites. In the mid-20th century, Nigerians began publishing adverts for pen pals in North American newspapers, promising ivory or ebony knives in exchange for cash advances – the requests were signed off with made-up royal titles. ‘Generous, but possibly gullible, American citizens have allowed themselves to be taken in by African schoolboys,’ the US consul general in Lagos complained in 1949. A couple of decades later, a Ghanaian called John Ackah Blay-Miezah spun stories of a fortune that had been stashed away from British colonists and could only be accessed if he raised enough money.* ‘Nkrumah liberated his people politically,’ Blay-Miezah claimed. ‘I am going to liberate them economically.’ He received hundreds of millions of dollars in wire transfers, fooling everyone from Korean business moguls to members of Richard Nixon’s cabinet.

One night in January 2022, in an Accra slum known as Agbogbloshie, I climbed up to the second floor of a nightclub called the Wembley. In a bare room dank with sweat, several dozen teenagers tapped away on iPhones and laptops. These young men from the northern fringes of Ghana called themselves ‘browser boys’. Their business was to upload photos of beautiful women to fake Facebook profiles and lure gullible Western men into sending them Victoria’s Secret gift cards or Western Union transfers. One of the boys showed me a script on his iPhone:

I’m Unemployed. I use to be an accountant and lost my job as a result.the manager of the company i work for wanted to rape me,i run away and never returned.i reported him to the police they pay less attention cause he has money and power so lucky i applied for a nursing school ,am a final year student in the UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND COLLEGE PARK here working on my RN degree to work as a nurse seen ..I have left with 1 month for me to start a final year exams to be come a RN..

The browser boys conceived of their work not as fattening up pigs but as fishing. The bigger the fish, they believed, the more effort was required to reel it in. Astonishingly, their messages sometimes work. In Ghana, as in Nigeria, young men such as Starflex and Kofi Boat have acquired an almost mythic reputation, building mansions on the outskirts of Accra allegedly paid for with fortunes swindled from bored American men. At the mudbrick shrines of the Ashanti hinterland, browser boys desperate for their next catch seek out juju priests who give spiritual assistance in the form of a crucified stray cat or a libation of gin – in exchange for a cut of any earnings.

The Ghanaians I met wanted to become rich like the Americans and Europeans they contacted online. Convincing people thousands of miles away to hand over their riches was just what it took to get ahead. Other scammers justified their work by describing it as a form of reparations for colonialism: Europeans had come to West Africa many years ago bringing knives and mirrors, a browser boy called Boss of Bosses told me, only to steal its people and gold. It was fair for the Africans to take back some of their stolen wealth.

Just as the original West African scams emerged not long after foreign businessmen started extracting gold from the region and selling it overseas, it’s hard to imagine the scam compounds coming into existence without the thousands of sweatshops that opened across South-East Asia in the preceding decades. Phone footage recently smuggled out of a scamming facility – Gate 25 on the border between Myanmar and Thailand – shows ranks of zombified men and women hunched over wooden tables, motivational posters (‘One team, one dream’ written in English and Chinese) on the walls around them. Replace the laptops with sewing machines and it could be a Nike or H&M factory. But one of the more bewildering aspects of the South-East Asian scamming compounds – or ‘internet investment parks’, as they call themselves – is the funhouse mirror they put up to recent American corporate culture. It’s a particularly bizarre form of slavery that electrocutes labourers while also establishing daycare centres for their children, that sells them from one compound to another while also providing brothels, that imposes HR departments and lessons in interpersonal skills. If the office perks of the American tech sector were introduced to collapse what few distinctions remained between the office and the home, the scamming compounds have used the idea of workplace amenities to make hundreds of thousands of aspiring digital nomads believe they haven’t been enslaved.

Having looted billions of dollars from every corner of the planet, romance scamming compounds are now themselves popping up across the globe. Chinese-run facilities have recently been discovered in the Philippines and the desert outside Dubai. In 2022, Chinese scammers took over the shuttered Seaview Hotel on the Isle of Man and imported more than a hundred pig butchers from the Philippines; intermittent cheering could be heard from inside, presumably in celebration of successful slaughters. The following year, 43 Malaysians were broken out of a scam compound in Peru. The Chinese cyber-theft industry has even spread to the home of the 419 scam: in January, 177 Chinese nationals were arrested in Lagos and Abuja, where they had been caught training locals.

Why set up a scamming compound on the Isle of Man? The advantage of cyber-theft is that it can target a billion English speakers from a dormitory on the Mekong. But one pitfall of a model which – unlike cocaine trafficking or extortion – is tolerant of competition and requires little more than an internet connection is that copycats begin emerging where they shouldn’t. The bigger question is how long the romance scamming industry can continue in its current guise. It’s only a matter of time before AI renders hundreds of thousands of enslaved scammers as redundant as telemarketers or call centre workers. There are deepfake videos that imitate celebrities, AI models that mimic human speech patterns and response times, applications that can write bogus text messages at scale. Is there a sector better placed to profit from the automated generation of complex dialogue than one that steals billions of dollars a year through sloppily written messages?