If you own a cellphone, there’s a good chance you’ve gotten The Text: a random recruiter, sending a friendly message with an incredible job opportunity to make a lot of money for just a little bit of work. If it seems too good to be true, that’s because it is. It’s an employment scam.
If it feels like you’re being inundated with these spam texts right now, you aren’t imagining things. There’s been a huge spike in these scams since 2020, and that’s because they work. Being scammed can feel really embarrassing, but you should know that if it’s happened to you, you aren’t alone. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission received nearly 250,000 reports of text scams. And Americans lost about $500 million to them.
On the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast, we discuss the origins of these scams.
According to Matt Burgess, an information security writer for Wired, that text in your inbox is likely from a group known as the “Smishing Triad.”
“They are one of several groups of scammers that are known as smishing syndicates. These groups use SMS texting to trick people into giving up their address, banking, and other personal information. They’ve been estimated to be sending 100,000 messages per day,” Burgess told Vox. “They develop their own software, and they sell it to other cyber criminals who may be able to use that software to then go and scam people further. The amount of messages they’re sending per day is huge, and the amount of people that they’re trying to target is colossal.”
Those of us receiving the texts aren’t the only victims of these crime syndicates. The people sending them are often the victims of human trafficking, lured to countries in Southeast Asia under the guise of getting a good-paying job, only to be trapped and forced to scam.
This is something Erin West has seen firsthand. West was a prosecutor in California for over two decades, and after seeing so many people get their money taken in scams, she decided to do something about it. She started an organization called Operation Shamrock, which teaches people about scams. Since its inception, she’s investigated scams coming out of Cambodia, Myanmar, and all over Southeast Asia. The industry “has developed Cambodia into literally a scamming state,” West said. “Where previously their industry was tourism and garments, now scamming makes up 60 percent of their GDP.”
It’s an industry built on the back of what is essentially slave labor. West tells us what’s on the other side of the phone on Explain It to Me. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.
You’ve talked to some of the victims who were forced to work at these scam facilities. What was their experience like?
I met a Ugandan man named Small Q. Small Q was working in an internet cafe in Uganda. He’s 23 years old. A fellow Ugandan came in and told him, “I know you’re making $100 a month working here. I can get you $1,000 a month in a live-in work facility in Bangkok. You’ll be doing data entry.” Small Q went through the interview process. He did two interviews. He did a typing test. He was delighted to hear that he got this job where he would literally be making 10 times what he made at home. He told his brother, “I could give this a shot, or I could die poor in Uganda.”
When he arrived in Bangkok, they took his phone, they took his passport, drove him for hours and hours, and ultimately he found himself in a gated, massive walled community with large dormitories. The men with AK-47s at the gate told him, “You’re a scammer now. This is your job.”
Wow, so it sounds like the people who end up being the scammers are actually victims of an employment scam themselves.
That’s exactly right. Inside these rooms where the scams are happening, people are in fear. That’s the horrifying piece of this that people don’t understand. On the other side of that text is likely someone who was human-trafficked to be there. The financial victims do not realize that the people on the other side of the phone are tremendous victims as well.
You’ve been to several of these compounds. What do they look like? What do they feel like?
“The financial victims do not realize that the people on the other side of the phone are tremendous victims as well.”
They are massive, 10-story-tall buildings. They often have bars on the windows to keep the people from jumping out, surrounded by a massive concrete-walled-off area. There are dozens and dozens along the Moy River in Myanmar. There are hundreds in Cambodia. There are dozens in Laos. The scale of this is incomprehensible.
Who’s running these compounds?
Chinese organized criminals are no strangers to the gambling industry. In combination with a road that China was building in Cambodia, Chinese organized criminals thought, “We should fill this area with casino towers.” And so they did. But Covid hit. And so when their casino towers sat empty, they had to pivot. So they decided they were going to do this. That’s when they started the human trafficking angle on it.
When people like Small Q arrive, what happens next?
You are living your life in the waking hours of the country you’re targeting. Small Q’s day would then be to report to a long table of people just like him, forced to be working on desktop computers and 10 phones.
There are different roles within this facility. When you first come in, you are one of the people who are trying to locate new clients. Once you’ve been there a while, you elevate to becoming a chatter. They submit at the end of the day to their boss what their character will be doing that day.
It sounds so oddly corporate.
I’m glad you picked up on the corporate nature of this. There’s very much a corporate incentive strategy for what’s happening there. So if Small Q were to be successful and scam money from someone, that’s a big win. Sometimes there’s fireworks for the massive scores. There can be treats offered like a karaoke room staffed with attractive women and liquor and cigarettes. It’s the carrot and the stick approach.
What happens if these people don’t meet their quotas? What’s the stick?
It’s horrifying. Small Q is not the only person I’m in touch with.
I’m in touch with another Ugandan that I’ll refer to as Sam. If he doesn’t make his quota, he is not allowed to have food. He’s beaten with an electric baton. There are sexual consequences for women. There is something called the dark room, where there is a metal bar that’s attached to the wall, where you are handcuffed to the wall and beaten, and then you are placed in a room where you are hung by your arms for three days. We’re talking about war crime-level torture that is happening to people.
And all that because you didn’t scam enough because you didn’t hit the quota?
Yes.
How do you get out of one of these scam jobs? It sounds like you can’t just quit.
You really don’t get out. That’s how they’ve managed to accumulate hundreds of thousands of people inside these walls. They’re told they can pay a ransom, and the ransom could be anything from $3,000 to $10,000 to $20,000. If they are able to get that money, there are ways that their escape can be brokered.
Ultimately, Small Q was able to get home by stealing a phone from one of the bosses. He was able to contact Madam Betty Bigombe, who is the high commissioner for Uganda. She was able to help him and 23 others get home. But the mental toll is massive.
