The Slave Armies Powering a New Kind of Golden Triangle Cybercrime
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On January 28th this year, a Bangkok local government official is checking the Facebook page of a volunteer group he's set up to help folks struggling financially during the pandemic. Among the messages, there's a disturbing video from an 18-year-old Thai girl, her eyes swollen from crying. I'm in a building opposite the karaoke bar, says the girl. She traveled from Bangkok to the Thai-Cambodia border, she adds, where she's been promised a job in the seedy Cambodian casino town of Phu Yipet.

but everything has gone tragically wrong. Once across the border, she's been told her new role will actually be to scam strangers online. And if she wants to leave, her father will have to pay 40,000 baht, over a thousand US dollars. "I know everything, and I'm afraid that he'll kill me," she says, referencing the boss who has tricked her into this criminal world. "I don't know what it will do to the others after this, and I don't know if I can contact you again."

I've heard that at least 20 or 30 people have died. The official Ekapop Luang Prasat is bemused at first. Perhaps this video is a scam, he wonders.

but the thai team sends location details and photos from our cambodian compound and in the coming months dozens more trafficking victims share their own stories sent into slavery casino towns all over southeast asia cambodia lao myanmar each one has a tale of misery orchestrated by chinese gangsters

Hot spots like Phu Yen Pet and Sihanoukville in Cambodia and the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in Laos, the home of notorious casino the King's Romans, are the worst hit, as the pandemic's halting of tourism forces local crooks to branch into even more violent crimes.

These special economic zones, or SEZs, are tax havens, legal no-man's lands, criminal black holes patrolled by private security instead of cops, where kingpins and gambling millionaires hold sway rather than politicians or local laws. That means that whoever gangsters trick across the border belong to them.

They're slaves for scams. Beaten, electrocuted, starved and sold into even worse indentured servitude if they refuse to play ball. Some are shipped onto the casino floor. Others are forced into sex work. Ekapop, through his Facebook group, has heard almost every version of this sad story. Tycop struggled to work on foreign soil, so he's become this trafficking market's unofficial saviour.

By July this year, he'd rescued almost 140 people from it, being ultra careful not to tip off mafia leaders or the SEZ's many guards and goons. The slaves have come from all over, some from Sihanoukville and Poipet, others from Lao capital Vientiane, and even Mong La, a Myanmar Manhattan whose mould high-rises were built by a former Chinese soldier, and whose reputation for drugs and wildlife trafficking has endured for decades.

Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

Hi guys and welcome to another edition of the podcast where we teach you all the life hacks you'll need to sneak into a Chinese mafia-run casino. I'm your host Sean Williams in Berlin. I'm a freelance writer, reporter, podcaster and future consultant in German bureaucracy and I'm joined today by Nathan Southern, a security specialist investigating conflict, trafficking, drugs, war, terror and Lindsay Kennedy, a journalist, photographer, videographer focused on security and human rights.

Nathan, Lizzie, pleasure to have you both here. Thanks, man. I'll try and speak as digestible and slow in my Glaswegian accent as possible. It's a beautiful bro. Thanks for having us. So, you can...

You guys are both in Glasgow, Scotland after a long journey from Southeast Asia. And I just want to make clear that the story I just led this show with is not my own. It's taken from a recent feature you both wrote yourselves for The Diplomat about this giant, crazy network of so-called slaves for scams. And SEZ, some of which we've gotten into with our episode on the Billion Dollar Meth Lab,

It's a fascinating and tragic topic. I'd say I'm a pretty tragic character. So guys, welcome to the show. And you can be the fascinating two thirds of this triple act for the next three quarters of an hour or so. Fantastic. Yeah, well, I think I can live up to that, Billy. I hope you guys can. Now, before we get into anything, the usual plug for our Patreon, which I think as we're recording this, Dale is putting up a bonus episode from Danny about Mexican cartels.

There's one of mine about crime and the porn industry. I'm going to do a mini show about that fake cricket scam league thing in India. It's all good stuff. And we're going to take a short break after this episode for the summer holidays and for some other behind-the-scenes reasons we'll be able to discuss soon. But firstly, I'm keen to hear how you guys both got wind of this whole illicit market, how you got in touch with this guy, Ekapop Luang Prasert. I hope I'm saying his name right. Thai names are quite...

quite difficult to get right. He's the Thai official helping people escape. And what you saw in the Golden Triangle, which is a place close to my own heart, of course, so...

Yeah, tell us about that because a trip out there is never ever a dull thing. Yeah, so this all started for us in Cambodia back in 2021. And weirdly enough, Cambodia hadn't really been hit by COVID until February. And they had an incident called the February 20th incident, which we started looking into for a piece in Al Jazeera about how COVID started spreading through the country.

And it essentially came from high class Chinese prostitutes being flown in on a private jet from Dubai and then couldn't spend the two weeks in quarantine and instead tested positive on arrival and then were snuck out of the hotels to go and service VIP Cambodian and Chinese officials in the capital. And from there, that's what spread COVID.

So we started looking at this and then started seeing these other hotspots starting to be triggered around the country. And they all seemed to come back to these dodgy little casino towns, usually on the border of Thailand or Vietnam or maybe in Cenoville. We realized that just so much was coming back to these casinos.

And then it just started becoming obvious that it was about human trafficking. No one was in the casinos at the time. Cambodians aren't actually allowed to use the casinos themselves. It's only foreigners that can, and no one could come into the country.

So we started realizing there was human trafficking, there was human smuggling, there was just a whole load of bad stuff happening in these dodgy areas. So we started to look at this. And then the first wind we got of these scam centers was something called the China Project. It became known as in Sihanoukville, this big port city in Cambodia, which is famous for new Chinese developments and the triads, basically.

And in this area, there is a compound that's maybe about a dozen or so buildings, maybe about nine or ten levels high. And it was revealed that it was just full of at least hundreds of slaves.

people who were being forced to stay inside the compound and do online scams. But we didn't know much more than that at the time. So we went out and seen the place and thought, well, once this story's broke, surely that's going to be the end of it. Surely when you've got hundreds of people in a huge compound. And this is an area as well, this isn't like some sketchy, tiny border town. This is Sinutville where if you've been a backpacker in Cambodia, you will have went through Sinutville to get a boat to one of the islands, right? And we go up

and it's just covered in barbed wire. The only people allowed to come in and out are clear Chinese gangsters, just dudes in G-wagons, black T-shirts, covering the dragon tattoos. We're trying to get access. They're getting pretty aggressive. We realise that right next door is a police station.

So this whole thing has been operating right next door to the local officials. Then it just started popping up everywhere. Like everything that we were looking at around organized crime security, casinos kept coming up and we heard more and more accounts of these slave compounds. We were actually in Laos looking at a completely different issue. We were looking at wildlife trafficking.

And we were speaking to this dude who helps rescue bears from traffickers, which was nice and kind of sweet. And then he showed us these two red pandas. And we're like, oh yeah, these were seized on the way here.

coming back from China. Like, that's pretty weird. You don't usually have the high value wildlife coming in, right? It's always going out to China. And like, do you think it would maybe be, you know, King's Romans Casino? Oh yeah, yeah, I think so. And he said, my friend's just back from working there. Oh yeah, what was he doing? The casino's been closed. He was like,

Yeah, I mean, he was doing some kind of call centre thing, but I don't think he was allowed to leave. And that was the second we just clicked. All right, great, great. It's spread. This is the exact same thing. It must be. Can we meet him?

And then we ended up having a beer with him. This guy was really, really messed up. He explained the situation. He'd been in there for six months. He wasn't allowed to leave. He was tortured. It was really brutal. So then we started really looking at this, asking around, and everyone seemed to know about it happening in Laos, but no one outside the country.

So then that kind of brought us to the Golden Triangle, which is, I mean, you've seen it. It's just an insane place. I mean, we were looking at other types of trafficking out there, like interviewing different human traffickers, drug traffickers, and they just don't care. They're not concerned at all about getting stopped by the cops.

There was one drug trafficker who's a police informant as well because he obviously got caught and had to make a deal. And we meet him at the Myanmar border. He says, all right, let's do the interview. Let's do the Golden Triangle, the main tourist part of the Golden Triangle. And we're like, yeah, is that the most subtle bit, is it, buddy? Like right by where you take the photos of the sign that says welcome to the Golden Triangle? And he's like, yeah, let's do that. And he gets to the back of the pickup. He's got COVID, so he's not allowed in the pickup.

So he's wearing his balaclava the whole time. They floor at about 120 miles an hour. Me and Lindsay are tailing behind and I'm like, I'm trying to keep up. And I'm like, man, do I really want to die for this? But also like low profile, dude, you're driving through checkpoints. You're just not stopping. No wonder you got caught, right? Yeah.

And then everywhere in the Golden Triangle, you're looking over at King's Romans and then everyone we're speaking to realising this is known for drug trafficking, human trafficking, but the more people we speak to realise the bigger and bigger an issue was that Thai people were then being enticed into these scam centres in Laos and King's Romans and not allowed to leave.

and don't trust the authorities, can't get in touch with anyone to help them because these SCZs are essentially lawless, they're controlled by one gangster. And then that's when we started speaking to the people who were involved in the rescues, and that's where Ekapop came in. So we met him in Bangkok, and he started telling us how he was the only, one of the very few people who was actually able to help people get out of these horrific scam centers.

Yeah. First of all, bonus points for mentioning Dubai. I really didn't think Dubai was going to come up, but it invariably does somehow. Yeah, I've seen kind of how the police and the authorities there do absolutely nothing. I think I was speaking to a

meth smuggler, meth smuggler husband and wife. And there was, there was a, I think one of the friendship bridges that goes across the Mekong round there between two, two countries. And they, they just sort of hopped for a little hole in the fence before they got to the, uh, border control. And they just walk casually up. They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, don't worry. We never even go up to the border control now. We just walk around them. Um, but yeah,

Lindsay, I mean, what does this industry actually look like? What's the hierarchy? Who are the kingpins running this stuff? And are they...

are they working hand in glove with the authorities then yeah so the thing is so these secs are supposed to just be essentially business parks that's the point of them they're supposed to be sort of one-stop shops for tax um so dealing with all of your sort of import and export tax and that kind of thing so they're supposed to be really above board and some of them are in some parts of the world um but the these these secs were in cambodia and in laos and myanmar

What they essentially have become is areas where the police don't think they can come in because they're run by individual Chinese interests, a lot of whom are like known gangsters, have served a lot of time in China. Some of them have then come to places like Cambodia and managed to get citizenship as well and become sort of very influential in politics.

But sometimes these SEDs contain casinos themselves. Sometimes casinos and SEDs are just very close together. But either way, the issue is that...

there is this sort of mistaken assumption by local authorities that they can't send their own people in. So in the Golden Triangle, S.E.Z., which is the most notorious one, that's run by a guy called Zhao Wei, who is a very, very notorious casino owner and gangster who sort of started off in Macau and then was involved in casinos in Mong La, which is like one of the scariest bits of Myanmar, and was there until a lot of that got shut down in sort of about 2006, I think.

And then he moved over to Laos and set up his own SCZ and put a casino in that. And the local police say, we're not allowed in without his permission. So if they get a call saying there's been a murder even inside the Golden Triangle SCZ, they have to find someone powerful enough to negotiate with Zhao Wei to be able to go inside the SCZ and they have to leave their guns at the door.

So that's like... But the same names come up again and again. So you've got... Sal White is in charge of the Golden Triangle SEZ. You've got a guy called Broken Tooth, Wang Kwok Koi. He's called Broken Tooth because he lost a lot of teeth in a fight once when he was... When he was a teenager, I think. Teens, I think. And he...

This guy went to prison in Macau in the 90s for running illegal gambling stuff. But by the time he came back out of prison, Macau had transferred back over to China from Portugal. So he sort of did very well at positioning himself as this great patriot and then going and setting up overseas businesses all over Southeast Asia. Sort of halfway between saying...

they're like, you know, casino businesses and they're all, and it's all just purely about money and halfway between sort of making out that he's there sort of as a unofficial business ambassador of China sort of furthering Chinese interests abroad. So,

So you've got this guy and then there's a guy called like Sui Min and another guy called Sui Jong Chan. These guys also both did a lot of time in prison in China for illegal gambling rings, but then were able to move to Cambodia and get gambling licenses, get paid for citizenship in Cambodia, which you can do by basically just making a hundred grand donation to the government. And yeah, no, it's pretty, it's nice.

And so yeah, so they've all managed to get citizenship in Cambodia and managed to get themselves photographed with like senior politicians, often with like even like the deputy prime minister. One of them, Su Jung Jang, is also a close business associate of a guy called Chai Piep, who we've been looking into for years because he's a massive illegal logging magnate. So he's in with him as well. And he's also in with Han To, who's the nephew of the prime minister. So there

all really really they've all got really deep roots basically in all the kind of like in sort of in with political figures in with like the authorities and in with like senior business um sort of business people in cambodia and laos as well so they just they basically just become untouchable yeah so what is this this this kind of phenomenon of the gangster patriot then what what

What is that? Who are these guys? Like, how does it keep all of this stuff running? The way that Broken Tooth's gone about it, and a lot of others following suit, is he does this thing where he sets up things called Hongmen Associations. And the Hongmen is... Hongmen, yeah. It's kind of like...

The Hongmen, yeah. Or sometimes it's spelled Hungmen, which I find quite funny. So he sets them up all over the place, from Cambodia to Palau, which is a tiny little island in the Pacific, to Uganda, all over the place. And the idea is supposed to be that these are furthering Chinese culture or celebrating Chinese culture and business interests. But they actually go back for hundreds and hundreds of years. So there used to be this kind of like,

what you call like a mutual aid association where like different Chinese business people would like help each other out in a different country. But they're also heavily linked into the 14K triads, which Broken Tooth was quite senior in back in the 90s.

So it's kind of hard to unpick to what extent they are just mutual aid associations, kind of like little mini chambers of commerce. And to what extent they are chapters of the mafia, basically. So they set them up all over the place. And then there becomes this kind of weird confusion, like I said, about whether or not these are, to what extent they are linked to the government or to what extent they're doing work for the Chinese government by furthering their interests.

But they also have this really mental history, Hongmen Associations, of being kind of secret societies that have their own things like, they'll have their own coins, they'll develop their own currencies. So there's been this like natural progression into selling cryptocurrencies and developing new crypto coins around the world, which like, it's really bonkers basically. Like it's kind of like, it's this natural extension of this like, of these secret golden coins they used to share like hundreds of years ago. So,

So they managed to, it's completely bonkers. So like then they'll end up being able to get, kind of get loads of investment, get loads of interest in new cryptocurrencies because it kind of feeds into this like ancient cultural thing. And one of the most mental ones of this is, so Broken Tooth's deputy in the World Heng Hong Men Association in Malaysia is a guy called Nicky Liu.

So yeah, he was heavily involved with another guy, a fraudster called Zhang Jian. And this guy ran the biggest Ponzi scheme in Chinese history. And it was mostly about various different coins that he was launching. He used to call himself the world's future richest man.

which I thought was a brilliant expression. And so he ran a bunch of Ponzi schemes, but most of them around this thing called a crypto scam called Wussingcoin. And he used to do all kinds of crazy stunts. He organized a thing where a hundred nuns up in the mountains in China all shaved their heads and announced that they were committed to his cryptocurrency slash cult slash religion and wrote the name of the currency across their heads.

and got themselves photographed doing that, which is mental. And then he went to Malaysia and he managed, in Penang, he put on this dinner. It was meant to be this really exclusive event where you had to pay $200 to come to get a glimpse of him. But you could only come, the only people allowed to come were men with blonde hair.

So all of his followers in Malaysia dyed their hair yellow or gold, pays over $200 and then rock up to come to his event. And it turns out he's not even there, he's hanging out in the Maldives. But his protégé, sorry, I know this is a massive tangent, his protégé is this guy called Nicky Lau who was the deputy at the World Hongmen Society. So then he took a lot of his ideas about scamming people through cryptocurrencies and

and started recreating them in places like Malaysia. And then it was kind of like this natural progression from crypto scams to massive online scams involving fake crypto investments that then started starting themselves with basically with masses and masses of slaves who were tricked into coming and working for them. So that's been this weird gradual progression of the industry over the last 10 years or so. Fucking hell, I think that's the best answer to any question I've ever asked in my whole career. So we've got

Hung men hanging out around the world. We've got a guy that runs a giant Ponzi scheme, including shaving the heads of nuns and writing the name of his coin on their heads. And then another guy, no, the same guy who sets up a party for blonde haired men, famously in abundance in Malaysia and then buggers off to the Maldives.

And this kind of altcoin crypto Ponzi scheme, that's the sort of stuff that people are getting roped into in these border towns, right? Yeah, exactly. These are the basis of the scams. They're all different types of online investment scam. A lot of them involve crypto. But they've kind of come off the back of...

semi-legitimate attempts to launch real cryptocurrencies by these gangsters who kind of try and merge the idea of cryptocurrencies into a sort of kind of extension of being a good Chinese patriot when they're actually just trying to set up new gangster initiatives. The whole thing is completely mental, to be honest with you. It's incredible. Okay, so how...

How, I mean, I guess, I mean, obviously you went on this crazy trip into the region and you've seen a lot of stuff. You mentioned to me before we came on that you'd been, you actually went out in May, right? And you went to the Kings, well, you went to the Kings Romans Casino, unbelievably weird, bonkers place. Tell us a little bit more about that because I assume it didn't all go to plan and wasn't just your average trip down the local road.

gambling den as I often do. What the fuck am I talking about? Yeah, so it took us two attempts to get into King's Row. So the first time we went there was in Laos in May, just after Laos had reopened its borders. And the place was like broken, man. They'd been completely closed for two years and

I mean, this is why a lot of people are getting brought into these scams as well. People are so desperate for cash. They've completely run out of fuel. When we crossed over the border into Laos, there were no taxis, no buses, nothing. And we thought, all right, well, I mean, it's like a 10-mile walk to the next town. And the only person offering to take us was a local border official who said he would take us for 100 bucks. He'd just change out of his military uniform and we'd have to sit in the back of his truck.

And it was just like, the place was just kind of broken. And then when we found out that this was happening in King's Romans, these scam things, we're like, all right, we need to go over there. We need to go over there anyway because it's King's Romans, it's meant a way to see it. It's mostly known for the wildlife trafficking and the meth trades. We want to see it anyway. And then we found out this was happening. We knew we needed to get there. So there was no buses. There was kind of no way to get over to that.

that part of the country, most people go in from Thailand and get a boat over. So we got a truck and we drove over to Bocaio province, where it is in Laos. The truck actually broke down about 2 a.m. at the checkpoint into Bocaio. And we're trying to keep like a low profile, just acting like, you know, tourists. I got my backwards cap on like, hey, man, just here to see the casino. And then we break down and we spend the night with the Bocaio people.

cops. We've just got to watch them, though, and see that every single Chinese freight truck that comes through, not one of them was checked for anything, but every single LAL truck that came through, there was like a wee handover of cigarettes or sometimes energy drinks. That seems to be the new bribe for these guys. And we eventually get to...

near the SCZ and on the way there are checkpoints all through Lille but on the way to King's Romans they really really pick up and they stop you and they open up the door and they're like super excited the cops and they're like Ni Hao I look at you surprised because I'm not a Chinese dude and they're really surprised and they go oh are you here to work? no just here to visit and then they look really confused and then we go on

And we go up to the gate of King's Romans and the place is just like this city. It's like a small city completely covered in barbed wire with a shit ton of security all surrounding it. And the main gate is similar to the old scam place in Cambodia. It's just almost exclusively Mercedes G-wagons with Chinese dudes with tattoos just driving through, flashing a badge, not getting stopped. And the only cars getting checked are the ones coming out.

And they just check the trunks of those cars. We realize, all right, so you're looking for people who have maybe escaped. And we go up to the desk and we say, hey, we're just here to go to the casino. We just love a bit of Baccarat or whatever. And the lady almost gives us a pass but looks really, really confused. And then says, oh, no, no, I think you need to go to the other queue. Okay, so we go to the other queue and then everyone is just...

a really, really kind of poor and kind of sad-looking Lao person waiting in queues. Maybe it was 100 of them. And all of their documents and all of their money seemed to be held by these Chinese dudes with the black T-shirts and the tattoos again. And we go up, and the lady at the desk of this processing queue just asks her nationality and just says, Indonesian? I'm like, well, no. And Ukrainian? No. And she went, oh, you won't be on the list yet. And I'm like, I've not actually said her name yet.

and we're trying to work out what was going on. And she said, it's okay, it's okay. Just sit down there. Someone will come and take your blood and then we'll get you processed.

And now the thing that we heard about happening in Cambodia, which the Chinese authorities and the Cambodian authorities got really, really touchy about were these stories where people weren't making money in the scam centers. So they started taking them as blood slaves so they could sell their blood for transfusions around the world. And that started to get back to China. Yeah, man. And it started to really freak people out in China. So they shut this down really quickly, arrested people that made this claim, right? And then we look around and like, oh, they want to take our bloods.

The only people going in are really poor, well-off people with all their documents and all the money with these Chinese gangsters. And we realised, oh shit, we're in the trafficking queue. Everyone here is about to get trafficked in a case of romance. Is that what we have to do after Brexit?

I'm like, maybe we should just give it a go and see what happens. Lindsay was a bit smarter and said, no, let's not get traffic today. So we started talking to people through Google Translate and we're saying to the lady, one woman was about to go through, are you sure you...

want to go in like we've heard our friends have been told that they're not allowed to leave and she looked like not surprised but like scared and like kind of waved us away really quick and then I tried to speak to some of the what was essentially the traffickers on Google Translate it was actually quite hard with Mandarin and English but they were kind of willing to talk and then they started getting kind of aggressive and then we and then we had to leave and

And then we just kind of went around the outside and we realized we couldn't get into the compound at all and thought, all right, well, there's no way of getting in there. But on Google Maps, it's saying that the casino was busier than normal. So they're saying that the casino was closed. It's clearly not. We were just not the right Chinese gangster to get in. So we thought, all right, well, we can't get in there. We know what's happening and there's something really strange going on. And then we get to Thailand about six weeks later.

And then it's opened up a bit more and we were able to cross over from the Thai side into King's Romans. And you just get a little speedboat, you go over, people go over to gamble for the day or eat tiger or pangolin or whatever it is they do. And then we get in and just instantly you just see the slave compounds. They're the exact same way that we've seen them in Bokeo, in Phnom Penh, Sinuville, all throughout Cambodia, all throughout Laos.

And they're the exact same makeshift compounds that are built with barbed wire, all about a dozen stories high, and maybe about 10 buildings altogether. And the taxi driver is instantly like, that's the call centres. People aren't allowed to leave. Wow. And it's everywhere. And he also said that you have to have a special pass to go towards the entrance and the exit that takes you out to Laos.

Okay, so that explains why they're searching everyone that's coming out. They realize that people are escaping. It's really, really strictly controlled. The casino itself is open, but it's just sad. It's just sad. There's hardly anyone there. So it's just a few Chinese dudes that have been gambling in the casino for the last two years.

There are some young girls in schoolgirl outfits getting ready for their shift around midday. It's just a kind of bleak place. But the really weird thing is they're in the middle of building an airport.

so we're going to have an airport in the middle of this SCZ that means that we'll probably be able to get around to any form of customs checks so they can just keep trafficking in as many people, products or wildlife as they want directly into this international airport that doesn't need to go through any, uh, any border checks. So yeah, the place is weird. Um, it's more quiet. It's got a fake, uh, it's got a fake Starbucks. Um,

that also sells I've been to this place have you been? I've been to this place yeah because oh yeah that was a long long old day going to some pretty dark corners of that little town god it's a shithole it's fucking terrible man the menu though I thought the Starbucks looked really good it was just lowercase not all capitals or you wouldn't have even known and you look at the menu and they've got some you know Starbucks classics like a small handful of meat laughing

Don't you always have that with a latte in the morning when you get up for work? I love the image of you guys going up to like Chinese gangsters and just thrusting an iPhone in their face with like Google Translate asking, are you trafficking people into sex slavery or something like this?

Yeah, it's like high-tech freelance journalism. It usually works for us because we are a couple as well and we can just kind of play on that. So we were investigating the Cambodian military's involvement in illegal logging last year and that involved going into what we knew were military bases where the military were just building roads in Vietnam to smuggle timber over there, right? And they've shot people over this, but it's a super kind of scary thing. But then we'd just drive in

And the military would come up handing their guns and basically, what the fuck are you doing in this base? And Lindsay would get out in her hot pants and be like, is there a waterfall? Quick, kiss me. So in this slave to scam trade, how are people usually lured into doing what they're doing and what happens when they step foot in the SCZ? I mean, how does the whole process go from start to finish of capturing these people?

force them into slavery? So everyone we've spoken to has been approached over social media in some form or another. Some of it's people who are already inside the scam centres are told then to try and recruit more people. But often it's just ads will come up that just say there's a job in admin or online trading, but you get full training and it's really good money and you get free accommodation and all this kind of stuff.

But one of the more pernicious things we've been hearing is that social media influencers who are really popular in Thailand and Vietnam and Cambodia, especially beauty influencers, that kind of thing, are being approached and asked to talk about these great jobs that have come up inside the casino complexes. And that's how at least some of the girls, especially girls that have been ended up in forced sex work, have been brought into this as well.

And there's like kids as young as 14. We've talked to rescuers who have tried to get out kids who are as young as 14 that have been recruited over social media. And they're just basically told, as long as you can use the phone and understand the internet and you speak one of these languages, like either Chinese or Thai or Vietnamese or English or a combination of a couple of different ones, then yeah, that's all you need to do and you'll get paid really good money.

So once they're then brought into an SEZ or a casino complex, what often happens is that because they are sort of self-contained Chinese-run places, they then say you've got to do a couple of weeks quarantine as well, still now, even after most quarantines have been lifted. And then they'll have to pay things like we were saying we saw on the gate. They'll have other extra costs all the way. Their trafficker will have paid for their travel and everything and just say, you know, pay us back out of your first paycheck.

And then they'll arrive, they'll have to pay admin fees, they'll have to pay to have blood tests or blood taken and COVID tests and all these things. And what they don't know is all of this is being added up and added up and added up. So by the time they come out of the quarantine period, they're told, oh, that job we told you you had, that doesn't exist anymore. So you're going to have to work on this online scam

And a lot of people, most people at that point say, I'm not working on an online scam, I want to go home. And they say, well, the thing is that you now owe us $10,000 because we've paid for X, Y, Z. So it's your standard debt bondage situation, basically. And then what we were told by the guy that we interviewed in Laos, who'd been in there for six months, is that every month that you don't, you're then forced to sign a six-month minimum contract. But they tell you you can leave after six months.

But on your first month, they'll say, "Oh, well, you didn't meet all your targets for scamming people this month. So we're going to subtract your room and board from what you get paid." And then the next month, you take even more money out of that because you still haven't made your targets. And it goes down and down and down until you start owing them even more money. So your debt is growing every month.

And then it gets to five and a half months and they say, yeah, you're not profitable. We're going to sell you to another company. And at that point, your six-month contract starts all over again. So there are people who are just trapped in there for years on end because they get sold every couple of months. And every single time their contract resets. But because there's a kind of semblance of some kind of legality, because there are contracts flying around and there seem to be people are getting paid something, it really confuses the police and authorities as well. So it makes it even harder to deal with.

But yeah, once inside these places, they're often locked inside dorms where they're not allowed to leave the dorm buildings at all. For the six months, they do everything, they eat in there and everything. And they are tortured or threatened or beaten if they try to leave. People have told us that if they don't hit their targets or they try and take a photo or other small sort of infractions, they end up being put in solitary confinement, have food withheld. People are jumping out of windows to sleep.

really awful stuff. So basically it's just a combination of violence and threats and say, told you we're going to be sold, keeping people there. But then there's also, we don't know to what extent this is really happening and to what extent some of this stuff is just rumors to scare people. But there's all these rumors flying around about things like organ harvesting, about blood slavery, about one guy we spoke to, he'd been convinced that they had this kind of human blender to get rid of human remains of people they'd killed.

And the thing is that the more absurd these things sound, the less these people are believed when they eventually get out by the police. So whether or not they're true is just another kind of mechanism of control, really. It all becomes a win-win situation for the traffickers and the scam...

because if the people they've held against their will do well, they make a ton of money out of them. And if they don't do well, they can just sell them on and make money out of them or ransom them to their families. So most families end up having to pay between sort of $2,000 and $15,000 to get their kids back. So yeah, however they make their money out of them, it works out for the scam companies, basically. It's quite dark. Yeah. Yeah. And so...

I guess we went into it a bit before, but how does this scam actually work? How are they actually getting money from people? How are they making all of this cash? The scams usually follow the same formula, basically, where you'll be in these compounds, and there's dozens and dozens of these compounds in dozens of cities across Southeast Asia now. And what will happen is within each compound, there's maybe like 10 dorm rooms on each floor. And each dorm room will be running a different type of scam. But usually...

follow a similar formula where you'll sit down and they'll go into like a romance scam situation where you'll pretend to be a

pretty Singaporean lady, basically. And you will use Facebook, you'll use WeChat, you'll use Tinder, basically any social media, and you'll be given, they basically have data on potential marks that you can target online. And I guess these are probably pretty lonely middle-aged dudes that may be susceptible to a pretty lady speaking to them on the internet and may have a little bit of cash in their pocket. And

And then you've got these, say it's a guy from Laos, he'll be sitting there and his job will be to entice seven men a day into the next stage. And what the plan is with each of these people is start building a relationship and if they want to have pictures or phone conversations, there is a pretty lady in the room that they can hand over the phone for. So they're all kind of working together to make it quite seamless.

The plan is to try to get them to invest in some kind of usually crypto scheme or some other type of investment. Sometimes it's gold, which is really big in that part of the world. And they're targeting people from everywhere. It depends on what language you speak. So it could be targeting Thai people, it could be targeting Chinese, it could be targeting Americans, Indians, anyone, right? So if you're getting targeted online, there's a good chance that the people doing it are actually victims of slavery themselves trying to push through this formula.

And they'll say, hey, listen, I've got this great idea for making a bit of money. And what they'll often do is they'll replicate an actual crypto website and they'll make it look exactly the same. And they'll send the link to it first and be like, oh yeah, this looks good. And they'll send over the link of the replica and then people will put money in.

It's like as old as time, right? So they'll put a bit of money in and then they'll get that money back. So maybe a small return like 20% if you put in like three or four grand. And the guy's like, all right, well, I'm not being scammed, right? And then maybe even they start talking about marriage and it gets deeper. And they may put a bit more money in and again might get it back. And then they go for the big one. And then you have people putting in their entire life savings. And then all that happens is, boom, the website's gone, conversation ceases, that profile shut down, and you don't hear from them again.

And there's just no way to trace it. There's no way to know where your money's actually went because they're actually quite sophisticated in how the cyber aspect of it works. And they've got seven of them going a day. And then they'll get another seven the next day. So the amount of money these places are making is just enormous, which is why we know that this continues and known sites and compounds continue

busy cities because the money's going to senior government, it's going to senior military people because there's just so much cash flying around that it's really, really there's not much incentive to stop poor people getting trafficked. Yeah, you really need to join the journalism trade to like immunise yourself from this kind of scam, right? Because there's nothing coming out the other way if you do get scammed by a fake Singaporean 22-year-old on the other end of the line. But

so the casinos have kind of branched into this they're being run by the mafias that have traditionally been making their money from the wildlife and the drug trade and the casino floor no one appears to be stopping them I mean you mentioned Eka Pop and his Facebook group and rescuing up to 140 people at last count from these scams like

Who is actually... Is there anyone else helping with this effort? Is police or governments trying to get involved? Or are these SCZs just completely off the map and sort of, yeah, unenforceable? I think actually it's really complicated because there are actually a lot of...

There are actually a lot of people who are really upset about this. There are lots of individual police and soldiers, especially in Thailand, actually, because there aren't really any of these SCZ scams that we know of within Thailand itself. But there's a lot of Thai victims in Laos and Myanmar and Cambodia. And there have actually been rescue missions, I say sort of like rescue missions, but like

In order to be rescued normally, you would have had to pay some form of ransom first, and then the police go in and make a big deal out of how they're rescuing people, but they've actually just negotiated a ransom. But there have been rescue missions where the Thai police and Thai military have persuaded the Cambodians to let them come over and try and get their own people out of a known compound.

And then they've actually stood at the door for eight hours and the people running the compound are like, well, no, you're not coming in. And they have to negotiate a certain amount of money at the gate to go and get anybody out of there. And the Cambodian police are just standing there like, I'm sorry, we don't know what to do. And it's just completely insane how little power they have. So there are definitely people who are complicit. There have been a whole bunch of awful cases where...

people have taken information to the police or pet and terrified parents have tried to contact like the, like, um, the cynicville authorities. And then that, that information has clearly been passed on to the scam companies and then their child disappears again. Um, so there are definitely people who are corrupted within the system. Um,

But it mostly just seems to be a general terror of going into SEZs or casinos and upsetting the business interests of people who are much more powerful than you. And I think that there are...

It's not just Echo Pop. There are other vigilante and volunteer rescue people. There's a woman called Tanrak up in the Golden Triangle that we spoke to who spent the best part of a year trying to get kids aged 14 to 18 out of King's Romans. But

The actual authorities really just can't do anything without the help and complicity of their colleagues in the countries where the SECs are based. And they're not willing to go against powerful people in their own country. You mentioned there's a certain degree of victim blaming as well, right? People who have been...

counter sort of attack by the police for bringing up cases? Yeah, it's awful. So the worst one of these was in Synecville. There was a guy called Chen Baorong who is a bit of a hero. He runs a thing called the China Cambodia Charity Team in Synecville, which was one of the only groups really trying to negotiate the release of Chinese people who were trapped inside some of these places.

And he sort of started off being treated as a bit of a hero by local police and authorities. And I think he became potentially a bit of an irritant because he was helping get people out of some compounds that maybe were a little bit uncomfortably close to political figures. So he helped get this one guy out who said that he had been used as a blood slave. So basically, yeah, just used to harvest his blood for sale.

This guy was checked by a doctor in Synecville who said that his story checked out. And then the story kind of went mental and it got back to China and it caused this massive uproar, I guess, in China. And then the Synecville authorities became very, very keen on shutting it down and saying it was made up.

So the guy who was apparently, or says he was a blood slave, was put in prison. But Chen Baorong, the guy who ran the volunteer group, he is now still in prison too, awaiting trial for spreading fake news because he repeated what this guy had told him.

um to like to the press um so it's now become really really frightening for some people um to be seen to be helping anyone get out of these places um and it's very frightening for people uh who escape who have been told that they are lying um about very specific details and then threatened with legal action as well um so yeah it can be a very dangerous thing to help people either who are inside still or once they're out i i think

As well, it's important to realise just how powerful these organised crime groups are in Southeast Asia. And there's a lot of discussion about the cartels in Latin America and how huge they are and the power they have. But there's more money being made in, say, the drug trade and within organised crime in Southeast Asia. But it's not nearly as violent. And that's because they have such a monopoly over it all because they're

they are often not just bribing the government. The government of Cambodia specifically, but also Laos and Myanmar is a whole other story. They are actually actively involved in this. There are high-level officials who facilitate the trade of drugs, of weapons, of people, of timber for the entire region. And it's often...

these Chinese organized crime groups are able to basically do whatever they want as long as, and this goes back to the Hongmen patriotic societies, as long as China's kind of happy with them. So it works out as this like Belt and Road initiative like for the mafia, basically, where you have organized crime groups that do whatever they want, but as long as they support ideas like

Taiwan and Hong Kong are part of China and they'll support Chinese business growing, then Xi Jinping's government kind of lets them do what they need to do. And that's the case of organised crime all around the world of China. If they're kind of pro-CPP, then it's OK.

then they can continue to operate. So when the blood slave thing came out, that became embarrassing for China. So then they had to do a few raids and shut it down a little bit because they don't want it coming back domestically. As long as these things stay out of China, same with drugs and weapons, then it's okay for them. And then these Chinese mafias can just grow and just completely take over, uh,

the countries like Cambodia that just have absolutely no alternative but to take the cash and allow the kind of illicit trade to go through the country. Yeah, I think that's something that we've looked at with the fentanyl trade as well, that the CCP is...

at the most charitable stretch, negligent to the extreme about the industry and 99.9% actively sort of promoting it in certain parts of the world. So you guys just come back. I mean, you're going to be working on any more stories through this? Sounds like, I mean, some of the sort of offshoots of this are absolutely insane. I mean, this is,

with the bald, no, with the shaved headed nuns. I mean, that is insane. So what were you kind of working on? What's coming up for you guys? Well, so we've got, you know, we've got a few big investigations we've been looking into, like more on the illegal logging and the wildlife trade. They're coming out for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. We're looking into hopefully doing a really big detailed investigation into this. And,

and really linking up who the people are involved in. But it's been a weird thing pitching it, man. Like, trying to pitch it as a story, all the kind of journals that have been covering this in places like Cambodia, especially the local journalists who are getting arrested for it as well, people like Meg Dara in Cambodia, are taking tremendous risks. But we've all been, like, pitching this to international outlets, and so few have shown any interest. And fundamentally what this is, it's, like,

tens of thousands of people are in massive modern slavery compounds in the middle of busy cities and we all know where it is and these big publications are like what's the angle? What's the specific thing? I think it probably just sounds so unbelievable.

But it's really hard to try and create this digestible content that people will read in the newspaper and go, oh yeah, okay, I understand. So you need a few pieces to be written about at first, and then editors start to get interested in it. But it's been a headache trying to get this story out here, so that's a big part of why we're happy to be on here today, man, and just kind of spread the word a little bit about this. I mean, this affects everyone. Anyone who's getting scammed could be a slave.

Yeah. Look, editors, get your fingers out of your asses, all right, and do commission this story because it's insane. Yeah, it's on such a huge scale. I mean, presumably so many different towns and casinos and places around the region, these giant complexes, there must be thousands of people who are

Yeah. Yeah. We, some of them, we're pretty sure it must be like tens of thousands just in, just in the golden triangle. That's easy. Um, the, the, the dorms are huge and there's just, there's just stacked and stacked and stacked and stacked behind each other. And yeah, tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people trapped. Um,

The scale of it is just enormous. And it's just wrecking whole... Because it's obviously wrecking the lives of the people there. But then every single one of those people probably has a family back home getting themselves into serious debt somewhere in the countryside to pay their ransom to get them out. So the kind of ripple effect of damage this is doing throughout Southeast Asia, it's just absolutely enormous. Yeah, yeah. No, it's hugely tragic. And yeah, I guess we don't do many calls to action at the end of our episodes, but...

in this case, please commission more stories by these guys because what they're doing is amazing. Thanks so much for coming on the show, guys. That was, wow, that's a lot of information there and I think you've broken it down really, really amazingly. Hope to hear from you soon and best of luck with future stories from that trip because, yeah, there's a lot more to come, I would imagine. Thanks, man. Thanks a lot. It was great to meet you. Thanks so much. Cheers. Cheers.