Revealed: Leaked Chats Expose the Daily Life of a Scam Compound’s Enslaved Workforce
Just before 8 a.m. one day last April, an office manager named Amani sent a motivational message to his colleagues and subordinates. “Every day brings a new opportunity: a chance to connect, inspire and make a difference,” he wrote in his 500-word message to an office-wide WhatsApp group. “Talk to the next customer like you’re bringing them something valuable, because you are. »
Amani didn’t put together a typical sales team. He and his subordinates worked in a “pig butchering” complex, a criminal operation designed to run scams – promising romance and riches through crypto investments – that often defraud victims out of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars at a time.
The workers Amani was speaking to had been on a 15-hour night shift since eight a.m. at a high-rise building in the Golden Triangle special economic zone in northern Laos. Like their victims, most of them were also victims: forced laborers trapped in the compound, in debt bondage and without passports. They struggled to meet fraudulent revenue quotas to avoid fines that added to their debt. Anyone who breaks the rules or tries to escape faces far worse consequences: beatings, torture, or even death.
The strange reality of daily life in a Southeast Asian fraud complex — the tactics, the tone, the mixture of cruelty and optimistic corporate chatter — is revealed at an unprecedented level of resolution in leaked documents to WIRED from a whistleblower within such a sprawling fraud operation. The facility, known as the Boshang Complex, is one of dozens of fraudulent operations across Southeast Asia that have enslaved hundreds of thousands of people. Often lured from poorer parts of Asia and Africa with fake job offers, these conscripts have become the driving forces behind the world’s most lucrative form of cybercrime, forced to steal tens of billions of dollars.
Last June, one of these forced laborers, an Indian man named Mohammad Muzahir, contacted WIRED while he was still a captive inside the fraud complex that had trapped him. Over the following weeks, Muzahir, who initially identified himself only as “Red Bull,” shared a wealth of information about the fraudulent operation with WIRED. Its leaks included internal documents, fraudulent scripts, training guides, operational flowcharts, and photographs and videos from inside the complex.
Of all Muzahir’s leaks, the most revealing is a collection of screen recordings in which he sifted through three months of internal WhatsApp group chats at the resort. These videos, which WIRED converted into 4,200 pages of screenshots, capture hour-by-hour conversations between workers at the complex and their bosses, as well as the nightmarish work culture of a hog butchering organization.
“It’s a slave colony trying to pass itself off as a business,” says Erin West, a former prosecutor in Santa Clara County, Calif., who runs an anti-scam organization called Operation Shamrock and who reviewed the chat logs obtained by WIRED. Another researcher who examined the leaked chat logs, Jacob Sims of Harvard University’s Asia Center, also noted their “Orwellian veneer of legitimacy.”
“It’s terrifying, because it’s manipulation And coercion,” says Sims, who studies scam compounds in Southeast Asia. “The combination of those two things motivates people the most. And this is one of the main reasons why these compounds are so profitable.
In another chat message, sent hours after Amani’s saccharine pep talk, a higher-level boss chimed in: “Don’t resist company rules and regulations,” he wrote. “Otherwise you can’t survive here.” Staff members responded with 26 emoji reactions, all thumbs-up and greetings.
Fined for slavery
In total, according to According to WIRED’s analysis of the group chat, more than 30 employees at the resort managed to defraud at least one victim during the 11 weeks of available recording, totaling approximately $2.2 million in stolen funds. Yet bosses in the chat often expressed disappointment with the group’s performance, berated staff for their lack of effort and issued fine after fine.
Rather than explicit imprisonment, the complex relied on a system of indentured servitude and debt to control its workers. As Muzahir described it, he received a base salary of 3,500 Chinese yuan per month (about $500), which in theory meant 75 hours per week of night work, including breaks to eat. Although his passport was taken away, he was told that if he could clear his “contract” with a payment of $5,400, it would be returned to him and he would be allowed to leave.
