I wouldn't say I'm enslaved, would be unfair.
That being said, I live in a room rented to me by the company that hires me, I work for a customer service center, so it's not a construction situation. The reason the company rents us rooms is because we're not paid enough to afford normal rent.
All this means that if there's ever a ramp down, I'd be immediately jobless and homeless, which does not feel good at all...
If you added on top being in a foreign country and needing your employer for your visa, I think you'd basically have the same situation as the article?
So that's a little precarious. I hope you have some savings built up.
A situation like you describe is ripe for abuse. H1Bs here deal with similar precariousness, though not on the level of what it sounds like you're dealing with. I hope your situation improves and you gain some security.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/feds-seize-15-bi...
> [US] Federal prosecutors have seized $15 billion from the alleged kingpin of an operation that used imprisoned laborers to trick unsuspecting people into making investments in phony funds, often after spending months faking romantic relationships with the victims.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-29/china-executes-online...
> China has executed 11 people involved in criminal gangs in Myanmar, including online scam ringleaders. Their crimes included "intentional homicide, intentional injury, unlawful detention, fraud and casino establishment"
https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/3184205/why-china-was-so-k...
> Chen's case might prove more complicated since the US had seized a large amount of his cryptocurrency assets, but he was now in custody in China.. "If China doesn't cooperate, it will be extremely difficult for the US to investigate Chen."
>seized $15 billion from the alleged kingpin
I know the answer but why amass $15 billion, more money than a person could spend in a lifetime, and still conduct this scam? You think a person would say "enough" and escape to a beach somewhere.
Because it was old Bitcoin, which was confiscated long time ago and did 100x.
I'm not sure what to call the bias but the people who have done that we don't hear about so we're only hearing about the ones that don't do that. Who knows how many ruffians and scofflaws are out there on beaches, going unknown!
Good point - it's like the opposite of survivorship bias? We only hear about the ones that don't survive and get caught. The "survivors" we don't hear about all the criminals who are still at large I guess.
A while back I thought I could make a bit of extra cash by playing along with these scams, apparently they give returns on the first/second round of investment and only run off with the money once the sum is large enough for them. Knowing that someone may get beaten or worse for losing money prevented me from going through with it
If you would be able to withdraw (you wouldn’t be able to) that money has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is from other people who were scammed.
No one is going to get beaten because of your interactions with scammers. They’re going to be beaten because they are enslaved.
The phrase playing with fire comes to mind.
The returns show are general on app/paper only not something you can actually withdraw
They sent me to my usdt wallet. So i actually got it. Of course after I earned 30 USD they make it impossible to withdraw unless I “invested” 100 usd. Very weird scam to pay out 30usd.
So means 1 in 3 people must invest 100 in order for them to breakeven, which tbh doesn’t make sense.
Also note that came from a random telegram account from dubai.
They asked if I wanted to make money etc. I obviously thought was a scam. I never expected to really cash out the 30 USD.
That makes sense to me and is what I would expect. I have seen accounts where people were in fact allowed to withdraw their small initial gains (although i can not confirm that was the case, maybe they were just trying to save face) that's what gave me the idea to scam the scammers in the first place.
They would likely allow you to withdraw some returns but not the principle.
Trying to scam the scammers is one of the world's oldest ways of getting scammed.
A related paper interviewing victims of the pig-butchering scams.
“Hello, is this Anna?": Unpacking the Lifecycle of Pig-Butchering Scams [1]
Does Laos not have a functioning justice and enforcement system that the individuals trapped here could not just call them?
The catch-22 is that these people are nearly always immigrants, and the criminals have taken their documentation, so the best case scenario is they get rescued and then deported, possibly via a spell in immigration detention. The worst case scenario is the cops turn up, laugh, collect the day's bribe money and then the person who called the cops gets beaten.
(this is an important dynamic in sex trafficking as well)
From TFA:
>The relative leniency of Muzahir’s compound, says Harvard’s Sims, likely stems from scam operations’ sense of total control in Laos’ Golden Triangle region—a zone of the country controlled largely by Chinese business interests that has become a host to crimes ranging from narcotics and organ sales to illegal wildlife trafficking. Even human trafficking victims who escape from a compound there, Sims points out, can be tracked down relatively easily thanks to Chinese organized crime’s influence over local law enforcement. “These guys don’t have to be held in a cell,” Sims says. “The whole place is a closed circuit.”
The government is somewhat complicit - there are even reports that the police take escapees back to their captives for a bribe
this is far bigger a problem and requires interventions from China and India. what good is it to just punish the people who ran the scam but not the country that supported it?
What you see is exactly how those systems function
Is there an archive link somewhere? All I see is a 21 minute podcast I can't listen to without a sub, and a single paragraph of copy.
Found this archive link:
https://archive.is/2026.02.02-090119/https://www.wired.com/s...
I have noticed a dramatic decline in human scam calls and a commensurate increase in ai calls.
Complementary movie on this topic: "No More Bets" from 2023
Horrifying read. I recently read a book about a girl who was pressed into prostitution, and this reads much the same. [1] Before I was convinced that slavery was mostly a thing of the past, how awful to find out this isn't true.
According to International Justice Mission [1], 50 million people are trapped in human trafficking.
and most of them are in muslim countries.
Source for this? This just reads as blatant xenophobia...
Looked this up out of curiosity and came across a non-profit which produces reports on the topic and seems to be the basis for the Wikipedia article on modern slavery.
According to the 2023 Global Slavery Index, 7-8 of the top 10 countries in the world with the highest prevalence of modern slavery have a majority religion of Islam (Mauritania has disputed figures about religious prevalence with Christianity and Islam at similar levels). And none of the countries in the top 10 lowest prevalence have a majority religion of Islam. Prevalence here is used to mean estimated number of people in slavery per 1000 population.
However, the absolute figures for total people affected are proportional to the size of the country, as you would expect, with North Korea and Russia topping the list.
And if you look at driving factors, the US is the leading importer of products at risk of being produced by slavery by an order of magnitude.
Why would a criminal organization that trafficked you into a place where you have no legal recourse ever stop exploiting you?
Same reason your government doesn't set taxes to 100%, has rules for themselves they at least sort of follow, and only treats people like shit when they've got a pretext. If they make it "too bad" then they'll have to piss away a whole lot more money on ensuring compliance, it'll threaten stability, etc.
Slaves are the least motivated and least productive form of workers. Slaves who know they're slaves are worse still. Shooting for maximum extraction of labor doesn't actually get you the best ROI. Don't get me wrong, they'll still treat you like shit. But they maximize their "take home" by not going too far with it.
I get that we all want to turn off our brains and hand wring because "criminals" or whatever but the dynamics of human organizations are unchanged regardless of what side of the law they're operating on.
Slavery was replaced by wage labor because it was more productive in the long run - that's part of the economists founding narrative. But I think they tend not to emphasize that it was also simply because it was a lot more flexible for a business in a competitive market to rent than to own, ceter paribus.
Quasi-slave status persisted in many situations for a long time, being a local maxima for various management situations. Penal slaves in the postwar American South were in many cases treated worse than their chattel slave parents/grandparents partially because they were rented out by their owners, who didn't pay for them, to managers who rented and didn't have any stake in their survival.
Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly, Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity spread, slaves were no longer conveniently available, and the society had to adapt.
In densely populated areas, that meant systems like serfdom. Agricultural land was a scarce resource mostly owned by the elite. Most peasants were nominally free but tied to the land, with obligations towards whoever owned the land. Peasants farmed land owned by the local lord and paid rent with labor. And if the lord sold the land, the peasants and their obligations went with it.
Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves. (Similarly, Islamic Europe had banned Muslim slaves.) As Christianity spread, slaves were no longer conveniently available, and the society had to adapt.
This requires a very bold, 115 font asterisk. Or rather it’s plain wrong. Mass slavery in Europe didn’t really end until serfdom was abolished (1800s). And let’s not even get started on the African slave trade which was managed and prospered off of from Europeans, both from direct sales and indirectly from slave labor. Also, many of those slaves converted to Christianity, so it wasn’t based on any religious affiliation.
It was abolished in western Europe. Even in eastern Europe serfdom was not the same as slavery.
The African slave trade happened between west Africa and the Americas, and Africa and west Asia. Not with Europe.
Slave owners refused to free slves who converted, and tired to prevent them being converted : https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/protestant-slavery
I’m a bit confused by your reply. Pretty sure the rulers of the Dahomey kingdom weren’t trading with people of the “Americas” but with Europeans, before and after its abolishment across Western Europe. In the book Fistful of Shells, historian Toby Green argues the scale of the trade was only made possible by European traders flooding West Africa with cheap currency (shells which had little value to them but that could be collected in the billions from Brazil and the Indo-Pacific).
My points are:
1. slavery in Western Europe had been abolished long before the transatlantic slave trade - the Europeans were intermediaries, but there was little to no slavery in their home countries. There were many court rulings in England against slavery.
2. not enslaving Christians played a role in abolishing slavery in medieval Europe
3. serfdom was a far better condition that being a slave
4. Slave owners in the Americas opposed the conversion of slaves to Christianity. they also censored the version of the Bible available to slaves very heavily.
5. The claim about mass slavery within Europe is misleading on two counts: serfs are not just chattel slaves (they had rights), and Western Europe was very different from Eastern Europe.
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/blog/bl...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain#Judicial_de...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Select_Parts_of_the_Holy_Bible...
Debt/war/penal/chattel slavery was not a particularly strong economic activity in Europe in the Middle Ages. What we're mostly talking about is agricultural serfdom.
I think the Church had a lot less to do with the end of _serfdom_ than the Black Death. The sudden population drop mandated that lords who wanted to maintain production had to steal peasants from other lords, and improve their own compensation/conditions to retain their own labor force. And so on for the rest of the economy as well.
This represented a massive transfer of power and rights downwards... for a while. The late 1300's and 1400's have some of the best conditions for the laboring class for the previous 400 years or the next 400 years. You can hear about some of the dark days to follow in England specifically in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ec9Al5ezYs
>Slavery effectively disappeared in most of Christian Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages, because the Church opposed keeping Christian slaves.
It disappeared because it was replaced by indentured servitude on the low end and restriction and tax on who could do what trades on the high end. Because the lords own a huge fraction of all the farmland. So this is very much a "you're nominally free but you're gonna be share-cropping your old master's land" situation for the former serfs. An improvement, sure. But not nearly as big of one as the history books tout.
Lucky for them that didn't last very long until the black death made labor way more valuable so a lot of the rules got eased up and once that unleashed a bunch more productivity at the margin, well there was no going back.
>Most peasants were nominally free but tied to the land, with obligations towards whoever owned the land. Peasants farmed land owned by the local lord and paid rent with labor. And if the lord sold the land, the peasants and their obligations went with i
I'm not saying they're equivalent, but there's a very good comparison to most professional licensure to be made here.
Serfdom was a huge improvement. Serfs could not be taken away from their homes and families. They could own things. They had far more rights.
These just-so narratives about how slavery was abolished for rational economic reasons can be quite frustrating. Obviously historically most people who owned slaves didn’t stop owning slaves because it was more profitable to give freedom and pay. Nor because they were competing with neighbors who had turned to cheaper wage labor. They did so because they were forced. Slavery was a topic of great political turmoil.
Is the argument that it would have come back if it were really cheaper? Or is the argument just so above the fray that the political turmoil is part of the supposed “costs” that were saved by abolition?
I’m not trying to directly engage the question whether slavery was more profitable than wage labor. It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history.
And vice versa, the people who pushed for abolition (in the US anyway) did not do it for economic reasons either. It was a deeply moral mission initiated by, basically, religious fundamentalists. Then followed on by more mainstream liberals, still for ethical reasons, and then followed on by the masses once war broke out over it.
A similar pattern in the UK, bar the war.
There was use of military force to suppress the slave trade but not actual war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa_Squadron
Contrary to what most people seem to think about the past, slavery was oft seen as naturally repulsive even thousands of years back. It required regular defense. In Aristotle's Politics [1], written some 2400+ years ago, he felt compelled to lay out just such a defense and it was, by far, his weakest argument. He clearly started at his conclusion and worked backwards from there, instead of working forward from first principles and he did in other topics. The reason it's relevant is that he did accurately predict the end of slavery:
"For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'Of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods.' If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves."
There were thousands of years of efforts to end slavery, some countries would occasionally succeed at such only to see it spring right back. Yet following the industrial revolution it began rapidly disappearing everywhere that had gone through industrialization + urbanization. The issue in your mental model is that you're only considering local effects over very immediate time frames. Think about the bigger picture.
Industrialization drove big money away from farms and into factories, away from rural scarcely populated rural areas into densely populated urban areas packed with very poor potential workers. As soon as the necessity argument for slavery became plainly absurd, to say nothing of the issue of industrialization also reducing the need for so many workers even on plantations, slavery wasn't long for this world. This says nothing about actual slave holders who, as you said, did not just go quietly into the night. But as their economic might relatively waned, so did their influence.
> It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history.
Why? The economics of oil, cotton and silver, for example, are undeniably important forces in moving the history of many regions.
>These just-so narratives about how slavery was abolished for rational economic reasons can be quite frustrating. Obviously historically most people who owned slaves didn’t stop owning slaves because it was more profitable to give freedom and pay. Nor because they were competing with neighbors who had turned to cheaper wage labor. They did so because they were forced. Slavery was a topic of great political turmoil.
These sorts of ignorant narratives about how humanity abolished slavery out of the goodness of its heart can be so frustrating.
If slavery was so much more profitable that those engaging in it were the dominant economic force in society it never would have been abolished, at the very least because so much other economic activity would have depended upon that surplus (stolen from the slaves).
This isn't so say that moral factors didn't matter, they absolutely did but if we couldn't afford abolish slavery or or if we did despite not being able to afford to or if free workers were substantially worse than slaves at the margin we'd have been out competed by some other society that didn't make that choice.
>Or is the argument just so above the fray that the political turmoil is part of the supposed “costs” that were saved by abolition?
That's certainly part of it. It takes a lot of constant violence to keep people enslaved. You can shit-can all that administrative overhead if you make people "free" (well not all of it, but a lot).
>It just always annoys me when people treat the economic forces as the ones that moved history.
It annoys me when people think we can just do what we want. We are fundamentally tied to what we can afford, in the most general sense of that word. Our freedom of action is limited.
Edit: We'd all be better off if everyone stopped thinking of slavery as a binary and instead as the fraction of a worker's surplus that is taken by threat of violence. Even if where one draws the line of "taken by violence" varies, this at least enables one to make better comparisons across centuries and locations. But that leads to some deeply uncomfortable questions for many so of course we won't do that.
> It takes a lot of constant violence to keep people enslaved
Or digital transaction cancel-sanction-kill switch tied to biometric identity of fugitive human assets.
Paper passport hostages are crude approximation.
The Quakers in New England in the 1800s were known for (1) being abolitionists and (2) whalers. They often bragged about employing freed and escaped slaves on their ships. It all sounds great when viewed through a narrow lens, but the whale boats had a system of paying the crew when they returned successfully. No whales, no pay. Yes, the Quakers would risk the cost of the ship and the supplies, but they didn't pay for the labor until the end ... and then only when the workers actually succeeded. The plantations had to capitalize the cost of the slaves upfront, a significant cost that often required large loans. Before the Civil War, places like New Orleans were big banking centers.
The late 1700s early 1800s British Army and Navy also drove a "famously hard" bargain when it came to the working situation of the former slaves they employed.
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> I was convinced that slavery was mostly a thing of the past
Unfortunately, it's the opposite. There's more people in enslaved situations now than ever before in all of human history.
Slavery is alive and well in most part of the world, especially south asia, middle east, Russia and Africa,where children with no papers are trafficked all the time for the worse things you could imagine. I'm not sure what convinced you otherwise.
children? how about adults?
After USA destabilized Libya, it turned horrible. In Libya there are open slave markets. Adults. Africans trying to who travel a great deal trying to get to Europe are often kidnapped and kept as slaves in Libya.
https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/the-scandal-of-a-sl...
I'm well aware of Libya and its open air black slave markets, don't worry, an absolute disgrace what happened in Libya, and we could talk about Syria too and how The Yasidi were enslaved by Daesh...
Also in the USA. We call it "prison labor", and over 1% of our adult population is "under correctional control."
Approximately two-thirds (about 61% to over 65%) of the 1.2 million people incarcerated in US state and federal prisons are employed in prison labor, totaling around 800,000 workers. These workers often perform maintenance tasks for, on average, 13 to 52 cents per hour, with many facing forced labor conditions https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-prison-labor/#...
I'm against for-profit prisons, but equating people who commit crimes and end up in prison and are forced to work as part of their sentence, to people who have committed no crimes is a bit ridiculous.
I understand your sentiment. Unfortunately, the history of America's legal system isn't simple. There are people in prison who never actually committed a crime, but who were convicted because they couldn't afford good legal representation during their trial. This disproportionately affects the poor, and there are correlations between poverty and minority status in America. Some people have been able to get their convictions overturned, but this typically requires very sympathetic people advocating for them.
There's also a very long history in America of laws and law enforcement being targeted against poor people and minorities. Vagrancy laws (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrancy#Post-Civil_War) and modern anti-homeless laws effectively criminalize homelessness, and the War on Drugs has had a major negative impact on poor people and minorities. Yes, in this situation those who have been imprisoned due to such laws did violate the law, but such laws, in my opinion, serve the function of kicking people while they are down rather than addressing the root causes of their poverty.
There's a good argument that having a system of convict labor creates a perverse incentive to fill that labor pipeline, similar to how well-meaning traffic laws (such as speed limits) can be abused (for example, "speed traps").
If you are open to a bit of reading I would recommend The New Jim Crow, Usual Cruelty, and Copoganda. The USA has a disproportionate amount of prisoners and armed law enforcement compared to every other comparable country - because it is a hugely profitable industry that self perpetuates itself really well- it’s similar in a way to how hard it is to get any consumer protections in USA from predatory and polluting entities.
There are also slaves you see outside your window without recognizing them as such. Homeless people are sometimes exploited by gang members who enslave them to either pimp themselves out or sell drugs.
One of the side effects of a society tolerating thousands of people living in nylon tarps with no real safety net.
drug addicts as well are manipulated by dealers into theft & other crimes to pay for their addiction, essentially a form of chemical induced slavery
The West has largely snuffed the horror of slavery in its sphere but outside of that it's the wild west. There are horrifying things to read if you go down that rabbit hole.
China executes 11 members of Myanmar scam mafia
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2gdrvy9gjo
China executes four more Myanmar mafia members
The BBC article is interesting:
With these executions Beijing is sending a message of deterrence to would-be scammers. But the business has now moved to Myanmar's border with Thailand, and to Cambodia and Laos, where China has much less influence.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked to run online scams in Myanmar and elsewhere in South East Asia, according to estimates by the UN. Among them are thousands of Chinese people, and their victims who they swindle billions of dollars from are mainly Chinese too.
Frustrated by the Myanmar military's refusal to stop the scam business, from which it was almost certainly profiting, Beijing tacitly backed an offensive by an ethnic insurgent alliance in Shan State in late 2023. The alliance captured significant territory from the military and overran Laukkaing, a key border town.
China exercising profound influence over their near abroad.
And they didn't even have to concoct a lie to justify it
They are Ethnic Chinese who were operating scam centers in collaboration with junta at northern area Laukkai.
There are more at shwe Koko area.
were they Chinese citizens?
They are usually Chinese triad gangsters who operate scam businesses and illegal casinos in south east asia.
China claims jurisdiction because 20 Chinese citizens were murdered, if that’s what you’re wondering.
I wonder what kind of stories one'd hear from scam-centers in India.
We have quite a bit of insight into Indian scam centers thanks to the work of scambaiters like Jim Browning[1] who frequently hack into their CCTV cameras and desktops.
The big difference is that the workers in India are voluntarily employed. In fact they often work for companies that do legitimate customer support as well, so they maintain the facade of doing “service” for their “clients”.
It’s also worth noting that Indian call centers focus more on tech support scams rather than romance scams.
They run the same corporate style operations. Management team, performance reviews etc all that jazz
> The more senior boss, who went by the name Da Hai
Weird. In Wired's own graphic of the org chart, this person appears, but he's labeled "SEA" instead of "DA HAI".
In the chart, it says 大海 (dàhǎi, lit. big sea) above "SEA", which means 'ocean'.
Yes, I know, but the intended audience can't read 大海.
The chart and the article are both created by Wired; it's strange for them to refer to him one way in the chart and another way in the article.
I'm curious about the ethnic makeup of the "team leader" level. One of them is called "Ted", and seems to also be called 特德 ["te de"]. The 特德 could just be because everyone in the upper levels is Chinese, but the English-language post from Ted shown in the article doesn't really suggest a native English speaker. (And does suggest an emotional loyalty to China.)
Amani doesn't sound like a Chinese name or like the English name of a Chinese person.
"Amani" is an East African name
I'm surprised anyone here expects these things not to be happening. The world outside of our (frankly small) 'western bubble' varies from pretty rough to absolutely horrific.
I'm personally not too sure what anyone does about it. People left unchecked, to some degree, are awful.
While not as bad, MLM style companies share a lot of the same techniques as described in this article. Seems like a lot of them hold people primarily by indoctrination rather than actual force
There's sadly forced labor within the 'western bubble', too. My experience from working in tech is the bubble is mostly a small set upper middle class people.
As a human it's not like you meet that many people so I think necessarily we have a very myopic view of how the world is. I mean hell, I often don't even know what people I see regularly are going through, there are people I talked to regularly that had severely abusive relationships or were going through a serious illness and it took a while for me to figure out.
> The world outside of our (frankly small) 'western bubble' varies
Even within our "western bubble" horrible like these things continue being exposed, at least once every year. Sex trafficking rings, slavery and more seems a lot more prevelant than seemingly some people like to believe here, even in our "western bubble".
One would think the whole Epstein affair that keeps growing would make people realize this, even more since there is still many individuals who are seemingly shielded for whatever reason. And that's what we know about, that they're "willing" to share, so imagine the ones who aren't as dumb and big as Epstein, they're still around and they're still in our "western bubble".
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It was reported in the very first paragraph of the article and in countless other articles the past few years: these people are kidnapped and kept as slaves. Nobody decided "yep, I want to get kidnapped during my relaxing trip to Thailand and be transported to the Laos/Myanmar border to be beaten half to death and take on call center work with the risk of being murdered should I refuse."
Because that is what is happening. People who get kidnapped and refuse to work are being murdered. This isn't call center work. Some people may be doing this voluntarily around the world, but this article is specifically about people who are being held as literal slaves with zero chance of walking out alive on their own free will. And it's worsened by the fact the governments of Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar (or what's left of their government), and Thailand are all complicit in this. It brings in big bucks, and there are reports of police even bringing people back to the compounds if they somehow escape.
I have to disagree on one point: Thailand is not complicit in this. They turn off parts of their grid and deploy their military at cost of life and limb to combat this.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/thailand-cut-power-myan...
Correct, Thailand has taking meaningful steps. Unfortunately Musk's Starlink has proven a great alternative to supply these slavery centers with internet, despite it being widely known exactly where the centers are and trivial to block. But then it's hard to eexpect a company to care about human trafficking when it's run by "What day/night will be the wildest party on your human trafficking island, Jeff?".
It's really a spectrum. Some were kidnapped. Some knew part of the what they were getting into (they're there to scam people) but were lured by the promise of high salary, but later found out it wasn't what was promised and lost freedom. Some knew exactly what they were getting into, are voluntarily there, and even have personal freedom. Not every scam syndicate in the general area treat every scammer the same. It's often hard to tell who is in what category.
Just because you talked to one (or many) who chose the job freely, doesn't mean the ones in SE Asia are the same...
The captive ones do the scamming via text anyway, and they'd get beaten or worse if they don't do as wanted. "Just send some coded message", your incompassionate mind might say.. sadly not everyone is as wise as you, and it's hard to be so when they can cut your head and throw you into a river in a lawless part of the world.
Why aren’t the bosses identified via whatsapp?
I thought that’s why various western countries require chat applications to allow decryption of private messages.
These scam factories seem to be the perfect use case for all these anti-privacy regulations. Pity these operations are so profitable.
in these countries simcards and cell phones are not so strictly linked to personal identity documents, so even if the chats are decrypted it is not very helpful
What about location? Wasn’t there a thing about whatsapp encryption leaking gps location or something?
Really sad to see humans being able to be this nasty to each other. Technology being the enabler and enforcer, and also the means around detection.
These scams are really a good excuse to force whatsapp to do something about their technology. Afterall they patented it (probably) so their own it and they should do their best to ensure it’s not abused.
myanmar has had an ongoing civil war for decades so location is moot. there is no central authority that has the ability to deal with these things. the scam centres can get a lot of freedom just by supplying tinned food and petrol to whichever group they are closest to.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/4/4/hundreds-of-enslaved... one thing that is still happening is fishing fleets buy myanmar people and keep them as slaves on trawlers or in remote island prison camps
there are 100+ formal languages in Myanmar, at least 100 unique ethnic groups, and over 150 armed combat groups. and the ethnic diversity is very abrupt, people living 30km away from each other can be so different they can't communicate with each other at all. foreign governments have almost zero influence on the ground
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_armed_organisat...
because the languages are so complex and dialect driven, they are often impossible to translate and monitor too.
Well, let's just hope that if you get kidnapped, enslaved and forced into labour, someone will be kinder to you then you were to them.
So, what do you expect from that hypotheically kinder person? Should they let themselves be scammed by me, once I am kidnapped, enslaved and forced into labour?
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This probably has more to do with a power vacuum in which lawlessness arises instead of the ideology that is at power.
But in this case this is not about politics, it's about local power and local control, and Laos government have very little of either of it. Laos communism and Vietnam communism are very similar, but you don't here the same about Vietnam, because Vietnam is easier to control due to geographical terrain and investment by USSR and china after the vietnam war. Laos still have areas with unexploded personal mines and ammunition (the "joke" there is that US pilots couldn't aim for shit, the reality is that vietcongs used Laos jungle path to encircle US soldiers, and so the US made those path unusable). Laos have way less roads, rougher terrain, and mines. You have basically local feudalism. Imagine colombia, but ten time worse.
>Laos communism and Vietnam communism are very similar
No they're not; Vietnam scores much higher than Laos on any measure of economic freedom/property rights.
As opposed to capitalism, which as we all know works flawlessly. The free hand of the market keeps everything running smoothly. There’s always competition for the benefit of the customer, never collusion. There aren’t just a few bit players controlling everything, everyone has equal opportunity. And of course who can forget trickle down economics, where giving more money to the richest people made every one of us richer.
Capitalism’s most outstanding feature is that no matter how hard it tears one’s asshole, it keeps people begging for more with the false promise that they too one day will have their turn as the selfish oppressors doing the pounding, and that’s a good thing for everyone actually, for some reason.
Is there any ideology applied societally at the scale of those two which hasn’t failed to deliver?
Capitalism doesn’t preach to be a solution for monopolistic behavior of actors that accumulate too much power. It’s a known downside of capitalism that has to be actively managed by the state.
Capitalism has still delivered with massive success in China, the US, India, Europe, etc etc. It hasn’t “failed to deliver” in any of those places.
So in other words, communism pretends to solve the problem of power accumulation but doesn't, while capitalism doesn't even claim to do so (and only occasionally even sees it as a problem at all)
> downside of capitalism that has to be actively managed by the state.
And all governments in the world seem to be doing a great job at this! /s
> Capitalism has still delivered with massive success in China, the US, India, Europe, etc etc.
Ah yes, the “massive success” where people can’t afford a place to live, struggle to cover basic necessities, are increasingly lonely, radicalised, unhappy, depressed… But hey, at least you can look at cat videos all day while enriching a small number of individuals who don’t even allow you the dignity of not having to piss in bottles as you’re making them more money they will ever be able to spend.
This was precisely my point. No matter how much mistreatment there is, we can always count on someone coming out to ask for more.
>Ah yes, the “massive success” where people can’t afford a place to live, struggle to cover basic necessities
Nobody is struggling to find enough to eat in Europe or America; even the poor unemployed are overweight to the point of obesity. Tens of millions of people from all over the world are costly flocking to those countries for a better life; they wouldn't be doing that if their systems delivered better outcomes.
If you like communism so much why not move to somewhere like North Korea or Cuba, the most communist countries in the world?
> Nobody is struggling to find enough to eat in Europe or America
Respectfully, you need to get out more. I recommend you go volunteer at your local food bank.
Or at the very least go into Wikipedia and search “poverty”. There are pages for individual countries. And yes, they very much include the US and Europe.
> If you like communism so much
I’m not defending communism, I’m arguing capitalism isn’t a panacea. The world isn’t black and white.
You just moved the goal posts, OP didn't say there weren't people struggling with homelessness, I think he was saying that famine or dying of lack of food is basically 0% in Europe or America. "Enough to eat" is poorly phrased, as we eat too much already.
I haven’t even hinted at homelessness, so what the hell are you even talking about? Do you think they serve homes at food banks? Do you think every poor person is homeless? Do you think anyone with a roof over their head isn’t poor? Do you think you need to be literally dying of hunger to be struggling to eat? An abundance of food in a country does in no way mean there aren’t people in that country going hungry, and to believe otherwise is to be both deeply uninformed and privileged.
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I used to volunteer, for many years, at a local food bank until 2 years ago.
And no, nobody is struggling to find enough to eat in Europe. These people go there because they chose to not participate in contributing to society the basic minimum. They do not work, they still receive money from the state, they have shelter (if they want, which many times they don't because they need to follow rules they prefer not to follow), they have food - that's exactly what your example provides them: food - they have medical care, they even have drugs freely provided by the state (methadone).
All of this is done by capitalism. All of this abundance, that even allows to provide immense benefits to those that choose not to contribute to society, comes from the extreme productivity enabled to capitalism. To the point where the state is these countries, can take 82% of what every worker earns [1] (this is the real example of France, BTW) to give to those that don't work and to invest in public projects that at best are severely mismanaged, and at worst not needed at all.
All this ridiculously high productivity and forced profit sharing, is made available by the free market.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/taxing-wages-france.pdf
> I used to volunteer, for many years, at a local food bank
So did I.
> And no, nobody is struggling to find enough to eat in Europe. These people go there because they chose to not participate in contributing to society the basic minimum.
Your disdain for poor people and uninformed take frankly make me question your honesty regarding working at a food bank. Clearly you were never friends or cared to learn the stories of the people in need.
> that's exactly what your example provides them: food
You mean you never had to turn someone down because you ran out for the day? I’m smelling more bullshit by the sentence. Were you working at a food bank in the rich neighbourhood of a rich city of a rich country?
> they even have drugs freely provided by the state (methadone).
Ah, there we go. Associating poor people with being drug addicts. I was wondering when that was coming.
You have all the exact same talking points of the people who were born lucky and never really struggled, who want to defund social programs but offer no alternatives. Zero empathy.
Yes, there are people who game the system. If you think people choose to live in poverty to do so, I don’t believe you’ve ever been in contact with those communities, you’re judging them from a safe distance.
> Were you working at a food bank in the rich neighbourhood of a rich city of a rich country?
Yes, I was working in food bank in a rich country. That's what all capitalist European countries and USA (you know, the ones where you claimed above people didn't have food), are: rich!
> You have all the exact same talking points of the people who were born lucky and never really struggled,
Yes, I was born lucky: My parents were hardworking blue collar workers receiving the minimum wage for most of my childhood and guess what: they still managed to provide me all that was needed and put money aside for themselves so not to depend on any handouts. So, yes, I lived a very lucky privileged life that anyone that lives in a capitalist country and is not afraid to work can also have.
> you know, the ones where you claimed above people didn't have food
You are being dishonest. That was not the claim.
> My parents were hardworking blue collar workers
Did they pull themselves by their bootstraps? You’re engaging in what is called the hard work fallacy.
> guess what: they still managed to provide me all that was needed and put money aside for themselves so not to depend on any handouts.
What year was that again? Want to go check some housing prices and the wage gap between now and then? You sure were lucky one of your parents didn’t get sick with a fatal chronic illness as you were growing up, burdening the other with ever rising health costs which bankrupted them through no fault of their own. Tell me, were any of them ever racially profiled and were thrown in jail on a bullshit charge, making them lose their job and fall into ever increasing debt?
I have no doubt you faced some hardship. But make no mistake, you had advantages that many people did not have, and it was down to blind luck. Believing that other people deserve what they get because they are lazy is a selfish view that cuts your nose to spite your face. Your parents and yourself shouldn’t have faced any hardships, and neither should the people living in poverty now. You’re blaming the people with no money instead of the people hoarding all of it, as they get ever richer.
I’ll say it again: Capitalism’s most outstanding feature is that no matter how much mistreatment there is, we can always count on someone coming out to ask for more. That’s exactly what you’re doing. Break the cycle.
Food is not the only basic necessity people struggle with. By the way 14% of US households suffered from food insecurity in 2024 https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details?pubid=1136.... On top of that the poor are overweight and obese because cheap food is ultraprocessed, unhealthy and designed to make you addicted to it.
>Tens of millions of people from all over the world are costly flocking to those countries for a better life;
Of course the west and specifically the US have absolutely nothing to do with the material conditions of those countries.../S
> If you like communism so much why not move to somewhere like North Korea or Cuba, the most communist countries in the world?
And if you love capitalism so much why don't you move to the US? Oh wait, they just halted VISA applications for 80 countries and don't want to let in any immigrants...
> Of course the west and specifically the US have absolutely nothing to do with the material conditions of those countries.../S
Of course we do. We provided close to 5 trillion USD in aid to those countries since 2000. Unfortunately, the mentality and culture of these countries is so counterproductive that even with that immense amount of help from Europeans and Americans, they still manage to still live in terrible conditions of deprivation.
I say it's best to cut all aid and let them finally understand they need to take care of themselves. That would probably finally institute the free market mentality they need to finally fix their own issues.
You can not be serious. Did US hegemony start in the year 2000? Where did you fish that 5 trillion figure from? Here maybe skim through something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
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this really has little to do with communism. after all the vietnam war etc concluded, that area kind of got left to itself by the powers that be.
It's a small country that was given a political system to be a client-state of a hegemonic regional power, and then the hegemon abandoned them, they don't have valuable resources like crude oil or gold, and they end up with underdeveloped state institutions. they aren't really failed states, but more so "unfinished" states
similar examples include belize, papua new guinea (abandoned by australia), East Timor, vanuatu, djibouti, maldives etc. some marxist, some british, portuguese, french, etc
in many of these countries you really can do what you want. belize is not much more than a forestry plantation with 19th century english corporate law and a few bars in the capital ("Belize City").
Laos is a pretty odd state. I looked up their official news site once expecting to find North Korea style propaganda, but it was instead surprisingly straightforward about a lot of day to day problems. I also had some contact many years ago with their one Linux/Free Software enthusiast. My impression is that it's a fairly weak state, and the main reason the communists are technically still in charge is that nobody really wants the job of ruling Laos particularly much.
Is there anything that capitalism did that is different from what it preaches?
No, capitalism is about capital owners having control about what is produced and how it is produced, and we have exactly that, especially since Friedman "shareholder primacy" theory, which, at least to me, looks like the ultimate form of capitalism (capitalism != liberalism, which is about markets and exchange, not about production methods).
Communist countries however are never about communal ownership of production method. I think there is reasons for that: communism is not only about production methods, but also about the "march of progress" and other philosophical theories that are more or less dumb (some are very effective analysis tools, some are very less so), and communist leaders pick and choose what they want from it.
Why is capital owners controlling production desirable?
It's not. But that the system we're currently under. In a better world, you'd have employees, local government, consumers as well as obligation owners on the companies boards.
Because of incentive alignment. They are the only ones incentivized not to do something stupid with their own resources.
of course people are also resources in this framework, and "something stupid" could be providing insurance/healthcare/pension etc - unless a tyrannical (/s) government forces them to do otherwise
How does Elon Musk fit into your framework?
Because they created the production; it they couldn't control it then they'd have no incentive to create it and there'd be no non-state-owned businesses, exactly as happened when China was fully communist and still happens in North Korea today. Capital doesn't grow out of thin air just from "working"; the only people who think it does are those who've never tried to build a successful business.
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Why though? The essence of communism is banditism
Same with capitalism, as we are witnessing now in US.
Or with any -ism for that matter.
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I know you're just trolling but given how much the current administration has done to shut down foreign aid programs that helped investigate and stop trafficking, the American Right doesn't seem to give a shit about "real slavery" either.
Why would people from place X be more interested in abuses happening in place X than in a country literally half a planet away that they have no control over? Truly a mystery, probably they are just DEI crazies (whatever that means).
From my experience online, it's just that's it's far more acceptable to say "I hate DEI" (never to be defined), instead of "I actually hate black people/minorities".
DEI is, by most people who complain about it's definition, prioritizing hiring / access based on targeted diversity metrics. It's not really that complex and there's not really anyway to reasonabley accomplish it that won't result in an over representation of poor performers among the "diversity group", which in turn just reinforces the stereotypes that made DEI a necessity in the first place.
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Real slavery, like what's permitted via the Thirteenth Amendment and propagated by over-policing black communities? Pretty sure the "American Left" is keenly aware of this, even if terminally-online armchair policy analysts engaging in whataboutisms aren't.
This is kinda the whole crux of prison and police reform in the US; you may want to read "The New Jim Crow". Decent primer.
comparing this to what happens in USA is why people don't take BLM and DEI seriously
Race to the bottom, eh? Why talk about what the situation is in our country and try to improve it when other people in other countries have it much worse?
Oh, you don't have to out yourself like that; not here in public! Many people care about black lives and DEI. In fact, I'm willing to bet you probably agree with the most palatable form of DEI - jobs programs and hiring incentives for veterans.
In any case, here's a quote FTA:
>Rather than explicit imprisonment, the compound relied on a system of indentured servitude and debt to control its workers.
Not that different from the USA: https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-inve...
I guess if you're taking the Epstein thing as extra-territorial we could pretend this comment makes any sense.
You could, of course, demand/wish/hope that right-wing politicians did anything about slavery in foreign nations. But somehow “trying to do anything good” is on left-wing politicians, while right-wing politicians, without repercussions, can thwart all anti-slavery efforts made by the US over several decades.
Like ending 69 global initiatives to end child labor, forced labor and trafficking: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/27/trump-cuts-c...
US politics in a nutshell. In order to feel you’ve contributed to a conversation, you can just yell DEI and be done with it.
Spot on. Between the end of the Cold War and the 1994 Congressional election, the right wing decided to flip the enemy from external communists to internal partisans. You’d hear some “party of Reagan” platitudes, but it was really the party of Cohn and Stone, names more influential today than Reagan. Those are people who recoil at doing good in the world.
That's why those "scammer gets owned" videos made by douche youtubers, full of people gloating in the comments about how superior they are, never sat right with me. Those people crammed into warehouses are obviously extremely desperate or coerced or both.
There is quite a difference between indians going to "work" in a shiny building in the business district and native chinese held captive in Myanmar and forced to scam people in China.
Don’t like that you’re being downvoted. I’ve always felt the same.
I don't - it's the same as people defending thieves and burglars because "they are just people and they have families to feed". I've had shit stolen from my house before and the emotional damage this causes is far greater than anything financial - to me, thieves could be shot on the spot, literally zero sympathy towards them, they are only one spot below actual murderers and rapists in my book.
These guys are the same - do I feel bad for their plight? Yes, for sure, I wish we could help them and make sure they can live their lives free and not in what is effectively slavery. But they are currently "employed" destroying peoples lives, so many examples of people losing their lives savings to these scammers, many commit suicide due to this. Fucking around with them for youtube videos is the least we can do.
You understand the front line of the pig butchering scam don't have agency, yet you call them thieves and burglars. They're not the ones doing it, it is those who control them. Having said that, I neither agree or disagree whether youtube videos should gloat about how they've wasted their time or whatever.
I think we need to make it practically impossible to run the scam by having social media / messaging operators shutdown fraudulent accounts, especially if reported.
>>They're not the ones doing it, it is those who control them
No, it is quite literally them doing it, not the people running the operation. Same as if there is an organised gang in my area it's the people who are in my house that are doing the burglaring, not the people running the gang.
And yes, I appreciate very much that they might not have any choice in the matter which is why I said, I am genuinely sympathetic to their position and I hope we can solve this.
Thank you for illustrating my point in a far more unhinged manner than I could have possibly expected. Someone from a first world country in 2026 unironically defending that "thieves should be shot" needs to take a hard look at himself. Probably a good idea also to read the first few pages of Utopia by Thomas More, a fucking 510 year old book where the author explains why this is such a crushingly stupid (not to mention morally repugnant) way of thinking.
>>needs to take a hard look at himself.
I do every morning, having moral integrity is something really important to me. I just still can't get over the trauma of having my own home invaded, burglared, and the people who did it getting away with it scott free - I sincerely hope they get hit by a train and die a very painful death.
>> Probably a good idea also to read the first few pages of Utopia by Thomas More,
I will do that, it's bedtime for me now but I'll have a look tomorrow.