Thousands of Crypto Scammers are Enslaved by Human-Trafficking Gangsters, Says B...
source link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/08/19/0629215/thousands-of-crypto-scammers-are-enslaved-by-human-trafficking-gangsters-says-bloomberg-reporter
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Thousands of Crypto Scammers are Enslaved by Human-Trafficking Gangsters, Says Bloomberg Reporter
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"Vicky's random text had found its way to pretty much exactly the wrong target. I'd been investigating the crypto bubble for more than a year..." After a day, Vicky revealed her true love language: Bitcoin price data. She started sending me charts. She told me she'd figured out how to predict market fluctuations and make quick gains of 20% or more. The screenshots she shared showed that during that week alone she'd made $18,600 on one trade, $4,320 on another and $3,600 on a third... For days, she went on chatting without asking for me to send any money. I was supposed to be the mark, but I had to work her to con me.... Vicky sent me a link to download an app called ZBXS. It looked pretty much like other crypto-exchange apps. "New safe and stable trading market," a banner read at the top. Then Vicky gave me some instructions. They involved buying one cryptocurrency using another crypto-exchange app, then transferring the crypto to ZBXS's deposit address on the blockchain, a 42-character string of letters and numbers...
People around the world really were losing huge sums of money to the con. A project finance lawyer in Boston with terminal cancer handed over $2.5 million. A divorced mother of three in St. Louis was defrauded of $5 million. And the victims I spoke to all told me they'd been told to use Tether, the same coin Vicky suggested to me. Rich Sanders, the lead investigator at CipherBlade, a crypto-tracing firm, said that at least $10 billion had been lost to crypto romance scams.
The huge sums involved weren't the most shocking part. I learned that whoever was posing as Vicky was likely a victim as well — of human trafficking. Most "pig-butchering" operations were orchestrated by Chinese gangsters based in Cambodia or Myanmar. They'd lure young people from across Southeast Asia to move abroad with the promise of well-paying jobs in customer service or online gambling. Then, when the workers arrived, they'd be held captive and forced into a criminal racket. Thousands have been tricked this way. Entire office towers are filled with floor after floor of people sending spam messages around the clock, under threat of torture or death.
With the assistance of translators, I started video chatting with people who'd escaped...
I'd heard that [southwestern Cambodia's giant building complex] Chinatown alone held as many as 6,000 captive workers like "Vicky Ho."
Two of the workers interviewed "said they'd seen workers murdered." And another worker said Tether was used specifically because "It's more safe. We are afraid people will track us... It's untraceable."
The reporter's conclusion? "It was hard to see how this slave complex could exist without cryptocurrency."
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There was no crime until Bitcoin was created. Do you remember the good old days? Man they were great. No crime anywhere.
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Yeah, I used to be able to leave my car parked, unlocked, with the windows down and the keys in the ignition. In downtown Los Angeles.
Those were the days...
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It's absolutely true that criminal minds will think of ways to steal money regardless of the times. However, many decades ago there were very few people in Cambodia scamming people out of money in the US. Yes, they stole money from local Cambodians but usually not from people in other countries. Furthermore, when people reported the crime, the police could investigate the stolen money trail.
Electronic money transfer has enabled remote money stealing scams, but crypto has made the stolen money trail invis
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Why is this a troll? The poster is exactly right. That last line is just ludicrous.
"The reporter's conclusion? "It was hard to see how this slave complex could exist without cryptocurrency."
Then the reporter is just really, really stupid.
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by vistic ( 556838 ) on Saturday August 19, 2023 @05:34PM (#63780938)
"...how THIS slave complex..." this one, the one being talked about in the article. THIS slave complex could not exist without cryptocurrency. The article is saying it exists only because cryptocurrency exists. You are misinterpreting it as them saying "how a slave complex", as though no slave complexes could exist without cryptocurrency. But that is not what they wrote, despite your lazy interpretation.
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Like any cultist or scammer, the cryptocunts will twist words. It's in their blood. They should be put down like rabid dogs, a bullet to their tiny, addled brains.
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There is no evidence that the "slave complex" actually exists other than in this reporter's imagination.
I've been to Cambodia. The chance that a trafficked human there can write legible English is near zero.
And what is the point? Slave complexes are expensive to run. You need security and guards. The workers have to be acquired, which means paying the traffickers. Then the slaves have to be fed and housed.
Why not just hire people for 50 cents an hour?
None of it makes any sense. No location is specified. The
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The trafficked people are from English speaking countries, like the Phillippines. This is organized crime, not some local small criminals setting up shop.
And the point is making money. Keeping trafficked people with no passport and no rights to be in the country under control is dead simple. No need for guards. If they run away, the local police will return them.
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I live in the Philippines.
You can hire people here for $10 per day.
There's no way you can run a slave complex for that price.Economic logic aside, a bigger problem is the complete absence of evidence.
Filipinos and Cambodians look similar. The police might catch some, but they won't catch all, and only one would need to get away or get access to a cell phone to report the location. Then the gig is up.
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i'm not in south east asia, but even so his descriptions sound hard to square with his "slavery" framing. from TFA:
This is about one of the supposed slave complexes. So there are: "hapless tourists" taking pictures, "local vendors", ambulances, and news coverage about this place? But nobody asked any questions?
It sounds more like standard it-wouldn't-fly-in-the-west-but-not-SO-unusual-in-various-exploitative-industries-in-developing-countries stuff than slavery.
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Sigh... sure. Whatever. Narrow the field until you have a quantity of one, and call it unique. But scams and call centres and slavery have been around a very long time, sometimes bundled together. Did those centres function before crypto? Of course they did. What, do you think that if crypto disappears, the "slavers" will simply say, "Oh hey, okay - I guess you're all free to go."?
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But it's crucial to Federal Reserve currency control to demonize crypto! Don't you understand? Heavens, think what'd happen if folks refused to hold their savings in dollars when we devalue the dollar again??!? We might have to downsize the Martha's Vinyard home. For shame!
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No, not insightful.
This is very much like arguing that cotton had nothing to do with creating a slave plantation complex in the Antebellum South because slavery had existed before cotton became a world-traded commodity. Sure there was slavery before, but the cotton and slave plantations went together like whips and slave masters and caused a huge expansion of slavery both in number of slaves, area devoted to slave agriculture and wealth to the slavers and their financial enablers.
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Um, no but almost. It was the Cotton Gin that did that, not cotton itself. The automation that the Gin enabled made cotton very profitable. But, the US stopped importing slaves before the Cotton Gin was invented so cotton wasn't the crop that drove the trans-Atlantic slave trade, that was sugar. That's why only about 10% of African slaves who made the middle passage ended up in the US. However, after the US stopped importing slaves, the Gin was invented and the amount of land used for cotton and worked
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The reason we study history is to not get taken in by inaccurate arguments like yours - says the guy who tried to restrict discussion of slavery in the USA to "the trans-Atlantic slave trade", ignoring the fact that Southern slavemongers switched to simply breeding slaves locally, like cattle, and selling them the same way. [medium.com]
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Just lining up to be wrong today I see. They didn't switch to chattel slavery, it was always chattel slavery everywhere in the New World since the beginning of the trans-atlantic slave trade. The reason for this is that it is unreasonable to expect a freed slave to be able to afford the cost of going back to Africa. This is very different from slavery in the Old World (which continued in non-industrialized regions at large scales until the 20th century) where freed and/or escaped slaves could actually wa
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They didn't switch to chattel slavery - Not what I said at all. They switched from importation, to creating breeding farms for production of slaves internal to the USA.
Ending slavery with a war was just a bad idea that has lead to unintended consequences that we are still dealing with today. - Given that the slavemongers were the ones who started the war, and that the end of slavery in the USA was not an occurrence nor goal until near the end of the war, I'm fascinated to hear what your (historically wa
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What every other country did, that's my model. Let's go with Brazil for arguments sake. Now go ahead to tell me that they have more racial strife than the US. No, don't want to make that counter-factual? Shocking, they had 5x the imported slaves as the US and had equal rights for them 30 years before the US (despite the fact that slavery ended 25 years later). Racial riots don't happen there. They also didn't have a civil war to end slavery. Those things are correlated. As are the social changes in
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What every other country did, that's my model. - Dishonest dodge. Be specific.
Let's go with Brazil for arguments sake. - Brazil waited until 30 years AFTER the USA to abolish slavery: May 13, 1888. If you can't even get the basic facts right, why would anyone trust your neoconfederate-apologist lunatic ravings?
Racial riots don't happen there. - You so sure [hrw.org] about that? [americasquarterly.org] Because it sounds like you're just lying out your ass at this point.
They also didn't have a civil war to end slavery. - Again, wh
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Nothing, slavery would have ended on its own as it became economically nonviable due to fossil fuels just like happened in dozens of other countries around the world. You still haven't explained why the US had to have a war when nobody else did. Freed slaves, not saddled with the yoke of being blamed for huge economic dislocation would have been granted rights and freedoms more easily and earlier (like in Brazil as I stated above which you clearly didn't read). I mean, did you not notice that Brazil's gr
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slavery would have ended on its own - That argument has been debunked, over and over again.
You still haven't explained why the US had to have a war when nobody else did. - The USA had a war because the slavemongers decided to start a war. What part of this is so difficult for you to understand? The slavemongers of the Confederate South announced their illegal "secession" over the mere POTENTIAL that slavery might end, and then started launching military attacks.
YOU need to provide your actual alternat
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Well, not _every_ other country (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution#1804_massacre_of_the_French... speaking of 200+ years of unintended consequences), but generally good points well made.
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âoeIt was hard to see how THIS slave complexâ not âoeIt was hard to see how ANY slave complexâ
Careful reading is a useful skill.
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And a rare one.
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When a millionaire loses their millions, ends up with close to $0, and declares bankruptcy, that doesn't help society.
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...especially when all the money just ends up going to Cambodian gangsters.
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I'm a millionaire (I own my home). I don't have $5M to speculate on crypto currency. Anyone with that kind of money to spend and dumb enough to do that deserves to lose the money.
They won't be destitute afterwards, they will just suffer a huge drop in their standard of living. Tough shit. Lots of deserving, hard-working capable people will never reach the undeserving multi-millionaire's lifestyle. I feel more for them.
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That's silly. Somebody works hard and finds the niche that makes them a millionaire, but to you they don't deserve the money if they aren't also armed with the tools to deflect fraudsters. What a narrow view you have. There are plenty of very astute people who will never be scammed, but will never have a million dollars because they having nothing to contribute. Are they more worthy?
A trusting nature means "undeserving"? Fuck off.
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They were defrauded in a crypto scam - that means they were greedy and stupid. And for millions, which means they didn't bother to do the basic due diligence you'd expect someone investing that kind of money to do.
You think having millions makes them worthy of anything? Fuck off.
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If you work hard and end up with millions, you most likely don't have that much in pure disposable liquid assets (ie. cash), but sheltered across illiquid assets (ie. tangible property).
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You are also likely to be smart enough to not hand all your money over to a stranger over the phone.
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But she had a really cute voice. I trusted her.
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I'm a millionaire (I own my home)...
Do you also own a yacht? If so, do you believe that you're really Elmer Fudd [wikipedia.org]? -
Not sure what the dollar amount has to do with it. Why do you think the millionaire with money to burn who doesn't do his due diligence is any more worthy of losing $5 million than the average working class person who doesn't do his due diligence and loses $50?
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Why do you think the millionaire with money to burn who doesn't do his due diligence is any more worthy of losing $5 million than the average working class person who doesn't do his due diligence and loses $50?
I don't know if you are legitimately having trouble figuring this out, but the harder something is to come by, the more valuably it should be treated when protecting it. Even the most destitute, jobless, penniless person can more easily replace $50 in a single day than almost anyone can replace $5 mi
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The terms for people without empathy are "unsocialized", "anti-social", and "psychopathic", most of which are identified as pathologies in the DSM [wikipedia.org].
Society would be better off if people didn't get scammed out of their money generally, it would be better off if those of us with knowledge and ability made it more difficult for people to scam other people out of their money, and as a general rule "protect the weak and defend the innocent" is seen as goals worthy of recognition and praise. Many knights orders us
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Society is ALSO better off when people on social media manage to read the second statement in a post before responding with something that is one of the dumber possible interpretations of the post they are replying to.
You posted a lot more words to look just as stupid as the other guy who essentially posted the same reply.
If reading is really that difficult, maybe text-based media isn't for you.
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In what other situations do you not only blame the victim, but celebrate crime? Society is objectively not better off with a fool being parted from their money by an enslaver.
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Society is ALSO better off when people on social media manage to read the second statement in a post before responding with something that is one of the dumber possible interpretations of the post they are replying to.
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Society would be even better off if edge lords like you toned down your shitty hot takes and bothered to not write like "steal their money, kill them all, and let God sort them out" nihilists.
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by an incompetent fool handing over their life savings to violent organized crime. Saying so is just silly.
"Millions of dollars" could just as easily be somebody's retirement cashed out. Age related cognitive decline is a thing.
Your lack of empathy isn't good either. You're not thinking this through at all, you're reacting for the sake of catharsis. I get that. Like me you probably *don't* have millions of dollars and your retirement plan is to work until you die. But that unwillingness to think things through makes it easy for reactionaries to take advantage of you and make you do things that hurt you. -
How to say you are a libertarian without saying you are a libertarian.
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Sounds to me like they are correctly doing the job Americans hired them to do. Good for them!
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That's why the monarchies in Europe don't own prisons like Guatanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib, and don't have indefinite-detention anti-terrorism laws. Plus, of course, one man can't order the invasion of another country.
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Your point? The US citizen count in Guantanamo is zero.
If you were trying to say something you should just say it.
Instead of Guantanamo you have no free speech laws and you are subjects who live under the military umbrella provided by the citizens of the US. You know the guys held there? The ones your military helped capture on the battlefield? Yeah, that's right, those guys. Thanks for the assist there, ally!
Just what point were you struggling to make?
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You did understand that this racket was run out of Cambodia, right? Oh, I get it, you thought Cambodia was in the US and therefore under the jurisdiction of the FBI and DHS!
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Reporter thinks they can write fiction. Submit story to Slashdot...
No, if most people can't explain something clearly, you don't know what it is and why it would be required to exist.
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The same has been reported in other respected media (The Economist [economist.com], for example), so it is very likely true. And very credible, too.
Which doesnt go for your statement.
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I kept one on the phone for a solid 15 minutes by telling him, "oh this sounds really important! Hang on, I need to get my wife so she can hear this too!" And then coming back to the phone every ~2 minutes to say, "wait hang on she's coming! Just hold on!" until he finally hung up.
If everyone did that they'd make a lot less money and maybe go away as their call efficiency dropped.
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Before crypto there was no crime. After all privacy is gone, we can return to the promised land. No crime for eternity, I have spoken./s
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There have been (and still are) plenty of people trying to run crypto-currency investment scams online who aren't just part of Cambodian crime rings or hostages of theirs.
Several years back, I was messaged on Facebook by a young woman who wanted to start chatting. She saw me posting in a forum about Teslas, so I initially thought, "Oh - ok. Just another Tesla fan who wants to talk about the vehicles." Especially at that time, that wasn't unusual at all. Lots of owners just want to share stories about mods
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It's too bad you didn't do a "search for this image on the web" to find out where "she" stole those images from. Likely this person was a man from Buttfuckistan trying to find a mark.
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Remember about a decade ago the charlatans were bleating on about "This will change the world!" "This will free us from big bad banx and gubmint!"
Yeah, all it did was create a huge scamming empire, tons of waste, scarcity of graphics cards, ransomware, and now we have actual human slavery.
Fuck this shit. I'm all for every government in the world outlawing this as "funny money" and throwing the ones behind it behind bars with the cuffs still on.
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..and to the cryptobros:
Thanks for proving to us why we need government, and rules and regulations, assholes.
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The gangsters are the crypto-scammers, not the slave workers.
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Then the gangsters can buy a small server rack and shoot the roomful of slaves.
Small disposal problem, once off. Long term reduction in food costs. Office space too.
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Computers are more expensive than rice fed slaves you can also sell out as forced hookers when crypto collapses.
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But, let's just say any part of this is true, what should be done?
Enslaving these people is realistic, in 3rd world countries getting someone to do something for you is both powerful and common. So, that seems very plausible. Targetting people to get them to give away their fortunes is very plausible, this has been done since money has existed. The correlation to crytocurrecny is true in only that it was easier to trace sending dollars overseas, but with cryptocurrency, that tracing is harder.
The only s
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