Hacker News Reader

Comment by adhesive_wombat | Hacker News Reader

> They are falsely promised for "entrepreneurial opportunities"

From what I heard, which I cannot verify, it's more sinister then that. People take completely normal-sounding jobs in normal-looking and functioning offices. After several months of being paid normally for normal work, they're invited to a team-building event in SE Asia. There, they lose their passports, are interned in huge camps and are press-ganged into being scammers, and tortured or killed if they refuse.

This isn't your usual "can't cheat an honest man" tale where you sucker in greedy rubes with a promised free lunch.

View on HN

The entire chain that enables this is disturbing, but fascinating.

For instance, the scammers would need some kind of credibility in the job market before the team-building exercise. Do they just start up new legtimate businesses with new people just for this purpose?

And the SE Asia slave camps need a huge amount of compliance from the locals.

And what happens when none of the employees return from the original country?

> And the SE Asia slave camps need a huge amount of compliance from the locals.

Myanmar is home to like 20 different civil wars. Some of these conflicts ended in ceasefires. The areas that got good ceasefire deals (Wa, Mongla, some "border guard forces" who the military lets do whatever they want in return for allegiance) generally have a high degree autonomy from the Burmese government. So these areas are essentially run by warlords who are accountable to no one because the Burmese government cannot enter these areas. China backs some rebel groups and occasionally puts pressure on them to stop various crimes but they quickly adapt (when China cut internet to Mongla they just started using satellite). These areas are home to the largest meth labs in the world, illegal logging, illegal mining, etc. So they are perfect for criminals as they just have to pay "taxes" to whoever is in power. I read a good book on this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62141000-stalemate

Some scams are in Cambodia and Laos. The survival of these mostly has to do with corrupt law enforcement. All of the scam victims are either Chinese or in the West so they have even less reason to care.

> For instance, the scammers would need some kind of credibility in the job market before the team-building exercise. Do they just start up new legtimate businesses with new people just for this purpose?

I think it goes something like this: You make $200 a month as a dishwasher in Cambodia. A friend of friend messages you and tells you that you can make $800 a month. Because you are hopeful and want to improve your life you do not thoroughly vet them.

> And what happens when none of the employees return from the original country?

If they are from the region there's usually no record because they are picked up by an "agent" and go through a series of illegal border crossings.

There are people who actually knowingly apply for these jobs too: https://vodenglish.news/underground-group-chat-teems-with-hu...

This seems like an important point. Either this element is being exaggerated, or some aspect of their society itself is enabling this at a fairly deep level.

People who need a job apply to new start-up companies all the time. The scammers can just start a new company every few months. All they need a rented office.

This is not exactly secret. Many of these companies are perfectly "legit" legal entities being covered as a "call center"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1Q_P__aqAk

Yeah, I saw that, too. If they refuse, they claimed that they are going to be "harvested" of cornea, plasma, kidney, etc. What I don't understand is that they said they were threatened to be taken to international water for organ harvesting procedures, but was that even necessary? Those camps are pretty criminal already, seems to be an unnecessary extra step.

That sounds very much like the plot of Animal World!

To be honest, it doesn't all add up for me as simply described: offices where multiple people suddenly vanish seem unlikely to escape notice back home, unless they're excellent at picking people without any support network to report them missing. But maybe there's more to it than the simple description. And there is an enormous supply of migrant workers in cities without friends or families to come looking until it's to late, so I suppose it could happen. Or maybe it's garbled in the transmission and the jobs are all actually out of the country, but they don't spring the trap instantly when you walk in

But at least it seems not to be simply little scammers tricked by bigger, eviller ones, but rather they really have people who were genuinely looking for at least fairly honest work being ensnared.

From other accounts, people back home are generally too poor to come looking.

These people have to smuggle themselves out of their own country, then maintain a presence illegally abroad, then run an amateur investigation. It just doesn't work out like that.

I live in a rich European country and every once in a while they find some poor smucks forced to pick asparagus at a farm or have sex with a dozen men a day in a hotel. It gets a little column in a newspaper.

It's really not that hard to make people drop off the grid in an uncaring world.

My understanding — which mostly comes from reading about the "scam centers" operating in the Laos "golden triangle" autonomous region specifically — is that everything happening there is either "legal" or "unprosecutable" due to jurisdictional problems. If a Chinese-owned-and-operated company has a bunch of illegal immigrants from Myanmar and Thailand and Cambodia (but no Laotians!) locked up in a "scam center" in a Laotian AR... then which police force has both the motivation and the right to come knocking, without that being an international incident and potential incitement to another territorial war in the region that nobody wants?

Laotian police have been quoted as saying that they have full authority to come into the autonomous region to investigate a crime, given irrefutable evidence of a crime — but that they can't come in without such evidence; and that it's very hard for them to get such evidence.

I'm guessing that by "crime", here, they probably mean "a felony" (or whatever the Laotian equivalent is) — which is likely the blocker for them, and probably the basis for the very thin line that these criminal gangs are treading.

I believe that "an escapee who can show that their organs had been harvested" would be irrefutable evidence, enough for a police raid; while "an escapee who told a story about being held captive for years" would not.

(And re: the other part, of some of the things happening there being "legal" — a large part of how these companies work is by indentured servitude, in the literal sense: they get people coming there to sign contracts for provision of services and equipment, that create a debt owed by the worker to the service/equipment-provider; and then they don't let them leave until they work it off. These contracts seem to have a lot of power for the gangs; they don't bother to chase escapees who haven't signed them, while considering people who have signed them to be "theirs to keep." Presumably, they've tested these contracts with local law-in-practice, and found that they actually work as a shield for what they're doing.)

I am sure that there are terrible human rights abuses as outlined in the parent article, but I think it is also true that the media loves to jump on stories like these and exaggerates things.

See for instance CNN reporting that Kim Jong Un had his uncle torn apart by a pack of dogs. Generally once organ harvesting starts coming in to play, one should put on a very skeptical hat, while there is evidence that this has happened among some prisoners in China, I think one should remain skeptical on first-read of such claims.

> After several months of being paid normally for normal work, they're invited to a team-building event in SE Asia

Holy ####. This reminds me of my previous software developer job when we were supposed to go to South Korea for God knows what[0]. The reason why we had to go there wasn't really explained well to me, and I didn't care enough to ask because I was just excited to go to another country. In the end our application was denied by the embassy, and I always felt a bit disappointed by that.

Perhaps the possibility of my case being sinister is miniscule, but maybe I shouldn't feel too disappointed.

[0] the owner of the company I worked for was South Korean

I don't think that South Korea would fall into this category, its pretty well developed and western-style democracy (with some strong nepotic powers at place but ultimately even they are not untouchable).

If you would be invited to say Philippines, Indonesia (which covers Bali too), Myanmar, Laos etc. that should raise an eyebrow.

just because someone says you are being taken to a particular place doesnt mean thats where you will end up.

That's not how international travel works until you totally leave civilization; no matter who's paying for the trip, you do know where you're going, and each individual has a choice at every border crossing; they can't simply "export" a box filled with people on a plane that's going "somewhere".

Thats only if they play by the rules and everyone is honest and unfettered by coercion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37327558

Yeah, but if you're a westerner being taken on a trip to South Korea, read your plane ticket to see if that's actually were you're going.

If the deal is more akin to "get in this van and my guy will take you to where you need to go", then that's another story.

> get in this van and my guy will take you to where you need to go

That could have been their pickup from the airport.

Well South Korean is a peninsula, effectively an island, so you're probably fairly safe there if you don't agree to get on somebody's boat or plane. Accepting a plane ticket to a country like South Korea just isn't very risky. Where you might get into trouble is accepting somebody's invitation to smuggle you across a border, or being taken to a country where the rule of law is in doubt or where you could be driven across a border into such a country.

once your in the air you are effectively detained.

a large number of situations, contrived or otherwise, can result in emergency diversions.

you may want to be sure a connecting flight is legitimate when travelling in 'suspect' regions.

this would be high profile kidnapping, but a source of non SEA persons, that would be more convincing, and a source of international ransom revenues, espescially if they were also accused of some crime.

An airliner being diverted for a kidnapping might happen if a country were trying to nab you, but that isn't a realistic scenario for a criminal gang to orchestrate.

So with zero substantiation from the OP (who admitted this), you believe this explanation and you've now connected it to some company trip to South Korea you once didn't go on?

It's pretty hard simplification for the matter.

There is only 2 airports where this sort of things happen. If your teambuilding event scheduled to be in some god forbidden area of Colombia for example, and if this doesn't bring any suspicion to you - well...

Sounds like an industry ripe for disruption, AI, LLMs and AI voice generators to the rescue! /s

In all honesty, if AI is killing those organisations, that might be the only half way decent thing coming of the current AI use cases.

The usual story here (Vietnam) is that the victims are often promised a job with high earning prospect in Cambodia, or they are in debt after playing in casinos over there. Since Vietnam economy isn't in a good shape, there is no lack of potential victims. They don't really get killed either as it will cost the kidnappers, they will just get sold to another scam center. Oh and the victim can buy their freedom back if they scam enough people (my friend lost 10k USD in one such scam), not that there is many people who can do that though.

Source? That sounds straight from a Facebook group

I don't believe you, to be honest. Provide a source or delete if you can't substantiate.

For what it's worth, they would be unable to delete the comment both because it has replies and because it is past a certain age. The comment can't otherwise be edited to have its text removed because it is past a certain age.

I don’t believe this happens with any degree of regularity; it’s like the plot of a movie.

If it happened even once, it would be noteworthy. Do you have any reference to an article about it?

Ever heard of the World of Faith Fellowship?

They’ve had decades of child and adult abuse and they continue to operate pretty much in the open in the USA and hardly anyone has even heard of them.

https://apnews.com/article/nc-state-wire-north-carolina-ap-t...

The idea that something like what the GP is describing could not happen halfway across the world because it would be so well covered is probably highly mistaken.

I personally agree, it is ringing the "apocryphal" bell in my head

Reply on news.ycombinator.com