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3 months ago
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It is a sign of the times that Asian scammers are now being interviewed by accident for The Spectator, the oldest continually-published weekly magazine in the English language. Niko Vorobyov is an author and former drug dealer who is best known for writing about his inside knowledge of the illicit narcotics industry, but he found himself chatting with scammers when researching crime in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (GTSEZ) in Laos (pictured).
As I wandered the streets, a group of Indians waved me over to a bar. ‘You are from Russia?’ one of them asked me. I was born in Leningrad.
‘I can tell from your face; I was in Dubai for five years. A lot of Russian girls are working here too, as models. The customers think they’re chatting to the model, but actually they’re talking to me. I am so good, once a customer complained to me that he got cheated by another girl — and I am another scammer, but he trusts me!’
Vorobyov paints a picture of GTSEZ being nominally part of Laos but actually a cultural enclave of China. The gangs that have been driven out of mainland China by a vigorous crackdown on scam operations are drawn to places like these because they are relatively lawless. As often happens, scam operations nestle alongside a gambling industry that was also driven out of China but which continues to make money from many Chinese.
The Golden Triangle — the triple-frontier between Myanmar, northern Thailand and Laos — has historically been home to opium warlords. While they’re still very much there, it’s been a while since this part of the world has hosted such a blatant criminal colony.
The Golden Triangle SEZ is a sinister Sin City. At the heart of it is an alleged Chinese crime lord named Zhao Wei. In 2007, Zhao negotiated a 99-year lease over the land with the Laotian government. It proved to be a wise investment. Gambling is illegal in mainland China and several years ago a clampdown to clean up the casino industry on the island of Macao (long-known as the Chinese Las Vegas) sent punters scurrying to the new gaming havens scattered throughout Southeast Asia. By then, Zhao, a Macao casino tycoon himself, had carved out his Laotian enclave, catering to an almost exclusively Chinese clientele.
There have been many reports of expatriate workers being lured to places like these by the offer of a well-paid IT job only to discover they will be forced to work as scammers unless their families can pay a ransom to secure their release. However, Vorobyov found himself in the company of scammers who like their job.
My new friend worked at a scam centre, one of those IT startups that specialises in relieving hapless victims of the contents of their online wallets. Pulling out his phone, he showed me a dozen or so different Facebook and Instagram profiles, all under different names. Pretending to be a beautiful young lady, he dupes marks into dodgy crypto investments, a scheme known as ‘pig-butchering’. Fellow fraudsters in his WhatsApp group brag about pulling in $10,000-$15,000 (£8,000 to £12,000) at a time. Move over, Nigerian princes, there’s a new game in town.
…this Indian and his friends are seemingly here willingly. For them, it’s only a job. ‘We are just here for work,’ he said. ‘We make some money and we go home.’
Some scam workers are tasked with engaging in lengthy conversations with their targets. Others are employed because they are attractive. The latter are used for the photographs that fool victims of romance scams. That naturally leads to prostitution being another of the enterprises in the hydra with scamming and gambling.
…fraud is not the only seedy industry here. ‘Tonight’s our night off. Tonight’s boom-boom night,’ added another Indian. ‘You can do anything you want with a girl for 500 yuan (£50).’
Last year Bloomberg delved into the connection between scamming and other criminal enterprises for a lengthy piece on GTSEZ.
Investigators claim gamblers arrived first, followed by drug and human traffickers, and now — since about 2022 — crypto scam centers.
Matthew Campbell and Patpicha Tanakasempipat’s thoroughly-researched article explains why scamming thrives alongside other dubious businesses that involve moving money from place to place.
More recently, the GTSEZ has diversified into hosting “scam centers,” where teams of operators, many of them victims of human trafficking, persuade online marks to move their savings into fraudulent crypto-trading schemes. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and other agencies have identified the GTSEZ as a nexus of money laundering as well, connecting criminal groups from Taiwan to Myanmar that use crypto, underground casinos and shadow banking to move ill-gotten gains. “It’s a multifunctional criminal enterprise,” says Richard Horsey, a senior adviser to the International Crisis Group who has studied the zone. “The GTSEZ business model is to provide the infrastructure. They create that ecosystem so that criminal businesses can come in, lease the premises they need, hire the armed security they need and get whatever they want.”
A woman named Siti gave an account of the scams she was forced to run until she was able to escape from GTSEZ.
…a manager told her and other recent arrivals that they’d be working as online scammers, not graphic designers, and that if they wanted to leave, they’d have to pay back more than $5,000 in supposed travel and visa costs, an impossible sum…
Siti was shown to the small bedroom she’d be sharing with several other women. Then she began learning the contours of her new job: She’d be hanging out on dating apps, most commonly Badoo, and making contact with Americans, posing as an Indian woman who’d recently moved to Virginia. To align with US time zones, she arrived at her desk as late as midnight and worked until noon or 1 p.m….
Siti says she would gradually hint that she’d been successful with investing, and if her mark expressed persistent interest she’d get him to place money through her. The trades would generate real profits at first. Then, when her managers said it was time, she would try to persuade the American to put down all he could afford — money that would disappear. “The customers are looking for friends, so I think they’re very fast to trust,” Siti says.
Niko Vorobyov’s article about GTSEZ for The Spectator can be found here, and Matthew Campbell and Patpicha Tanakasempipat’s article for Bloomberg is here.
