We were in the mountains of Laos.
I was at a cockfighting joint playing pétanque with our tour guide, Minh.
Think lawn bowls, except the floor is dirt, the air is full of smoke, and everyone is drinking cheap whisky from recycled bottles. K-pop blares on a distorting Temu speaker.
I was losing. Badly. The locals were laughing at me, but they were blind drunk.
So, screw them.
Minh told me he used to come here with a mate … but then his mate’s life took a dark turn.
He was a rice paddy farmer who scratched out US$200 a month. It was hard, honest work. One day he showed Minh a Facebook job ad that promised US$2,000 a month doing “online sales” in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, up in the north of Laos.
“Be careful”, Minh warned him.
Indeed.
I know the other end of that ad. My inbox is full of it.
These days a $100,000 scam loss barely makes the column. A few weeks back I wrote about a retired suburban accountant who got taken for $5 million. The scammers pig-butchered him. They fattened him up for months, then went after the lot.
So, who was the scammer on the other keyboard?
It could have been Minh’s mate.
Or it may have been Ava.
I know her name because she lived to tell it – on a podcast called Escaping Scam City. She and her husband Micah were a young couple from the countryside, stone broke after Covid, trying to feed the kids. They answered a Facebook ad for well-paid customer service in Cambodia.
The recruitment looked legit. There were Zoom calls, resumé checks. Finally the offer came and Ava got on a bus. The young mum quickly worked out that something was very, very wrong. She messaged Micah and told him not to come. He came anyway, hoping to bust her out.
Their passports were confiscated. Their phones were taken. They were held against their will in a massive compound with bars on the windows and made to work sixteen-hour days running scripts, gaining the trust of people like that accountant until all their savings were stolen.
Miss the quota and the bosses beat you. Micah said some workers were beaten so badly they were left permanently disabled, their eyes like goldfish. Others could not face another day of what they were doing and jumped from the high-rise.
Heavy, right?
Well, as you read this right now, there are still young people held prisoner in these compounds.
Hundreds of thousands of them.
The UN has labelled it a world humanitarian crisis.
So why isn’t someone coming to save them?
Because money talks. Cambodia’s scam industry has been estimated to make up around half the country’s official economy.
In other words, the crooks have more money, and more power than the governments of the places they scam in.
Seriously, they really do. In 2024 Laos gave a ‘national development medal’ to the Chinese crime lord who holds the 99-year lease on that Golden Triangle zone, for his “contributions to the economic and social development of Laos”.
Ava was locked in that scam compound for seven months. When she got out, a court gave her forty months. For being a scammer. Meanwhile the men running these compounds are making more money than Al Capone ever did. In plain sight.
I asked Minh how it went for his friend.
He shook his head.
“Not good. He lost his rice paddy. He lost his wife. He lost everything.
“We are a Buddhist country. I worry for his soul.”
Tread Your Own Path!