My TikTok direct messages are an interesting place. If you were to take them on face value, you’d see a flurry of messages from a range of middle-aged men asking me to be their sugar baby nestled next to messages from the likes of Stanley Tucci, Pitbull and Jeremy Allen-White thanking me for being a fan.
Look, I am child of the 21st century, I know these are scams, but sometimes, I can’t help myself from messaging the Pitbull impostors back. However, this week, my entire perspective changed when I discovered that the people sliding into my DMs weren’t doing so as a part of an elaborate, self-motivated get-rich-quick scheme.
In reality, they could be the victims of vicious human trafficking schemes.
It all started when I came across Scammerland — a podcast which takes a deep dive into the terrifying world of “scammer farms”, where people are forced into human slavery to creep into our DMs under awful, inhumane conditions.
Hosted by media multi-hyphenate Julian Morgans, Scammerland features interviews with people who have found themselves trapped in a scammer farm and, as I listened to their first-hand stories, I realised that the people messaging me weren’t something to giggle at; they were most likely people who’d found themselves in an awful situation, bamboozled by the promise of a better life.
As it turns out, the shock I felt isn’t isolated — it’s exactly how Julian felt when he discovered the human trafficking roots of scam messages, too.
“I think everyone gets these types of messages. From time to time, you’ll get, a mysterious WhatsApp message or a random text message with an offer to work from home and earn $5000 a day doing nothing,” Julian explained to PEDESTRIAN.TV.
“The one I got specifically was on WhatsApp, and the message was like, ‘Hey, dear, how do I know you?'”
Instantly, Julian knew this was a scam, but as a host of a weekly podcast called What It Was Like, he’s always on the hunt for intriguing stories, so he kept the chat going.
“Because I need stories, I was like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ And it was someone posing as a woman and I was just kind of curious about what kind of scam it was. Like, what mechanism are they going to use try scam me?” Julian continued.
“At a certain point, the woman was like, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m incredibly rich, and I can teach you how to get rich as well. All you’ve got to do is follow my instructions, and you can set up a crypto wallet.
“I was like, ‘oh, here it is. This is the scam’. I realised that there wasn’t really a story here, and told her to fuck off and get a real job.”
But then, there was a pause, and the person wrote back: “Help”.
Julian tried to type back, but he was blocked seconds later, unable to respond and left with a heap of questions. Who was messaging him? Did they really need help? Desperate for answers, he started Googling and soon found out that, since the pandemic, scamming was a booming industry fuelled by human trafficking.
Online scams have been around since the origins of the internet and they have become more sophisticated as technology has advanced. However, according to Julian, we’re a bit behind in the way we think about scams.
“We’re stuck in this antiquated idea about who operates scams and how they’re operated,” Julian said.
“We think of them as dodgy individuals or tiny groups of people in Russia or Nigeria doing the Nigerian Prince scam from the 90s. The world has changed so dramatically since then.”
According to the United Nations, a proliferation of scam farms took off in Southeast Asia after the pandemic. Organised crime groups, which relied heavily on in-person casino operations for money laundering and other criminal activities, evolved into online spaces and switched their business model to focus on scamming and cyberfraud.
In order to facilitate the growth of these large-scale scams, criminal organisations created scammer farms — compounds with hundreds of people forced into human slavery — in an effort to make money.
The United Nations’ Regional Representative of the Southeast Asia and Pacific region, Benedikt Hofmann, described these centres as being “fenced off from the outside world”.
“All their daily necessities are met. There are restaurants, dormitories, barbershops and even a karaoke bar. So, people don’t actually have to leave and can stay here for months,” Benedikt explained.
“Some have been tortured and subjected to unimaginable violence on a daily basis as punishment for wanting to leave or for failing to reach their daily quota in terms of money scammed from victims. There are multiple types of victims, the people who are being scammed around the world, but also the people who are trafficked, held against their will and who are exposed to violence.”
In Scammerland, Julian speaks to Ugandan rapper and gospel singer Small Q, who found himself in a ruthless scam farm in Myanmar after accepting a lucrative job offer in Thailand. After he arrived, he was smuggled across the border into Myanmar before being trapped, forced into labour, and tortured if he did not reach certain targets.
Thankfully, Small Q was one of 23 trafficked Ugandans repatriated from Myanmar after a nationwide effort from the Ugandan government. However, rescue from these fascilities is very rare, with tens of thousands of people remaining trapped in scam farms across Southeast Asia.
Just last year, the ACCC ScamWatch reported that Australians had a financial loss of more than $318 million through scams.
In August 2024, the Australian Federal Police joined law enforcement partners from around the world to address the cybercrime threats of scammer farms through a global initiative called Operation Firestorm, which seeks to take down scam centres across Southeast Asia.
Meanwhile, earlier this year, Thailand cut electricity supplies to multiple areas in Myanmar (which is a scamming hub due to longstanding civil unrest), believed to house large-scale scamming centres. However, it’s unclear whether this truly has made a lasting impact on the scam farms, with many theorising that they’ve just moved locations or pivoted to other methods of power, such as diesel-run generators or Elon Musk‘s satellite internet connection tool, Starlink.
Despite governmental efforts to bring scammer farms down, they’re still an ongoing and widely unspoken issue affecting those in human trafficking along with people actually being scammed out of thousands.
So, what can we do? Julian says the best course of action is to just be extremely careful online.
“I batteld with this question myself but I think the best thing you can do is be really cynical online,” he says.
“Act like everything is a scam. If it seems a bit off, question it. I think having that kind of cynicism is pretty healthy on the internet and especially going forward, with AI, it’s only going to be worse.”
Although it might sound like a cop out, scamming is a vicious cycle. Without victims, the lucrative nature of scam farms decreases. For now, all we can do is be aware of the problem and keep ourselves safe from becoming victims.
You can listen to Scammerland or Julian’s weekly podcats series What It Was Like on Apple, Spotify and YouTube.
The post Those Scam Messages In Your DMs Might Have Been Sent By People In Human Slavery appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
