- The original investors were Chinese
- The video footage shown is hosted on a Chinese platform
- The signage on the videos for "restaurants" and "hospitals" in the videos is in Chinese
- "A Chinese-style drum would echo through the compound each time a deposit of over $100,000 was received"
And the fact that Thailand receives a great deal of Chinese tourists, I expect at least some of the kidnappings affecting Chinese citizens - and then some of the scam victims to be Chinese as well.
I would expect China to be more affected and to able to exert more influence over this situation than Japan.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Wang_Xing
There was even a Chinese blockbuster movie about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_More_Bets
But the scammer choose lawless places like Myanmar for a reason and while China can exert pressure on individual bigwigs, they can't stop those small enough to fly under the radar.
Low-thrust societies can not be repaired by topdown level commands. All that happens, is yet another paint job, another face restoring measurement, while the rot behind remains the same.This is not some "aberration" from the fringe of the Chinese empire- this right here, is a sample of its core values under the CCP, undiluted by propaganda cosmetics.
The values are not tied to a political party. They are tied to the people themselves and these values are not found only in China, but even more so in Vietnam and India.
Not just scam gangs, the thugs collaborative with military,kidnap and sell youths to junta for
1. Forced military drafting.
2. Human trafficking
3. Organ harvesting .
That what military dictatorship done to our democractic country within 5 years.
But during that , Rule of Law is totally diminished and we are under rise of crime. The military regime allow the scams center to free roam and let the thugs to do what they want to create unrest.
Now PDFs (the people's defense force) and Ethnic armies fighting back to regain the country . We don't have any support from foreign power but funded fully by the people of myanmar - we regain about 60% of the country but Major cities are far from being touched.
Meanwhile - the Junta (the military in control of the country) and Scam gangs are collaborating , exporting and manufacturing drugs , kidnapping girls and selling them to China as sex slaves , kidnapping boys and using as meat-shield at frontline or sold for Organ harvesting. Appointing local thugs and gangs members , giving guns letting them run amok to create unrest and attack PDF .
Everything become a nightmare - many of talents had moved out side of country and staying in Thailand/Singapore.
It's scary to look at the scale of 'organized' crime / modern slavery. This is almost like Squid Games.
Thai authorities are trying to combat this issue by cutting off supply of basic utilities (electricity, network connection) to hinder their work. The government claimed that this reduces the volume of scam attempts by 20%, though it's not entirely gone as long as they can find a way to circumvent it
Exactly. Same as when prostitutes get picked up. They say they're trafficked or coerced to get a lighter sentence. Cops love it because they get to act like they're on the tail of serious crime and get more resources. Win-win at the expense of everyone else.
GP commented about Cambodia, but the article is about Myanmar.
Maybe that can explain the difference. (If slavery is more prevalent in Myanmar)
You don't need to clone someone's voice for that; that's a scam common enough that one of my parents almost fell for it. Cloning someone's voice might tick up the likelihood of success by some amount, but would the investment in the research-and-infrastructure (spinning up the machines to clone the voice, researching the person you're planning on scamming to find their relatives' phone numbers, etc) be worthwhile when you can just dial every phone number in the tri-state area and just try it with a panicked-sounding young woman's voice?
Scarier still is the knowledge that today, I can spot a scam call immediately - but a future is coming where I'm the one who'll be likely to read off my credit card number to someone on the phone.
They just call at 3 am, cry and cry to make the voice difficult to recognize and then a friend/kidnapper/corrupt-police-officer ask for the money.
We will lose a lot though; the most prosperous societies really rely on high levels of interpersonal trust (which allows people to easily do things together, whether that's leaving their buggy outside when they go to buy a coffee or commercial relations). It would be a shame to see that get destroyed.
I get a call and there is a green checkmark saying "GPG VEIFIED" and then I know it's who I expect.
The countermeasures won't destroy trust - it's the fact that you can't just pick up the phone and work out if you're speaking to a real human. Or trust that posts on an internet forum are from real people, and not just planted by bad actors using generative AI.
On the capability side, I say hello _when you call me_ differently than _when I call you_. Anybody who knows me will certainly have a sense something is off.
Socially, we all should be used to the idea of calling back using official numbers, and not closing an agreement on the first call.
But this is a numbers game. I imagine this vector would be more successful on third-world migrant workers, than in the first-world economies.
Talk is in German, but dubbed into English by the community. https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-erpressung-aus-dem-internet-auf-...
Helping a fool part ways with his money, which he (not they, but he) has way more than he needs could (and often is) seen as a lesser transgression compared to selling your own body.
In other news, multiplication matrix of morality of abortion and eating meat yields four morally tenable positions that somebody believes in and sees as consistent system of beliefs.
While there are obviously significant numbers of minors involved and some workers forced into it, the majority are not. Most are just struggling financially and trying to support themselves and/or families. Many are single moms. Many well over 18.
eg Cambodia is especially rife with these. There are so many recently-built apartment blocks that lie empty, often built with corrupt money anyway, they make easy and fairly low-key dens.
When it comes to scams, part of the scam is aiding the victim to making a transaction in a way that can’t be reversed. Cryptocurrencies, call cards, gift cards, even in-game currencies for online games. As long as it is liquid and carries a value, some entrepreneurial scammer will try to use it to increase their profit. Official currency transfer channels (banks, remittance centers) are usually the focus of laws and law enforcement, so scammers know to move to other forms of value. Cut-outs and fences are common in many forms of scams because these are tools that help them avoid the banking systems until the scammed value is laundered.
Us!? Complicit!? Yeah right, hah, we're just a social network dude give us a break smh
The Southeast Asian country it's supposed to take place in isn't explicitly named, but Myanmar, Cambodia, and Thailand were critical of the movie anyway.
Yes, but most of these scam call centeres don't engage in sophisticated scams. They have pople fumbling through scripts. There's not much improvising. It's all about the quantity and finding the victims who are willing to look past the sea of red flags.
It won’t take the jobs of the call center slaves.
I used to think of Myanmar as soft spoken Buddhist people with slow pace of life. now of think of the country as a 'scam central'.
so if you travel alone at this area, be safe and stay with crowd in public area
Yup. But - as much as I love to dunk on India for not doing anything on a federal level to combat the scammers - it's not exclusively India that's got issues with running scam callcenters. The Philippines are a hotspot as well [1], and Turkey is also ramping up [2] although their scammers mostly target Germany [3] as there is a sizable Turkish-origin diaspora here and a lot of Turks speak decent-enough German.
[1] https://www.afp.gov.au/news-centre/media-release/afp-partner...
[2] https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/turkiye-to-contain-fra...
[3] https://www.dailysabah.com/turkiye/istanbul-police-uncover-i...