Online Scams
You’ve probably heard a lot about these online scams. They might be crypto scams, they might be investment scams, or you might have been a victim of one of these online scams, and you may be wondering how do these things work? How do they even happen? Who’s the scammer?
Insight from The Wall Street Journal
Finally, there’s a great article in today’s Wall Street Journal about the inner workings of these scams. We’ve talked about this for many years; finally, it’s in the mainstream press. The headline is pretty provocative: “This man scammed hundreds of people online; he was also a victim.” How does that work?
The Operation of Cyber Fraud
Well, he was posing as Alicia. It’s a multi-billion dollar cyber fraud industry, most of it’s in Southeast Asia. A lot of it comes out of Cambodia, and what they do is they kidnap people in their own country. This person was kidnapped, and they forced them to perpetrate these frauds and scams on unsuspecting victims, many times in the US. He was enslaved for 16 months by Chinese gangsters, trafficking people from around the world, forcing them to sit at computers all day scamming people online.
Victims Behind the Scenes
Behind the scenes, scammers are victims too. After weeks of secret planning, this person went on strike, but then they were punished. They were handcuffed and hung by his wrist for a week so the other captives could see him suffering. So the person that is scamming you is probably a slave being tortured, beaten, and tortured.
The Scale of Scamming Operations
The scale of these operations is huge. An FBI agent we had a meeting with a few weeks ago told us that it’s possible that half of the GDP of Cambodia comes from scamming. The people who are doing it are basically locked in sweatshops to be on the computer all day. It’s not the same person over the course of weeks or months; you may talk to 15 different people picking up on the conversation. And as you probably know, victims lose their retirement funds, their families; sometimes people commit suicide because they have been so traumatized by losing all this money.
Real-Life Example and Law Enforcement Challenges
One Pakistan man had a wife and four children. He became obsessed with the woman that Billy betrayed, fell in love with her, and kept sending money. There’s no law enforcement in this scam industry in these countries. They get the money, launder it through casinos, so they have clean money after the fact. Some of the operations have been shifted to China recently; they started out as responses to COVID with the other revenues drying up, and now they are in huge industrial operations.
Building Scamming Infrastructure
Building satellite images are showing these buildings being built, identified as housing these scammers. So the actual person that you’re talking to might not actually be any less of a victim than you are if you lost money in these scams. New settlements are purposely built for crime; that’s what’s happening. So if you ever wonder what’s going on behind the scenes on the other side of the email, the other side of the messaging, a lot of times these people use WhatsApp or Telegram because they’re not easily traced. They use Bitcoin, and they start out maybe on social media, on Instagram, on Facebook, or maybe on dating sites, but immediately they go to WhatsApp or Telegram.
How Scammers Operate
How does it work? They sit at desks manning laptops and mobile phones loaded with fake profiles. They start out with a screening team that blasts out messages to hundreds of strangers, and anybody who replies goes to a different team who then builds a relationship. Once the target agrees to put money, they go on to another team, a technical team that handles transactions. They’re taught to escalate victims every day; if they don’t close deals and they don’t escalate, they get punished, beaten, forced to perform exercises. They spend hours a day online afraid to alert the outside world because of the threats of personal violence.
Sophistication of Scammers
One of the things you’re going to find is they’re very sophisticated with their psychology. Very, very intelligent, smart, upscale people in this country have been fooled into sending money because of the psychology they use. How do they do it? Well, some of the scammers that have escaped tell you the plan: day one, learn everything you can about the victim—family, job, where they live. Day two, ask about hobbies, pretend you like the same things, chat about relationships. Day four, now start talking about business. They have detailed scripts telling scammers exactly what to say, offering up options. Scammers are trained and tested; this is a very sophisticated process, just like any other company.
