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Just before 8am One day last April, an office manager named Amani sent a motivational message to his colleagues and subordinates. “Every day brings a new opportunity – a chance to connect, inspire and make a difference,” he wrote in his 500-word post to an office-wide WhatsApp group. “Talk to the next customer like you’re offering them something of value, because you are.”
Amani did not assemble a typical corporate sales team. He and his followers were working inside…Slaughtering pigs“A complex, a criminal operation built to carry out Tricks– Promising romance and riches from encryption Investments – that mostly Defrauding victims of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars at a time.
The workers Amani was addressing were eight hours into their 15-hour night shift in a high-rise in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in northern Laos. Like their markers, most of them were victims too: the forced laborers trapped in the compound, held in debt bondage without passports. They struggled to meet fraud revenue quotas to avoid fines that deepened their debt. Anyone who breaks the rules or tries to escape faces much worse consequences: beatings, torture, and even death.
The bizarre reality of daily life in a Southeast Asian scam complex — the tactics, the tone, the mix of cruelty and upbeat corporate chatter — is revealed with an unprecedented level of precision in the leak of documents to WIRED from a whistleblower inside one of the sprawling scams. The facility, known as the Boshang Complex, is one of dozens of scams across Southeast Asia that have enslaved hundreds of thousands of people. These recruits are often lured from the poorest regions of Asia and Africa with fake job offers, and have become engines of the world’s most profitable form of cybercrime, being forced to steal tens of billions of dollars.
Last June, one of these forced laborers, an Indian man named Mohamed Mohader, contacted WIRED while he was still captive inside the fraud complex in which he was trapped. Over the following weeks, Mazhar, who initially identified himself only as “Red Bull,” shared with WIRED a range of information about the scam. His leaks included internal documents, fraudulent scripts, training manuals, operational blueprints, photos and videos from inside the complex.
Of all Mudahir’s leaks, the most revealing is a set of screen recordings in which he scrolls through three months of the complex’s internal WhatsApp group conversations. These videos, which WIRED turned into 4,200 pages of screenshots, capture hour-by-hour conversations between complex workers and their bosses — and the hog-slaughtering organization’s nightmarish workplace culture.
“It’s a slave colony trying to pretend to be a corporation,” says Erin West, a former prosecutor in Santa Clara County, California, who leads an anti-fraud organization called Operation Shamrock and who reviewed the chat logs obtained by WIRED. Another researcher who reviewed the leaked chat logs, Jacob Sims of Harvard University’s Asia Center, also commented on the “Orwellian veneer of legitimacy.”
“It’s terrifying, because it’s manipulation and “Coercion,” says Sims, who studies fraud vehicles in Southeast Asia. “The combination of those two things together motivates people the most. That’s one of the main reasons why these vehicles are so profitable.”
In another chat message, sent within hours of Amani’s pep talk, a senior manager wrote: “Don’t fight company rules and regulations.” “Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to stay here.” Employees responded with 26 emojis, all of them thumbs up and high fives.
Fineed into slavery
In total, according to According to a WIRED analysis of the group chat, more than 30 pool workers successfully defrauded at least one victim over the 11 weeks of available records, for a total of about $2.2 million in stolen funds. However, bosses in the chat frequently expressed disappointment in the group’s performance, reprimanded employees for not making an effort, and imposed fine after fine.
Instead of outright imprisonment, the complex relied on slavery and debt to control its workers. As Muzahir described, he was paid a basic salary of 3,500 Chinese yuan a month (about $500), which theoretically entailed 75 hours a week of night shifts including meal breaks. Although his passport was taken from him, he was told that if he could pay off his “contract” of $5,400, it would be returned to him and he would be allowed to leave.