MAE SOT, Thailand—In late December, Guracha Belachew Bersha helped lead a small but brazen rebellion.
He’d been enslaved for 16 months in a twisted new criminal empire in which Chinese gangsters traffic people from around the world, often to remote and lawless parts of Southeast Asia, and force them to sit at computers all day scamming strangers online. The cyber frauds they’re forced to commit are called pig butchering, named for the way the perpetrators fatten up their victims by gaining their trust before taking their money and cutting them loose.
Behind the scenes, the scammers are victims too.
At the time of the uprising, his life was like an episode of the dystopian TV show “Black Mirror.” The 41-year-old IT professional from Ethiopia, who goes by the nickname Billy, was trapped in a criminal enclave in Myanmar, where his captors made him assume the fake online alter ego of a rich Singaporean woman they called Alicia. He had to memorize a manual on how to seduce men online and manipulate them into pouring their money into bogus investments.
After weeks of secret planning late last year, Billy and others in his dormitory went on strike. Punishment was swift. Billy said he was handcuffed and hung by his wrists for about a week where the other captives could see him suffering. Then he said he was taken to an unlit bathroom stall and tortured. For another week, his captors beat him and said he’d have to scrounge up $7,000 if he wanted to be freed.
Billy’s scarred and swollen hands trembled as he spoke with The Wall Street Journal at a safe house in Thailand earlier this year, shortly after his family paid the ransom and he was dropped off across the border. He and three others with him were among a few hundred who have made it out in recent years from industrial-scale scam enterprises built on a modern-day slave trade.
The scale of these operations and their rapid expansion is hard to fathom. The United Nations says hundreds of thousands of people like Billy may have been trafficked to Myanmar and Cambodia for what they call “forced criminality,” a new and perverse phenomenon in which people are threatened or tortured into committing illegal acts. Trafficking of people into Southeast Asia for this purpose in recent years has been documented from dozens of countries across Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia—and even the United States.
