Amani wasn’t rallying a typical corporate sales team. He and his subordinates operated inside a “pig butcher” complex, a criminal operation designed to carry out scams – promises of romance and wealth from crypto investments – that often defrauded victims of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars at a time.
The workers Amani was addressing were working eight-hour, 15-hour night shifts in a high-rise building in the Golden Triangle special economic zone in northern Laos. Like their marks, most of them were victims: forced laborers trapped in the compound, without passports, bound by debt. He struggled to meet the scam’s revenue quotas to avoid fines, further increasing his debt. Anyone who broke the rules or tried to escape faced dire consequences: beatings, torture, even death.
The bizarre reality of daily life in the Southeast Asian scam complex — a mix of tactics, tone, cruelty, and spirited corporate nonsense — is revealed on an unprecedented level in the leak of documents to WIRED from a whistleblower inside such a widespread fraud operation. The facility, known as the Baoshang Compound, is one of dozens of scam operations in Southeast Asia that have enslaved hundreds of thousands of people. Often lured by fake job offers from the poorest regions of Asia and Africa, these criminals have become the engines of the most lucrative form of cybercrime in the world, and are forced to steal billions of dollars.
Last June, one of those forced laborers, an Indian man named Mohammed Mujahir, contacted WIRED while he was still held captive inside the scam complex that had trapped him. Over the following weeks, Mujahir, who initially identified himself only as “Red Bull”, shared a wealth of information with WIRED about the operation of the scam. Their leaks included internal documents, scam scripts, training guides, operational flowcharts, and photos and videos from inside the premises.
Of all of Muzahir’s leaks, the most revealing is a collection of screen recordings in which he scrolled through three months’ worth of Compound’s internal WhatsApp group chats. Those videos, which WIRED turned into 4,200 pages of screenshots, capture the hour-by-hour interactions between campus workers and their bosses and the nightmarish workplace culture of the pig-slicing organization.
“It’s a slave colony trying to pretend it’s a company,” says Erin West, a former prosecutor in Santa Clara County, California, who leads an anti-scam organization called Operation Shamrock and who reviewed chat logs obtained by WIRED. Another researcher who reviewed the leaked chat logs, Jacob Sims of Harvard University’s Asia Center, also commented on their “Orwellian veil of legality”.
“It’s horrifying, because it’s manipulation And Coercion,” says Sims, who studies Southeast Asian scam compounds. “Combining those two things together is what inspires people the most. And this is one of the major reasons why these compounds are so beneficial.”
In another chat message sent within hours of Amani’s fiery talk, a high-level boss said: “Do not contradict company rules and regulations,” he wrote. “Otherwise you won’t be able to survive here.” Employees responded with 26 emoji reactions, all thumbs-up and salutes.
fined for slavery
Overall, accordingly According to WIRED’s analysis of the group chats, more than 30 employees at the complex successfully defrauded at least one victim in the 11 weeks of available records, with a total of approximately $2.2 million stolen. Yet in chat the bosses repeatedly expressed their disappointment at the group’s performance, scolding employees for lack of effort and issuing fines one after another.
Instead of outright imprisonment, the compound relied on a system of indentured servitude and debt to control its workers. As Mujahir reported, he was paid a basic salary of 3,500 Chinese yuan (about $500) per month, which theoretically included night shifts of 75 hours a week, including meal breaks. Although his passport was taken from him, he was told that if he could pay off his “contract” with a payment of $5,400, it would be returned and he would be allowed to leave.
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