Duncan Okindo says he was lured to Southeast Asia last year by the promise of a customer service job in Thailand. Instead, he ended up spending four months in a scam compound on the lawless Myanmar-Thai border, where he saw first-hand how criminal groups are at scale.
Okindo, 26, says he was struggling to find a job as the breadwinner for his family in his native Kenya when a local recruitment agency promised him work in Bangkok. The flight was his first trip overseas. On landing, he says, he was abducted at the airport and spirited across the border, into the notorious KK Park complex, guarded by heavily armed men and fortified "like it was meant for war.”
The facility where Okindo was held was typical of the region’s scam compounds — complexes largely run by Chinese-led gangs and designed for fraud, where criminals target victims across the globe. He says he worked in a large room with hundreds of other forced laborers, all logged into desktop computers. Many used a free version of ChatGPT to craft messages designed to trick Americans into making bogus cryptocurrency investments, he said. Such schemes are known as pig-butchering, in which scammers meticulously cultivate victims’ trust before stealing their money.
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