Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve all been inundated with messages from friendly strangers on our phones. Few among us know where they were coming from, but in 2021, I acted on a newstip that led me to an unlikely discovery: the messages were originating in seedy casinos and online gambling parks located across Southeast Asia where thousands of young people were being forced to perpetrate online fraud against their will.
At the time, this newest form of human trafficking, dubbed “cyber-slavery,” had received no coverage in Western media. So I began a monthslong investigation into its origins for ProPublica. My September 2022 report profiled the intertwining stories of a young Chinese man who was forced by a criminal gang to fleece people and a Chinese-American man who fell victim to just such a fraud, losing his life savings as he mourned the death of his father. A wave of international news outlets followed my investigation, and I was glad to see that other major news outlets in the U.S. and abroad began covering this crisis.
But despite the mounting news coverage, the problem was only growing worse. In June 2023, Interpol issued a warning calling scam-linked human trafficking a “global threat” that is “more entrenched than previously thought” and spreading rapidly to other countries (Dubai, Mexico, Peru and Zambia among them). In August 2023, the United Nations Human Rights Office said at least 120,000 people across Myanmar may be working as forced scam laborers, plus an estimated 100,000 more in Cambodia. Volunteers and non-governmental organizations who helped human trafficking victims seek rescue were as busy as ever, and for every person rescued from Southeast Asia’s criminal fortresses, one or two more seemed to arrive almost daily.
It is against this backdrop that I felt my work wasn’t done.
I felt compelled to do more to tell this story and to explain the nexus of cryptocurrency, technology, psychological manipulation and human trafficking that spawned what one group of experts recently called “the most powerful criminal network of the modern era.” The Big Trace will tell the authoritative story of this new global threat, its enablers, and its devastating toll on millions of fraud and human trafficking victims around the world. Through my reporting, I hope to make your voices heard.
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