As an investigative journalist, I went from a New York bar to a beach town in Cambodia to explore how organised crime gangs use messaging to dupe Westerners.
The mysterious WhatsApp message arrived one night in August last year, while I was out at a bar with a friend: “Hi David, I’m Vicky Ho don’t you remember me?”
After a day, Vicky revealed her true love language: bitcoin price data. She started sending me charts. She told me she’d figured out how to predict market fluctuations and make quick gains of 20 per cent or more. The screenshots she shared showed that during that week alone she’d made $US18,600 on one trade, $US4320 on another and $US3600 on a third.
For a newbie, this might have been a little intimidating. But Vicky’s random text had found its way to pretty much exactly the wrong target. I’d been investigating the crypto bubble for more than a year, trying to figure out why the prices of bitcoin and hundreds of lesser coins – with ridiculous names like Dogecoin, Solana, Polkadot and Smooth Love Potion – were going up and up.
Vicky said that wasn’t enough. She told me I’d have to deposit $US500 in Tether to make the “short-term node” work. It was gibberish. When I didn’t send the money right away, she sent me a voice memo. “OK, Zeke, what are you doing?” she asked, in a high, soft, silky voice whose accent I couldn’t place. “I see you got my message. Why you not reply me back, huh?”
I’d been hearing rumours about illicit uses of Tether – I’d seen court documents containing intercepted messages from a Russian money launderer promoting it to his clients, for one thing – but pig-butchering was the most concrete example I found.of money to the con. A project finance lawyer in Boston with terminal cancer handed over $US2.5 million. A divorced mother of three in St Louis was defrauded of $US5 million.
Thousands have been tricked this way. Entire office towers are filled with floor after floor of people sending spam messages around the clock, under threat of torture or death. At street level were noodle shops, convenience stores, barber shops – many of them with signage in Chinese, rather than the local Khmer. Photos posted by one confused tourist showed that the shops were bisected by metal gates, preventing anyone who entered through the back door from exiting through the front.
Before heading to Cambodia, I stopped in Ho Chi Minh City to meet up with a young Vietnamese man named Thuy who said he’d escaped from Chinatown last year after being held for months and suffering brutal abuses. A YouTuber had paid a $US5000 ransom to free him, then filmed him for a series of lurid videos with titles like “The Story of Thuy Escaping From Hell on Earth” and “The Midnight Screams”.Thuy was 29 but looked younger, with a thin moustache and wavy bangs that covered his forehead.
He offered to demonstrate the hot-wiring. We found a shop, where I bought a used phone for about $US50. Then we went to my hotel, where, without hesitation, Thuy took apart an LED bulb in the lamp in my room. Using a USB cable he stripped with his teeth, he proceeded to wire the bulb to the iPhone’s battery. When he reinstalled it, the phone powered on.
who’d helped expose the scam-slavery problem. If they were in the US, they’d have won journalism awards. In Cambodia, things didn’t work that way. In a casino parking lot, a sign on a little booth caught my eye. It advertised money-transfer services in Vietnamese and Chinese. On it, I spotted a white “T” encircled in green: Tether’s logo. It didn’t prove anything, but it seemed odd that the first time I’d seen the logo outside a crypto conference was at an alleged human-trafficking hub.
When we went in, a clerk invited us to sit at a large marble desk, on white leather chairs embroidered with the Bentley logo. I was the only customer in the office, which had polished marble floors. In niches in the wall, I saw blue-and-white porcelain vases and a statue of a stag.I told the clerk, a friendly young Cambodian man in a football jersey, that I wanted to exchange Tether for US dollars.
Before we left, I spoke with Richard Jan, a veteran Taiwanese police officer who’d worked on the Big Fatty case. He said the Taiwanese government had rescued more than 400 victims of human trafficking in Cambodia last year. He’d travelled to Bokor to exfiltrate some victims himself. One of the young women his agency had rescued from the mountain had been beaten so badly she was nearly blinded. Jan told me other workers there had been killed.
I was a bit nervous to visit a human-trafficking gang’s mountain hideout. But Danielle explained that it wasn’t as dangerous as it sounded. Bokor was a tourist attraction, where visitors went to admire the ruins of French colonial mansions and the view from the mountaintop. Someone could take selfies 100 metres from the compound and have no idea anyone was trapped inside.
We packed up our stuff, got back in the van and made the slow, 120-kilometre drive to Sihanoukville. Starting about 2017, Sihanoukville was transformed by a casino-building boom fuelled by Chinese investors. Gambling is illegal in mainland China, outside state-run lotteries, but Sihanoukville is only a short flight away. And so skyscrapers and apartment blocks rose along dirt roads. Downtown filled up with domed structures flashing neon signs. Tens of thousands of Chinese workers flooded in.
Chinatown was outside the city centre, near one of the beaches. It was a massive grid of bleak, grey towers, just as the human-trafficking victims had described it, except many of the towers appeared to be empty. The authorities had announced five months earlier that they’d shut down one of the area’s biggest operations. This was after stories by Danielle and Dara and other outlets had made Chinatown a symbol of the government’s apparent tolerance of human trafficking.
Next to the compound was the KB Hotel – the one with the gilded facade that Thuy had shown me on the satellite images. I’d been told it housed sex workers. But now, it appeared to be open to the public. Its doors were flanked by coconut palm trees and manned by bellhops clad in black-and-gold knee pants, vests and loafers. I checked Booking.com and saw that, incredibly, the hotel was listed. A superior king room went for $US98 a night, breakfast included.
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