In the Dubai desert lies a scam factory capable of swindling tens of thousands of people at a time. But one scammer has a secret plan that could shut the whole syndicate down.
Out in the desert on the outskirts of Dubai sits a secret scam factory capable of swindling tens of thousands of people at a time.
When Evan arrived at the destination, all he could see was four office buildings, each eight storeys high, with nothing around them. Evan's job was to fatten the pig. He'd spend all day messaging up to 40-50 potential victims on WhatsApp, pretending to be a rich woman from Ukraine called "Annie"."We had pictures on our computers and videos of this lady being in fancy places, eating fancy food, sitting there just being beautiful," says Evan.They were of a model sitting in another room of the compound, waiting just in case a victim got suspicious and wanted to get on a video call.
"Each time you made a mistake, your credit score on the website went down and in order to get your credit score back, you had to pay them credit money or risk money … it became very stressful very, very quickly."Sargant began asking questions. He was told that the company behind the crypto website was based in New York, but when he rang the building, the doorman told him the company didn't exist.All up, Sargant had invested and lost over $1 million.
"And then if you looked at the building … there were definitely in excess of a thousand people working in that sort of scam." "So people would understand how it works, how to avoid it, how to spot the scam, and to warn someone else of it," he says.Worlds collide "It was one of those moments where it was like, OK, well this is pretty amazing — it was the same group."They went to the compound, where they were able to verify the evidence they had seen in Evan's recordings, then took this to Dubai Police.Their findings showed that the scam syndicate was being operated by Chinese nationals using a virtual company known as Gold Investment Financial Group and Hong Kong bank accounts had been used to launder victims' money.
"It's a catastrophic crime … authorities need to do more proactive enforcement in relation to the criminal organisations that are targeting our country.""But we're not doing that in this country," he says. Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services Stephen Jones told the ABC that the government had taken a number of measures including setting up the National Anti-Scam Centre, introducing the SMS registry and funding ASIC's scam website take-down service, and would soon legislate mandatory industry codes.Evan says often workers don't aspire to be scammers.
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