TIME: Poppies to Pig-Butchering: Inside the Golden Triangle’s Criminal Reboot
It all started with a Facebook ad. Rachel Yoong was bored and fed up at work when a job posting for a casino in the Myanmar capital Yangon popped up on her phone. The purported $4,500 monthly salary was seven times what the Malaysian earned as a real estate agent in Kuala Lumpur, so she eagerly applied. Before long, Yoong was invited to two separate interviews with suave, well-attired agents. By July 2022, she was booked on a flight to Yangon and upon arrival told to rest up in a hotel. On the third day a car arrived to take her to her new place of work.
“But when I got inside there were two big, tough guys with guns,” Yoong, 30, tells TIME. “That’s the moment I knew I was in trouble.”
Instead of a casino in the city, Yoong says she was driven over 18 hours through 700 miles of winding mountain roads to Myanmar’s lawless northern region of Kokang by the border with China. There, she was sequestered in what was effectively a 10-story concrete prison inside state capital Laukkai with about 200 other human trafficking victims from China, Taiwan, Malaysia, and elsewhere across Asia. Sleeping eight to a cell, they were forced to conduct online scams for 17 hours each day, posing as attractive women using photos gleaned from social media to dupe predominantly American victims out of as much cash as possible. Those who didn’t meet their target of $1,000 every three days were subjected to beatings, electrocutions, and worse. “I saw three people die,” says Yoong. “One coworker jumped from the roof; two others were pushed.”
Yoong is one of hundreds of thousands of people across Southeast Asia and beyond who have been lured by fake job adverts into “pig-butchering” scam centers. (The term stems from fattening a hog for slaughter.) Whereas victims were originally drawn from Chinese-speaking communities in Malaysia, Thailand, or Singapore, today people are being trafficked to the region from as far afield as South America, East Africa, and Western Europe. Other than beatings, workers are subjected to sexual assault, rape, and having their organs forcibly harvested, according to Interpol. “What began as a regional crime threat has become a global human trafficking crisis,” said Interpol Secretary General Jürgen Stock.