Just before 8am one day last April, an office manager who went by the name Amani sent out a motivational message to his colleagues and subordinates. “Every day brings a new opportunity—a chance to connect, to inspire, and to make a difference,” he wrote in his 500-word post to an office-wide WhatsApp group. “Talk to that next customer like you're bringing them something valuable—because you are.”
Amani wasn’t rallying a typical corporate sales team. He and his underlings worked inside a “pig butchering” compound, a criminal operation built to carry out scams—promising romance and riches from crypto investments—that often defraud victims out of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars at a time.
Read the full story of WIRED's source, Mohammad Muzahir, here.
The workers Amani was addressing were eight hours into their 15-hour night shift in a high-rise building in the Golden Triangle special economic zone in Northern Laos. Like their marks, most of them were victims, too: forced laborers trapped in the compound, held in debt bondage with no passports. They struggled to meet scam revenue quotas to avoid fines that deepened their debt. Anyone who broke rules or attempted to escape faced far worse consequences: beatings, torture, even death.
The bizarre reality of daily life in a Southeast Asian scam compound—the tactics, the tone, the mix of cruelty and upbeat corporate prattle—is revealed at an unprecedented level of resolution in a leak of documents to WIRED from a whistleblower inside one such sprawling fraud operation. The facility, known as the Boshang compound, is one of dozens of scam operations across Southeast Asia that have enslaved hundreds of thousands of people. Often lured from the poorest regions of Asia and Africa with fake job offers, these conscripts have become engines of the most lucrative form of cybercrime in the world, coerced into stealing tens of billions of dollars.
Last June, one of those forced laborers, an Indian man named Mohammad Muzahir, contacted WIRED while he was still captive inside the scam compound that had trapped him. Over the following weeks, Muzahir, who initially identified himself only as “Red Bull,” shared with WIRED a trove of information about the scam operation. His leaks included internal documents, scam scripts, training guides, operational flowcharts, and photographs and videos from inside the compound.
Of all Muzahir’s leaks, the most revealing is a collection of screen recordings in which he scrolled through three months’ worth of the compound’s internal WhatsApp group chats. Those videos, which WIRED converted into 4,200 pages of screenshots, capture hour-by-hour conversations between the compound’s workers and their bosses—and the nightmare workplace culture of a pig butchering organization.
“It’s a slave colony that’s trying to pretend it’s a company,” says Erin West, a former Santa Clara County, California, prosecutor who leads an anti-scam organization called Operation Shamrock and who reviewed the chat logs obtained by WIRED. Another researcher who reviewed the leaked chat logs, Jacob Sims of Harvard University’s Asia Center, also remarked on their “Orwellian veneer of legitimacy.”
“It’s terrifying, because it’s manipulation and coercion,” says Sims, who studies Southeast Asian scam compounds. “Combining those two things together motivates people the most. And it’s one of the key reasons why these compounds are so profitable.”
In another chat message, sent within hours of Amani’s saccharine pep talk, a higher-level boss weighed in: “Don't resist the company's rules and regulations,” he wrote. “Otherwise you can't survive here.” The staffers responded with 26 emoji reactions, all thumbs-ups and salutes.
Scam compound whistleblower Mohammad Muzahir, photographed in India after returning home from his ordeal as a forced laborer in the Golden Triangle.
Photograph: Saumya Khandelwal
Fined Into Slavery
In total, according to WIRED’s analysis of the group chat, more than 30 of the compound’s workers successfully defrauded at least one victim in the 11 weeks of records available, totaling to around $2.2 million in stolen funds. Yet the bosses in the chat frequently voiced their disappointment in the group’s performance, berated the staff for lack of effort, and imposed fine after fine.
Rather than explicit imprisonment, the compound relied on a system of indentured servitude and debt to control its workers. As Muzahir described it, he was paid a base salary of 3,500 Chinese yuan a month (about $500), which in theory entailed 75 hours a week of night shifts including breaks to eat. Although his passport had been taken from him, he was told that if he could pay off his “contract” with a $5,400 payment, it would be returned to him and he would be allowed to leave.