Posing as ‘Alicia,’ this man scammed hundreds online. He was also a victim.

MAE SOT, Thailand—In late December, Guracha Belachew Bersha helped lead a small but brazen rebellion.

He’d been enslaved for 16 months in a twisted new criminal empire in which Chinese gangsters traffic people from around the world, often to remote and lawless parts of Southeast Asia, and force them to sit at computers all day scamming strangers online. The cyber frauds they’re forced to commit are called pig butchering, named for the way the perpetrators fatten up their victims by gaining their trust before taking their money and cutting them loose.

Behind the scenes, the scammers are victims too.

At the time of the uprising, his life was like an episode of the dystopian TV show “Black Mirror.” The 41-year-old IT professional from Ethiopia, who goes by the nickname Billy, was trapped in a criminal enclave in Myanmar, where his captors made him assume the fake online alter ego of a rich Singaporean woman they called Alicia. He had to memorize a manual on how to seduce men online and manipulate them into pouring their money into bogus investments.

After weeks of secret planning late last year, Billy and others in his dormitory went on strike. Punishment was swift. Billy said he was handcuffed and hung by his wrists for about a week where the other captives could see him suffering. Then he said he was taken to an unlit bathroom stall and tortured. For another week, his captors beat him and said he’d have to scrounge up $7,000 if he wanted to be freed.

Billy’s scarred and swollen hands trembled as he spoke with The Wall Street Journal at a safe house in Thailand earlier this year, shortly after his family paid the ransom and he was dropped off across the border. He and three others with him were among a few hundred who have made it out in recent years from industrial-scale scam enterprises built on a modern-day slave trade.

The scale of these operations and their rapid expansion is hard to fathom. The United Nations says hundreds of thousands of people like Billy may have been trafficked to Myanmar and Cambodia for what they call “forced criminality,” a new and perverse phenomenon in which people are threatened or tortured into committing illegal acts. Trafficking of people into Southeast Asia for this purpose in recent years has been documented from dozens of countries across Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia—and even the United States.

More traumatic than the physical abuse, Billy said, was being confronted by victims whose lives he was forced to ruin. Scam syndicates swindle tens of billions of dollars each year from people all over the world. Victims often lose their retirement funds, their families, their will to live.

One Pakistani man, who had a wife and four children, became obsessed with the woman Billy portrayed and wrote her long essays that read like desperate love poems. When Billy stopped responding, he said the man sent him a video of himself throwing acid on his face.

“Until I die I can’t forget it,” Billy said.

Lawless corridor

At the epicenter of the global scam industry is a lawless corridor carved from Myanmar’s eastern border—a 3,000 mile stretch of jungle-covered mountains that military-allied warlords and rebel armies have ruled as fiefdoms since the country’s independence.

Over decades, many of them built fortunes smuggling drugs, weapons, wildlife and people. They laundered their illicit profits through casinos serving clientele from neighboring China. A few years ago, they discovered an even easier way to make money: They could simply trick people online into depositing cash directly into their bank accounts.

Chinese gangs based in Cambodia, another major haven for cyber scammers, shifted some operations to this new fertile ground. Scams surged during the Covid-19 pandemic as trade and gambling revenues dried up. A military coup in Myanmar in 2021 fueled even more lawlessness.

Satellite images show nondescript buildings rising from freshly flattened hillsides and farmlands around 2017. Since then, nonprofits that monitor the area say they’ve identified hundreds of buildings housing scam dens in dozens of towns and industrial zones along the border.

Some of the scam centers have attached themselves like barnacles to towns that also have legitimate businesses. Others appear to be entirely new settlements purpose-built for crime.

Inside, scammers typically sit at desks manning laptops and mobile phones loaded with fake user profiles. Six former scammers interviewed by the Journal said the scam dens range widely in sophistication and propensity for abusing staff. But they all described a similar tiered labor system.

A screening team blasts out messages to hundreds of strangers a day, and passes those who reply to a different team, who then build relationships with the targets. Once the target agrees to put money on the table, they’re passed on to another, more technical team that handles transactions. Scammers are expected to “escalate” a certain number of victims each day.

If they don’t, they may be punished. The former scammers described punishments ranging from being beaten with sticks and shocked with cattle prods to being “baked”—forced to perform exercises like frog jumps in the sun in front of the others.

Though they spend hours each day online, the captives are afraid to alert the outside world. Billy said he had a mobile phone and communicated with his family, but he never let on that anything was wrong because his device was monitored.

In response to questions from the Journal, the Myanmar military’s information department acknowledged criminal activity along its border, but blamed rebel groups for undermining law and order. It said it is working with authorities in neighboring countries to suppress illegal gambling and cyber fraud.

Some rebel groups and outside monitors question how hard the regime is trying. The U.S. Institute of Peace, a Washington-based think tank that focuses on conflict mitigation, says “scam compounds have been protected and run by affiliates of the military junta” in Myanmar.

Border gateway

One of the main gateways into the crime belt is a border junction connecting the Myanmar town of Myawaddy to the Thai town of Mae Sot, a rustic valley outpost home to an eclectic mix of eager “voluntourists,” scruffy aid workers, migrants, refugees and exiled activists from Myanmar.  All roads into Mae Sot are dotted with police and military checkpoints. Somehow, truckloads of trafficking victims regularly slip past them to reach the town’s network of crime-friendly hotels and taxis that help them finish the journey to Myanmar.

Thailand’s foreign ministry said the country cooperates with neighbors to address cross-border crimes such as human trafficking, online scams and drug trafficking, and outlined Thailand’s efforts to identify and protect victims.

About a 20-minute drive south of Mae Sot, one of the most notorious compounds can be seen from the country road that winds along the border. Cranes dot the skyline of KK Park, where scores of buildings have sprung up since 2020 and newer, larger ones are now under construction.

“They’re obviously not hiding,” said Amy Miller, an anti-trafficking advocate who is now the regional director of a nonprofit called Acts of Mercy International. “Here they are, in plain sight.”

Most are simple, blocky structures that look like they could be factories, dormitories or even jails. They have windows, but few and small. Surrounding the parts of the roughly one-square-mile development closest to the river that demarcates the border is a cement wall crowned with barbed wire.

The first rescue

Judah Tana and his wife were hosting a dinner one night in mid-2022 when their guest, a close friend who worked on humanitarian issues, received an unusual message on Facebook. The sender said she was from Kenya and was held captive inside a building with six others just across the border.

Tana has lived in Mae Sot for almost two decades and the couple run a nonprofit called Global Advance Projects, which provided education and medical services for poor communities.

At first, they thought the message was a prank, or itself a scam designed to get them to send money. But all the sender asked for was help contacting her embassy. She seemed genuinely desperate and distressed. Tana decided to help her and the others escape.

He made a few phone calls to personal connections to secure the Kenyans’ release, and was told to pick them up at a drop site on the Thai side of the border.

Word spread among diplomatic missions about how Tana helped the Kenyans. Many had received messages from citizens who said their loved ones went missing after they traveled to Thailand for work. Tana was suddenly swamped with official calls from Kazakhstan, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and elsewhere.

People still stuck inside the compounds also heard what happened. The messages and calls became more frequent as they memorized his number and passed it around by word-of-mouth. When they got out, many shared similar stories of being recruited for what they thought were legitimate jobs in Thailand, then trafficked to Myanmar and brutally abused.

“That first seven led to 20 more, then 50, then 100,” he said. Rescuing trafficking victims from scam dens in Myanmar has since become his full-time job.

Tana began to see the horrifying scale of the problem. There isn’t just one KK Park, he learned. There’s KK II, and KK III, and KK IV.

“It started from just a few small buildings here, which were numbered by the alphabet, and they would hold several hundred, then several thousand victims,” he said, adding: “The growth was astronomical.”

To the north, buildings across a development called Yatai New City were infested with similar scam dens. Nearby was another plain and prison-like complex, which has no signage and is known only by the name of its access pier: Gate 25. To the south is Mountain View and Dongmei Zone, backed by a Chinese gangster named Wan Kuok-koi, also known as “Broken Tooth.”

Some people, like Billy, said they were sold several times and surreptitiously shuttled from one hellish compound to another. “This is like slavery to me,” Billy said.

Country in chaos

When Billy boarded a flight to Bangkok in August 2022, he left behind a country in chaos.

The Ethiopian government’s war against militants in the Tigray region was one of the bloodiest conflicts in modern history, displacing millions of people since it began in 2020. The economy was crumbling, making it an easy target for traffickers.

Billy came from a poor family. The second of seven children, he had worked hard to change his fate. He studied computer science in the Ethiopian city of Hawassa, then earned his masters degree in automation engineering at a university in Chengdu, China. He is fluent in Amharic, the main language of Ethiopia, as well as English and Mandarin.

After graduating, he worked a few odd jobs in Chengdu and stayed four years. He dated women from cultures vastly different from his own. He’d been to Thailand as a tourist and enjoyed relaxing with a beer on its beaches.

When a fintech firm called Huilong Network offered him a job there, it sounded like a dream.

Nothing about the recruitment process struck him as suspect. He did a virtual interview with a man who spoke to him in both Chinese and English before receiving a letter offering a seven-month contract earning a $1,500 monthly salary.

Upon arriving in Bangkok, he was given a generous cash per diem and told to wait in a nice hotel. Two days later, a driver picked him up and drove him and three other victims to Mae Sot.

After the eight-hour journey, they checked him into a guesthouse where staff held onto his passport. Around midnight, the driver told him it was time to go. By now, Billy knew something was wrong. He monitored their location on his mobile phone and realized he was about to cross a border, but by then there was nothing he could do to stop it.

“It was like a scary movie,” he said.

A short while later, Billy was inside KK Park. He said he was given a physical exam, then dropped off at a dormitory. The next day, his new handlers told him he’d been duped, and instead of being a marketing specialist he would have a different job: scammer.

On the second day, he refused to work. On the third, guards beat his legs until he couldn’t stand. After that he complied, but he didn’t excel at the job—his heart wasn’t in it. Three months later his captors sold him to a different compound in Laos.

Some six months later he was sold again, he doesn’t know why, and taken to the Mountain View compound in Myanmar.

As at the other two compounds, his bosses at Mountain View were Chinese. He said about 100 people worked for his company, which had no name, including management and scammers like him. Roughly half were Chinese, about a third were Ethiopian. The rest, he said, were mostly from Uganda.

Billy and another Ethiopian who escaped from the same compound, Alfan Gebu, said that on arrival they were given a PDF and told to memorize it. It contained photos and the backstory of the fake persona that both men were to use online—the Singaporean jetsetter named Alicia—and chapters explaining each step of the scam.

Day 1: Learn everything you can about your victim. Ask about their family, their job, where they live. Size up what they’re worth and if they’re vulnerable.

Day 2: Ask about their hobbies, and pretend you like the same things. Suggest to them that they enjoy shared interests together.

Day 3: Chat about past relationships. That night, confess that you’ve had a few drinks and tell the person that you like them.

Day 4: By now, they’re usually ready to start talking business.

The PDF contained detailed scripts telling the scammers exactly what words to use. It was like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, offering up options if the conversation took certain turns, or ran into obstacles like a suspicious wife or financial controls at the bank.

The scammers are trained and tested, Billy and Alfan said. Then they’re given about six mobile phones with WhatsApp and Telegram, and a laptop loaded with photos and videos of their alias, Alicia, as well as random pictures of things like food and pets and cars.

In the beginning, when they’re learning, the screening team will send them three to five potential victims per day. If they’re good at the job, they’ll get more. Their company mainly targeted men from the Middle East and South Asia.

Billy said he handled 15 to 20 cases every day for 16 months—hundreds of victims. He still has vivid memories of the men he was forced to deceive. Some were wealthy, with high-profile careers and families. Others were poor, losing what little they had.

One such victim was a goat farmer from rural Pakistan. He believed his luck had turned and that Alicia would make him rich. He invested the roughly $280 he had to his name, and sold his belongings to try to earn a little more. Billy left him with nothing but his herd and a modest hut.

The scammers eventually learned that the better they performed, the less they were punished. They spared themselves some physical pain but suffered severe psychological trauma.

“It’s real people scamming real people, and those people have feelings, they have emotions, they have memories,” said Mechelle Moore, the Mae Sot-based chief executive of an anti-trafficking nonprofit called Global Alms Incorporated.

“They’re put into survival mode, where you either think you’re going to die or be extremely hurt in some way, and you choose to comply,” she said. “It’s absolutely disgusting and devastating.”

The ransom

Billy, whose family paid a $7,000 ransom for his release, was disoriented when a taxi—arranged by his former captors—dropped him off at a hotel on the outskirts of Mae Sot.

The hotel was part of the network of local businesses that abet criminals, one that wouldn’t report him to immigration authorities for not having a valid visa. He knew that if he tried to leave by bus, he’d be detained as soon as they hit a checkpoint. So he booked a room and waited for a miracle.

A few days later, Gebu and two other Ethiopians arrived there, too. Their families had all paid ransoms to end their torture. Billy said his father raised most of the money by selling his home in Ethiopia. His best friend borrowed to pay the balance.

They laid low for almost two weeks in the hotel, only going out to eat at a restaurant across the street. Billy crossed the border with only the equivalent of about $85.

“Once they get across the border, they have nowhere to go, they’re still stuck inside the criminal ecosystem,” said Tana, of Global Advance Projects. He said some people who manage to get out of the compounds end up so desperate that they’re ultimately lured right back in.

Tana has contacts that keep an eye out for strangers in neighborhoods known to have complicit businesses. One of them spotted the Ethiopians at the restaurant and suspected they’d come from the compounds.

That’s how the escapees found Tana, who picked them up and took them to a safe house where they received medical treatment and legal help.

Moore, of the anti-trafficking nonprofit, said they’ve assisted more than 600 people. They have a 72-hour window to provide as much help as they can before informing authorities of their arrival in Thailand.

Billy and the others were deported to Ethiopia in early March.

It hasn’t been easy to settle back in. Billy and the others haven’t been able to find jobs since they returned. There are few opportunities, and potential employers are turned off by their reluctance to explain what they’ve been doing for the past year or so, they said.

Billy shares a small apartment with his best friend in a suburb of Addis Ababa. He prefers this to going back to the village where his family lives. He’s too ashamed to face them every day after costing them the family home and making them worry.

It’s also hard for him to hide his trauma, which he doesn’t want his family to see. All four men have trouble sleeping. They often call each other in the middle of the night.

“My mind’s not working straight, I need to take time to heal myself,” Billy said. “Maybe I’ll go camping. For one month. Or two months. Or three.”