It's a bit of a shame that the article is written only from the Japanese perspective. I would have been more interested in knowing China's position over this whole affair. Given that:
- The original investors were Chinese
- The video footage shown is hosted on a Chinese platform
- The signage on the videos for "restaurants" and "hospitals" in the videos is in Chinese
- "A Chinese-style drum would echo through the compound each time a deposit of over $100,000 was received"
And the fact that Thailand receives a great deal of Chinese tourists, I expect at least some of the kidnappings affecting Chinese citizens - and then some of the scam victims to be Chinese as well.
I would expect China to be more affected and to able to exert more influence over this situation than Japan.
China is very affected and has been tightening the screws hard. The situation really blew up when a Chinese actor was lured to Thailand, kidnapped across the border and forced to work in a scam center:
But the scammer choose lawless places like Myanmar for a reason and while China can exert pressure on individual bigwigs, they can't stop those small enough to fly under the radar.
China has the same culture- and the same scamming problematic. Its like a bigger mafiosi promising to solve crime and restore order by sending a lowlevel thief to the fishes.
Low-thrust societies can not be repaired by topdown level commands. All that happens, is yet another paint job, another face restoring measurement, while the rot behind remains the same.This is not some "aberration" from the fringe of the Chinese empire- this right here, is a sample of its core values under the CCP, undiluted by propaganda cosmetics.
The country is having a civil war for the last 60 years and was under sanctions until something like 2015. What else would anybody expect to be happening besides this, whoring in nearby Thailand and genociding minorities?
The scam centers started around 2017. They are stared in collaboration with BFG which is under command of Military.
60 year cilvil war is nothing compare to current Revoultionary war where due to military coup and 90% of people are against Military and youth formed alliances called PDF , and getting arms , miltiary training , fighting back to restore the country's democracy and rule of law.
But during that , Rule of Law is totally diminished and we are under rise of crime. The military regime allow the scams center to free roam and let the thugs to do what they want to create unrest.
This is about to get way worse with AI. They'll be able to call you, say nothing, you'll answer, "hello?" and then hang up and by then they've cloned your voice and left a message on your parents' answering machine that sounds like you begging for them to transfer money because you're in danger. They'll be video calling everybody on linkedin with a job in accounting and will have the face and voice of their boss, asking them to transfer money. The situation is about to be terrible, and the only thing keeping it remotely in check is that most people choose to be somewhat moral.
> by then they've cloned your voice and left a message on your parents' answering machine that sounds like you begging for them to transfer money because you're in danger.
You don't need to clone someone's voice for that; that's a scam common enough that one of my parents almost fell for it. Cloning someone's voice might tick up the likelihood of success by some amount, but would the investment in the research-and-infrastructure (spinning up the machines to clone the voice, researching the person you're planning on scamming to find their relatives' phone numbers, etc) be worthwhile when you can just dial every phone number in the tri-state area and just try it with a panicked-sounding young woman's voice?
Yes and no; there is a tipping point, past which hardware/software vendors will be forced to adopt countermeasures and new ways to verify identity.
We will lose a lot though; the most prosperous societies really rely on high levels of interpersonal trust (which allows people to easily do things together, whether that's leaving their buggy outside when they go to buy a coffee or commercial relations). It would be a shame to see that get destroyed.
I find it difficult to believe that AI will ever be able to clone your voice with just one word being said. There is a lot of variety in someone's voice thats not captured with the word "hello". Additionally, people have been saying for years that they can simply record you saying "Yes" and use that to agree to things but I have yet to see an epidemic of that being an issue either.
This is also the danger with these - apparent - AI meeting attendant bots being a thing now; organizations should ban them wholesale, as if they're unknown / unauthorised 3rd party ones, who knows what they'll do with the voice data of e.g. the boss.
On the capability side, I say hello _when you call me_ differently than _when I call you_. Anybody who knows me will certainly have a sense something is off.
Socially, we all should be used to the idea of calling back using official numbers, and not closing an agreement on the first call.
But this is a numbers game. I imagine this vector would be more successful on third-world migrant workers, than in the first-world economies.
I always thought that people willfully participate in scams to make more money. For example, I know there are quite a few telephone scam centers in India, that call US folks for SSN fraud etc. I thought these folks just work for salary.
It's scary to look at the scale of 'organized' crime / modern slavery. This is almost like Squid Games.
Three months ago there is a report that 119 Thai citizens were deported from Cambodia after a call center ring was busted. Out of these numbers, 100 willfully worked for the ring. 15 worked for the illegal gambling establishment. Only 4 minors are reportedly the victim of human trafficking. Ironically, when those people came back (willfully or otherwise), they will claim that they were being "misled" or "coerced" to do it even though the evidence suggests that they willfully do so.
Thai authorities are trying to combat this issue by cutting off supply of basic utilities (electricity, network connection) to hinder their work. The government claimed that this reduces the volume of scam attempts by 20%, though it's not entirely gone as long as they can find a way to circumvent it
> Out of these numbers, 100 willfully worked for the ring. 15 worked for the illegal gambling establishment. Only 4 minors are reportedly the victim of human trafficking. Ironically, when those people came back (willfully or otherwise), they will claim that they were being "misled" or "coerced" to do it even though the evidence suggests that they willfully do so.
Exactly. Same as when prostitutes get picked up. They say they're trafficked or coerced to get a lighter sentence. Cops love it because they get to act like they're on the tail of serious crime and get more resources. Win-win at the expense of everyone else.
While I don't doubt that happens, the article shows complexes surrounded by walls and numerous guard towers. I think it is safe to assume that most of the people inside these facilities are not there voluntarily.
There was a talk on the last CCC that covered romance scams from "call centers" in similar conditions in Myanmar. It gives some insights into the daily life from the perspective of someone who managed to flee the compound and take some documents with him. I was very surprised at the level of sophistication and organization that went into this scam. I knew about the tech support scam centers, but I still saw romance scam as something done on the individual level, not fully organized.
Romance scams of the mail order bride variety were pretty orginized, but not that sophisticated about 10-15 years ago in where I'm from. Was mostly a quick cash opportunity for studends of language faculties that had moral complex lax enough to scam people, but not lax enough to do outright prostitution.
Prostitution seems much more moral than scamming people. Charge for service, provide service. I certainly have far more respect for sex workers than thieves / scammers.
This is too simple of a take. The vast majority of prostitutes are not adult, willing, un-coerced independent contractors who take a short-term engagement. The money is made by the drug-supplying pimps and organizations that groom minors or prey on people who have no other way to support their habit. This is not moral and very different from the theoretical concept of prostitution.
That's not true in my experience. I've had friends who worked in or adjacent to the industry in several countries.
While there are obviously significant numbers of minors involved and some workers forced into it, the majority are not. Most are just struggling financially and trying to support themselves and/or families. Many are single moms. Many well over 18.
Scams will always exist, so long as there are things of value and humans are involved. See different unofficial currencies used in prisons.
When it comes to scams, part of the scam is aiding the victim to making a transaction in a way that can’t be reversed. Cryptocurrencies, call cards, gift cards, even in-game currencies for online games. As long as it is liquid and carries a value, some entrepreneurial scammer will try to use it to increase their profit. Official currency transfer channels (banks, remittance centers) are usually the focus of laws and law enforcement, so scammers know to move to other forms of value. Cut-outs and fences are common in many forms of scams because these are tools that help them avoid the banking systems until the scammed value is laundered.
Current LLMs still struggle with real-time dynamic conversation and cultural context switching that sophisticated scams require, though they excel at scripted interactions and will likely augment rather than replace human scammers in the near term.
Yes, but most of these scam call centeres don't engage in sophisticated scams. They have pople fumbling through scripts. There's not much improvising. It's all about the quantity and finding the victims who are willing to look past the sea of red flags.
Why not? As well as optimizing the scripts, AI callers can deliver them, and even optimize voice/accent/delivery for manipulating the particular target.
From what I've read, the cost of an llm would be greater than the current operators who are effectively enslaved. If it were cheaper then possibly - certainly easier to manage than people who would try to escape their dire situation here.
The best AI voice generation is already much more realistic than the typical TikTok robotic voices, and they're only going to get better. It won't be long before the only reason anyone will generate artificial voices that are obviously fake will be choice, not tool limitations.
As genuine customer service migrates to robots, it may change expectations as to what sounds legitimate? So in the future the genuine human ringing you up would smell like a scam whereas the genuine robot will have weight - irregardless of its legitimacy?
Myanmar is a failed state. The Junta doesn’t have sufficient control of the country to enforce the warlord regions where these scam-cities have sprung up.
These might be features of large scale purpose-built scam centers, but there are myriad smaller centers occupying apartment blocks, whole floors of office towers, and of course ex-Casino buildings and so on.
eg Cambodia is especially rife with these. There are so many recently-built apartment blocks that lie empty, often built with corrupt money anyway, they make easy and fairly low-key dens.
There's a Chinese movie that has a plot which revolves around this: No More Bets
The Southeast Asian country it's supposed to take place in isn't explicitly named, but Myanmar, Cambodia, and Thailand were critical of the movie anyway.
> The Eastern Indian state of West Bengal has a similar complex, where all the international scam-calls targeting English-speaking nations originate.
Yup. But - as much as I love to dunk on India for not doing anything on a federal level to combat the scammers - it's not exclusively India that's got issues with running scam callcenters. The Philippines are a hotspot as well [1], and Turkey is also ramping up [2] although their scammers mostly target Germany [3] as there is a sizable Turkish-origin diaspora here and a lot of Turks speak decent-enough German.
It's a bit of a shame that the article is written only from the Japanese perspective. I would have been more interested in knowing China's position over this whole affair. Given that:
- The original investors were Chinese
- The video footage shown is hosted on a Chinese platform
- The signage on the videos for "restaurants" and "hospitals" in the videos is in Chinese
- "A Chinese-style drum would echo through the compound each time a deposit of over $100,000 was received"
And the fact that Thailand receives a great deal of Chinese tourists, I expect at least some of the kidnappings affecting Chinese citizens - and then some of the scam victims to be Chinese as well.
I would expect China to be more affected and to able to exert more influence over this situation than Japan.
China is very affected and has been tightening the screws hard. The situation really blew up when a Chinese actor was lured to Thailand, kidnapped across the border and forced to work in a scam center:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Wang_Xing
There was even a Chinese blockbuster movie about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_More_Bets
But the scammer choose lawless places like Myanmar for a reason and while China can exert pressure on individual bigwigs, they can't stop those small enough to fly under the radar.
Thanks for the update! Your post would make a great addition to the article.
China has the same culture- and the same scamming problematic. Its like a bigger mafiosi promising to solve crime and restore order by sending a lowlevel thief to the fishes.
Low-thrust societies can not be repaired by topdown level commands. All that happens, is yet another paint job, another face restoring measurement, while the rot behind remains the same.This is not some "aberration" from the fringe of the Chinese empire- this right here, is a sample of its core values under the CCP, undiluted by propaganda cosmetics.
I was looking at the Wikipedia article for the "Global Organized Crime Index" today, and Myanmar is #1, above Colombia and Mexico. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Organized_Crime_Index
We are pretty much done now , due to coup, the junta's involvement in scam gangs and anti junta revolution civil war in full swing.
Not just scam gangs, the thugs collaborative with military,kidnap and sell youths to junta for
1. Forced military drafting.
2. Human trafficking
3. Organ harvesting .
That what military dictatorship done to our democractic country within 5 years.
They've been cooking up heroin and meth in vast quantities for decades, that's surely a big contributing factor.
The country is having a civil war for the last 60 years and was under sanctions until something like 2015. What else would anybody expect to be happening besides this, whoring in nearby Thailand and genociding minorities?
The scam centers started around 2017. They are stared in collaboration with BFG which is under command of Military. 60 year cilvil war is nothing compare to current Revoultionary war where due to military coup and 90% of people are against Military and youth formed alliances called PDF , and getting arms , miltiary training , fighting back to restore the country's democracy and rule of law.
But during that , Rule of Law is totally diminished and we are under rise of crime. The military regime allow the scams center to free roam and let the thugs to do what they want to create unrest.
This is about to get way worse with AI. They'll be able to call you, say nothing, you'll answer, "hello?" and then hang up and by then they've cloned your voice and left a message on your parents' answering machine that sounds like you begging for them to transfer money because you're in danger. They'll be video calling everybody on linkedin with a job in accounting and will have the face and voice of their boss, asking them to transfer money. The situation is about to be terrible, and the only thing keeping it remotely in check is that most people choose to be somewhat moral.
> by then they've cloned your voice and left a message on your parents' answering machine that sounds like you begging for them to transfer money because you're in danger.
You don't need to clone someone's voice for that; that's a scam common enough that one of my parents almost fell for it. Cloning someone's voice might tick up the likelihood of success by some amount, but would the investment in the research-and-infrastructure (spinning up the machines to clone the voice, researching the person you're planning on scamming to find their relatives' phone numbers, etc) be worthwhile when you can just dial every phone number in the tri-state area and just try it with a panicked-sounding young woman's voice?
Several elderly members of my family have unfortunately fallen for this. Voice replication is not a requirement.
I agree, finding who is the parent of who increase the time and cost too much.
They just call at 3 am, cry and cry to make the voice difficult to recognize and then a friend/kidnapper/corrupt-police-officer ask for the money.
Yes and no; there is a tipping point, past which hardware/software vendors will be forced to adopt countermeasures and new ways to verify identity.
We will lose a lot though; the most prosperous societies really rely on high levels of interpersonal trust (which allows people to easily do things together, whether that's leaving their buggy outside when they go to buy a coffee or commercial relations). It would be a shame to see that get destroyed.
why would countermeasures destroy trust? if everyone's phone had an actual keyword and key and other details wouldn't that increase trust?
I get a call and there is a green checkmark saying "GPG VEIFIED" and then I know it's who I expect.
I find it difficult to believe that AI will ever be able to clone your voice with just one word being said. There is a lot of variety in someone's voice thats not captured with the word "hello". Additionally, people have been saying for years that they can simply record you saying "Yes" and use that to agree to things but I have yet to see an epidemic of that being an issue either.
This is also the danger with these - apparent - AI meeting attendant bots being a thing now; organizations should ban them wholesale, as if they're unknown / unauthorised 3rd party ones, who knows what they'll do with the voice data of e.g. the boss.
The time to make money on e-hanko usable for everything is now.
Meh.
On the capability side, I say hello _when you call me_ differently than _when I call you_. Anybody who knows me will certainly have a sense something is off.
Socially, we all should be used to the idea of calling back using official numbers, and not closing an agreement on the first call.
But this is a numbers game. I imagine this vector would be more successful on third-world migrant workers, than in the first-world economies.
I always thought that people willfully participate in scams to make more money. For example, I know there are quite a few telephone scam centers in India, that call US folks for SSN fraud etc. I thought these folks just work for salary.
It's scary to look at the scale of 'organized' crime / modern slavery. This is almost like Squid Games.
Three months ago there is a report that 119 Thai citizens were deported from Cambodia after a call center ring was busted. Out of these numbers, 100 willfully worked for the ring. 15 worked for the illegal gambling establishment. Only 4 minors are reportedly the victim of human trafficking. Ironically, when those people came back (willfully or otherwise), they will claim that they were being "misled" or "coerced" to do it even though the evidence suggests that they willfully do so.
Thai authorities are trying to combat this issue by cutting off supply of basic utilities (electricity, network connection) to hinder their work. The government claimed that this reduces the volume of scam attempts by 20%, though it's not entirely gone as long as they can find a way to circumvent it
> Out of these numbers, 100 willfully worked for the ring. 15 worked for the illegal gambling establishment. Only 4 minors are reportedly the victim of human trafficking. Ironically, when those people came back (willfully or otherwise), they will claim that they were being "misled" or "coerced" to do it even though the evidence suggests that they willfully do so.
Exactly. Same as when prostitutes get picked up. They say they're trafficked or coerced to get a lighter sentence. Cops love it because they get to act like they're on the tail of serious crime and get more resources. Win-win at the expense of everyone else.
While I don't doubt that happens, the article shows complexes surrounded by walls and numerous guard towers. I think it is safe to assume that most of the people inside these facilities are not there voluntarily.
Kidnapping Indian and Chinese residents for their languages skills is pretty documented. That's more of a Shan states thing than Cambodia
Is that irony?
To my understanding this also was the common reality no 5 years ago.
There was a talk on the last CCC that covered romance scams from "call centers" in similar conditions in Myanmar. It gives some insights into the daily life from the perspective of someone who managed to flee the compound and take some documents with him. I was very surprised at the level of sophistication and organization that went into this scam. I knew about the tech support scam centers, but I still saw romance scam as something done on the individual level, not fully organized.
Talk is in German, but dubbed into English by the community. https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-erpressung-aus-dem-internet-auf-...
Romance scams of the mail order bride variety were pretty orginized, but not that sophisticated about 10-15 years ago in where I'm from. Was mostly a quick cash opportunity for studends of language faculties that had moral complex lax enough to scam people, but not lax enough to do outright prostitution.
Prostitution seems much more moral than scamming people. Charge for service, provide service. I certainly have far more respect for sex workers than thieves / scammers.
This is too simple of a take. The vast majority of prostitutes are not adult, willing, un-coerced independent contractors who take a short-term engagement. The money is made by the drug-supplying pimps and organizations that groom minors or prey on people who have no other way to support their habit. This is not moral and very different from the theoretical concept of prostitution.
That's not true in my experience. I've had friends who worked in or adjacent to the industry in several countries.
While there are obviously significant numbers of minors involved and some workers forced into it, the majority are not. Most are just struggling financially and trying to support themselves and/or families. Many are single moms. Many well over 18.
Scams will not end until all international transactions are insured and reversible.
Scams will always exist, so long as there are things of value and humans are involved. See different unofficial currencies used in prisons.
When it comes to scams, part of the scam is aiding the victim to making a transaction in a way that can’t be reversed. Cryptocurrencies, call cards, gift cards, even in-game currencies for online games. As long as it is liquid and carries a value, some entrepreneurial scammer will try to use it to increase their profit. Official currency transfer channels (banks, remittance centers) are usually the focus of laws and law enforcement, so scammers know to move to other forms of value. Cut-outs and fences are common in many forms of scams because these are tools that help them avoid the banking systems until the scammed value is laundered.
Plenty of transactions used in scams are irreversible.
exactly, and gp is saying as long as these transactions exist then scams will exist
No mention of Starlink, which they have adopted en masse. It would be trivial to shut them off from it given their locations are very well-known.
capitalism gotta get that capital, mate. myanmar war money is just as good as rural homesteader money
Straight from the Meta playbook. Rohingya? Is that the new bazinga?
Us!? Complicit!? Yeah right, hah, we're just a social network dude give us a break smh
Here is a good documentary about these scam centers, where some management staff even openly admit what is going on there:
https://youtu.be/kSNn2pHtRH4?si=6WAbOG4p6bd80dJ8
Will AI take their jobs? This seems like what current LLMs would be best at.
Current LLMs still struggle with real-time dynamic conversation and cultural context switching that sophisticated scams require, though they excel at scripted interactions and will likely augment rather than replace human scammers in the near term.
> that sophisticated scams require
Yes, but most of these scam call centeres don't engage in sophisticated scams. They have pople fumbling through scripts. There's not much improvising. It's all about the quantity and finding the victims who are willing to look past the sea of red flags.
LLMs will be used to optimize the scripts and to create the backstory of the fraudulent social media accounts.
It won’t take the jobs of the call center slaves.
Why not? As well as optimizing the scripts, AI callers can deliver them, and even optimize voice/accent/delivery for manipulating the particular target.
This could be said about basically any field of work.
Would they be good enough to defraud an elder on the verge of dementia?
From what I've read, the cost of an llm would be greater than the current operators who are effectively enslaved. If it were cheaper then possibly - certainly easier to manage than people who would try to escape their dire situation here.
That's a really tough call, what sets off your internal "Scam alert" more, a thick Indian accent from a busy call centre or a TikTok robot voice?
The best AI voice generation is already much more realistic than the typical TikTok robotic voices, and they're only going to get better. It won't be long before the only reason anyone will generate artificial voices that are obviously fake will be choice, not tool limitations.
The tiktok robot voice is deliberate I believe, it's branding. It's not a limitation of technology.
As genuine customer service migrates to robots, it may change expectations as to what sounds legitimate? So in the future the genuine human ringing you up would smell like a scam whereas the genuine robot will have weight - irregardless of its legitimacy?
The tiktok robot voice is old news, they can do realistic-enough human-like voices now, with verbal tics and everything.
Japan should qualify any future ODA to Myanmar requires the junta goes in and breaks up these scam centers and put the scam owners in jail.
Myanmar is a failed state. The Junta doesn’t have sufficient control of the country to enforce the warlord regions where these scam-cities have sprung up.
The junta isn't even controlling the part of the country where it happens. It also has funny geography which explains why they don't
short version: lotta mountains and jungles
These might be features of large scale purpose-built scam centers, but there are myriad smaller centers occupying apartment blocks, whole floors of office towers, and of course ex-Casino buildings and so on.
eg Cambodia is especially rife with these. There are so many recently-built apartment blocks that lie empty, often built with corrupt money anyway, they make easy and fairly low-key dens.
they also kidnap people at neighbour country
so if you travel alone at this area, be safe and stay with crowd in public area
There's a Chinese movie that has a plot which revolves around this: No More Bets
The Southeast Asian country it's supposed to take place in isn't explicitly named, but Myanmar, Cambodia, and Thailand were critical of the movie anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_More_Bets.
lot of men from kerala india get caught in these scams. sucks that indian govt isn't doing anything about kidnapping of their citizens.
I used to think of Myanmar as soft spoken Buddhist people with slow pace of life. now of think of the country as a 'scam central'.
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> The Eastern Indian state of West Bengal has a similar complex, where all the international scam-calls targeting English-speaking nations originate.
Yup. But - as much as I love to dunk on India for not doing anything on a federal level to combat the scammers - it's not exclusively India that's got issues with running scam callcenters. The Philippines are a hotspot as well [1], and Turkey is also ramping up [2] although their scammers mostly target Germany [3] as there is a sizable Turkish-origin diaspora here and a lot of Turks speak decent-enough German.
[1] https://www.afp.gov.au/news-centre/media-release/afp-partner...
[2] https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/turkiye-to-contain-fra...
[3] https://www.dailysabah.com/turkiye/istanbul-police-uncover-i...