Secrets of a Scam Compound ⇥ wired.com

Wired this week published an extraordinary story sourced from a forced scammer inside a compound in Laos. The premise of being lured into running romance scams is a well-known one; if you have heard about “pig butchering”, you are likely familiar with it. But the granularity of information shared by this source with Andy Greenberg is staggering: internal chats among leadership, video recordings inside the compound, and guides to teach these imprisoned people how to do crime.

In a companion article, Greenberg writes about the source:

Over the next days, with little in the way of orientation, he was pulled into the machinery of the scamming organization he’d come to know as the Boshang compound: He was trained to create fake profiles, given scam scripts, and then set to work on a nocturnal schedule, manually spamming out hundreds of introductory messages every night to lure new victims. At the end of his shifts, he would return to the top bunk of his six-man dorm room — little bigger than the hotel room he’d occupied those first nights — with a toilet in the corner.

Yet from the very beginning, he says, he was determined to again defy his circumstances. It struck him that he knew more about computers than most of his coworkers, or even his bosses, who seemed to understand only how to use social media, AI tools, and crypto currency. Within days, he began daydreaming of using his technical skills to quietly gather information on the compound and, somehow, expose it.

Brave.

Romance scams are not new. The reason this particular type of scam is so novel is because the technologies that enable it are brand new: cryptocurrencies, ChatGPT to spit out convincing scripts, generative image tools for producing “photographs”, and even deepfake software for video calls.