Scams are an underground industry
You already know the usual scams. Romance, crypto, tech support, job offers, fake investments, and the list goes on. But what you might not realize is that a growing number of people behind these scams aren’t evil masterminds.
They’re victims, too.
Across Southeast Asia, scam compounds have become a massive underground industry. These operations run out of hotels and warehouses and are worth up to $19 billion a year in Cambodia alone. That’s more than half the country’s entire GDP.
People are being lured in by fake job ads, kidnapped and forced into these human trafficking compounds where they’re made to scam people all day long. They are beaten, locked up and told to meet daily scam quotas.
If they don’t, they’re punished. Some have even died trying to escape.
🎯 Now they’re after kids
This isn’t just about fake emails and text messages anymore. Scam networks are using AI and deepfake tech to create fake explicit content of tweens and teens. They use it to blackmail families in sextortion scams, threatening to release real and fake explicit images unless they get paid.
Kids are committing suicide when faced with the reality they shared an intimate photo with a scammer threatening to send it to friends and family, as well as post it on social media. This is getting darker by the day.
🛡️ Protect yourself and family
The next time you get a sketchy message from someone you don’t know, it might not be a criminal in a hoodie. It could be someone who was tricked, trafficked and forced to work inside one of these scam mills.
- Stop and think. Scammers target emotion, desperation, loneliness, fear, even love. If it feels off, walk away.
- Don’t click links in messages. If it’s legit, you’ll be able to find it from the source.
- Talk to your family. Especially your tweens and teens. They need to know that they are being targeted. Often, it’s a swap of a nudie pic that leads to sextortion.
Scams are only profitable if people fall for them. If less money flows into these organizations, maybe the scales will tip against such hostile industries.
The more we know, the harder we make it for these criminals, and the fewer innocent people end up trapped inside these operations.
📢 Tap the share icons below right now to help spread the word.
Tags: Deepfake, family, social media, spread, Target
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