He had been kidnapped and forced to work for an abusive online scam operation.
A man was abducted by a Chinese gang and forced to work in a scam operation.
More than anything else, Neo Lu, a 28-year-old Chinese office worker, believed the gig would be the new start he needed to save money for his dream of emigrating to the West.
Taken together, his experience and the material he was able to smuggle out are a rare window into the inner workings and tactics of an underworld that is operating on a staggering scale.
Many of the people who have been abducted and forced to work for the scam gangs are Chinese, because the groups initially focused on stealing from people in China.
Increasingly, people from India, the Philippines and more than a dozen other countries have also been trafficked to work for scam gangs, prompting Interpol to declare the trend a global security threat.
Some gangs rewarded workers with more money or the possibility of getting travel documents to leave.
They put him to work as an accountant, and over months he tracked millions of dollars in illicit income and managed their day-to-day expenses.
A spreadsheet tracking operating expenses and scam revenue for Nov. 2022, created by Neo Lu when he worked as the scam operation's accountant.
More than a dozen similar illicit developments run by Chinese scam gangs sprang up in Myawaddy around the same time as Dongmei Zone, according to estimates by the United States Institute of Peace, a research group based in Washington.
Workers had access to a canteen, a convenience store that sold Chinese products, a Chinese restaurant, a small casino called the Golden Horse and a karaoke bar.
The head of the organization was a gray-haired, middle-aged Chinese man with bulging eyes whom everyone called Xi Ge, in Chinese, which roughly translates as Brother Joy.
The days were long and grueling: work started at 10:30 a.m. and ended at midnight, with three breaks of only a half-hour each.
In one room, workers used hundreds of cellphones that lined the walls to build authentic-looking profiles on WeChat, a popular Chinese chat app.
The workers spent their days using the WeChat accounts, swiping over social media feeds on each device to mimic normal use and get past the app's fraud detection system.
In the years since then, he had worked for Chinese firms in Oman, Nigeria and Kenya, but he yearned to save enough money to pay his own way through college and eventually move to the West.
During his first week, he used a work phone to reach out to a friend on Telegram, the messaging app.
Xi Ge eventually presented Mr. Lu with three options: pay a ransom of $30,000, work as a scammer like everyone else, or put his skills to use and help with accounting.
The internet giant Tencent, which owns WeChat, said in a statement that it prohibited criminal behavior on the platform and worked to fight scams.
In recent months, Chinese authorities have been working with Southeast Asian officials to arrest and deport to China thousands of people accused of working in scam groups, but experts believe many organizations have simply relocated their operations.
This Cyber News was published on www.nytimes.com. Publication date: Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:29:05 +0000