TIL There is a human-trafficking ring in Cambodia that forces thousands of people to commit pig-butchering scams and likely uses Tether as one of the ways to launder their ill-gotten gains.

A recent report published by a Bloomberg reporter was made on a human-trafficking ring operated by Chinese gangsters in Cambodia/Myanmar. After he encountered a pig-butchering scam attempt, he went to investigate the connections and culprit behind this scam. What he stumbled upon was a large human trafficking ring that was based in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. Basically, this operation involved luring thousands of people from surrounding countries in Southeast Asia by using lucrative job offers. Once the people arrive in Cambodia and at the compound, they quickly find out that it is not actually a legit job offer, but they are essentially buildings of call centers for orchestrating pig-butchering scams. It is a massive compound that is perched on top of a mountain top, away from prying eyes, and is closely guarded by armed men. Upon arrival, all belongings like passports and mobile phones will be confiscated and it will make it very difficult, if not impossible to leave. For the people who are now stuck there, they are now basically held hostage and forced to work long hours to commit pig-butchering scam.

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"Workers who missed quotas were beaten, starved, made to hit one another. One said he’d seen people forcibly injected with methamphetamine to increase productivity. Two others said they’d seen workers murdered, with the deaths passed off as suicides. They said the bosses would buy and sell captive laborers like livestock."

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One interesting aspect of this trafficking ring that was reported is that they were using USDT (Tether) to perform transactions from the illegal operation. Usually in these pig-butchering scams, they extract the money from victims by asking them to convert their money into USDT and sending it to some wallet, masquerading as some fake exchange. The reporter also mentioned that when he was there in Cambodia, he would see establishments offering money-transfer services and being advertised in Chinese and Vietnamese. There, he would see Chinese businessmen going to exchange Tether for cash or vice-versa without any documents.

It is also important to note that this particular reporter has also been investigating Tether and the money behind Tether since 2021. I highly recommend for you guys to go through the article because it's a large operation and likely the culprit behind many of the pig-butchering scams we hear about today.

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Link to archived article without paywall

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Edit: I think it's important to say here that this post is made to shed light on underground operations like this trafficking ring and not about putting the blame on crypto. There are plenty of ways to launder money and crypto is just one of them. In addition, pig-butchering scams are getting more and more common using crypto investments as a front. Due to the scale of their operations, it is entirely possible that the person on the other side of these pig-butchering scams you encounter is not doing it out of their own free will and are being coerced.