Modern slavery is here, and many are not aware of it. It comes subtly promising a better tomorrow, but the hidden truth is to lure victims into modern slavery, pig butchering and forced criminality. This article investigates this new type of criminality that borders white-collar crimes.
What is Pig Butchering?
Pig butchering is a top-notch crime that involves capitalizing on potential victims’ weaknesses that the perpetrators cunningly massage to gain trust, which they will use to convince their conquests to invest in bogus financial schemes where the scammers will empty all of their savings.
How Do They Pull It Off?
International criminal gangs based in the Middle East and South East Asia have perfected ways of enticing unsuspecting victims from Africa to join their mafioso organizations that target people of all kinds for the purposes and intents of milking their accounts dry.
It all starts with an innocuous ad in your WhatsApp, Instagram, or X account informing you about an opportunity of a lifetime. You do not realize that the scammers have profiled you for a while for a hit. They have an active cell in your country, and their accomplices scour many messaging accounts and develop a list of potential victims for recruitment.
You may be a University graduate hunting for a job and have shared your predicament online. You do not know that you have armed your future enslavers with valuable information that will eventually be used against you. As the scripture instructs: “…discretion shall preserve you, and understanding shall keep you safe.”
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In this case, divulging your circumstances to the people you hardly know may be your undoing. Even in Kiswahili we have a saying: “…usimwage mtama kwenye kuku wengi.” The fear there is that you may present your enemies with the arsenal to destroy your life.
The scammers in that ad offer a promising career in the Middle East or Southeast Asia. The ad says you will be doing clerical and secretarial work, answering clients’ questions online. The salary itself is too big, which should have been a red flag, but because you are in your last coin, your alarm bells go unattended.
You ferret out all kinds of excuses to justify the insane salary of USD 3,000 to USD 4,000 monthly. The ad assures you that if you accept the offer, they will immediately pay for your air ticket. When any deal is too good to be true, it is not what it claims to be.
Once you accept, they will pay for your one-way ticket to where their godowns exist. You will download the air ticket and inform your loved ones that you have hit the jackpot. What you may not know is that you are the actual jackpot. After you have landed at your destination, you will find those who will pick you up at the airport and whisk you to your new offices.
Your office is in a secluded, barricaded area where the arm of the law cannot reach. Essentially, you have been hit by human traffickers. In a few days, you will know that the ‘Pig butchering’ advertisement (AD) was a deception. What you deemed as bullseye is now your nightmare. Your job involves fishing potential victims for financial fraud. You will be given a manual to memorize details of techniques to find and defraud them online.
The daily task of raking the social messaging platforms to nail the potential victims is burdensome and conscience-rattling. You know you will be telling them lie after lie, and over time, you cannot put up in particular when you see the devastation you have inflicted on the victims.
Some of your victims may be men. In that case, you may pretend to be a beautiful woman and vice versa. You will tell them you belong to a well-to-do family loaded with cash. So money is not your problem. Over time, you will advise them of a money-making venture that has generated you plenty of money. In the beginning, they shall resist, but over time, you will find a way of winning them over.
The scammers call “targets” the potential victims. They profile them by scraping for weaknesses. The most frailty they are looking for is loneliness. You may be surprised to learn that in the developed world, many people are isolated and long for companionship. If an elderly man or woman joins a matchmaking app, little do they expect scammers to be there tagging them until it is too late.
An older man may be delighted to find a beautiful woman of his dreams soliciting a relationship with him. The first red flag is the scammers are the ones who make the first move because they are on the prowl.
Second, the scammers pretend to be filthy rich, but once the conversation is cultivated, they shift it to entice the potential victim to bogus investment opportunities. The third red flag is that when you resist their financial proposition, they become angry, and the tone of their voice becomes disrespectful and commanding.
When the victim relents, they are showered with empty praise and a promise of a physical meeting. The fourth red flag is that the victim never gets to video chat with the scammer. But on that frontier, scammers have been upping their game. They can deploy AI videos to assume another person’s identity and convince you that your digital lover is having a “one-on-one” talk with you.
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What the victims do not know is that those whom they think love them are victims, too, having been lured to the scamming jobs they hate. Those working with scammers may get tired of scamming people and leave the stage. The problem is that scammers treat them as enslaved people. Although the scammers keep their end of the bargain and pay their dues accordingly, they accept no rebellion.
Those who attempt to bolt are caught and have either been handed over to human organ harvesters in the Middle East for a substantial fee or killed. In Southeast Asia, scammers demand reimbursement of the initial investment plus a profit before severing their yoke with the enslaved people. The loved ones must raise sufficient money back home to clear the ransom. What they were told was a goldmine has turned out to
be a money fleecing scheme. Scammers claim the initial investment and the legitimate expectation has to be offset before the captive is set free.
Before enslavers decide to part ways with their slaves, they tend to gravitate towards torture as a way to instil discipline and fear. However, when torture fails, other options to cut down their losses become the last option. The digitally enslaved people complain of being overworked for an average of 18 hours a day. Staring at a laptop screen daily and for a long time takes a toll.
The victims recite the agony of cries of mercy from the people they have conned and destroyed their lives. The cries grow louder and louder at night. Over time, the enslaved people cannot take it anymore and want out. But the journey to freedom is fraught with torture, detentions, extortionate ransom and, in some instances, murder or being sold to human organ traffickers where the certainty of death is never in doubt.
Scammers ask for USD 7,000 to USD 15,000 to terminate the contract and for a non-disclosure agreement to be signed by both sides. One Kenyan working with a clandestine organization in Dubai snitched them, and his relatives now complain that he is unreachable. He could be dead by now!
An Ethiopian man was forced to pay USD 7,000 to free himself from this bondage somewhere in Thailand. The extent of this web of deceit may never be known, but we must restrain ourselves from being easy targets for scammers.
When you get these job ads, you first need to ask yourself how they got your contact information. Answer them in bold letters: “GO TO HELL” before reporting them to the social messaging owners for further action. Then you block them: the less you contact these gangs, the safer you will be. Beware of this Pig butchering scamming!
