This week on the perfect scam.

They have a quota of a certain amount of money that they have to steal or obtain.

And oftentimes those quotas are very, very high, nearly impossible.

And so they get either beaten, shocked with these electric shock sticks or cattle prods. If it's really bad, they may get sold

to another compound or even much worse. Much worse, meaning what? They could have their organs harvested.

Oh my God. Welcome back to the perfect scam. I'm your host, Bob The Perfect Scam.

I'm your host, Bob Sullivan.

Scam phone calls, texts, instant messages.

They seem to be everywhere these days.

Consumer reports says the number of scam texts increased 50% last year.

And I'll bet that figure doesn't surprise you. Why is there so much crime

spam? Well, the easy answer is it works. Crime pays and there's a lot of money in tech crime right now.

But there's another reason, and it's even more disturbing than I could have imagined.

Have you ever stopped to think about who was on the other end of those phone calls or those Facebook messages?

It's easy to just get angry at these people to just hang up on them, which is exactly what you should do.

But there is a deep, dark truth about many people engaging in these long, drawn-out romance scams and

crypto-scams. Many are the victims of human trafficking, captives, and scam compounds,

facing torture and even death, compelled to commit crimes in the name of ruthless scam bosses.

Today, thanks to some brave volunteers, a brave journalist and a very, very brave victim,

we're going to learn more about what's really going on on the other side of the keyboard,

on the other side of the world.

We've plucked this story from our archives for you while we work on all new episodes of the perfect scam.

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