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Welcome to Tech News Briefing.

It's Thursday, August 1st.

I'm Zoe Thomas for the Wall Street Journal.

A cyber fraud industry operating out of Southeast Asia is scamming people around the world out of billions of dollars collectively. And it's built on a modern day slave trade.

Today, we're going to learn about these industrial scale scam enterprises

and the victims on both sides of these crimes.

Flee Solomon covers Southeast Asia for the Wall Street Journal.

She's traveled to the region where these

scam syndicates operate and spoken to some of the victims. And she's with us now

Flee's, the frauds that are being committed are sometimes known as pig butchering scams.

Can you remind us how they work and why they're called that?

These are called pig butchering scams because the scammers will try to fatten up their victims by building their trust over days, weeks, or months before butchering them, by getting them to usually invest large amounts of money and then cutting off all contact with them.

Behind the scenes though, the scammers are victims too. How are they pulled into this?

So I've spoken with several victims from various parts of the world who were basically job seekers mostly in poorer countries and they had responded to job ads that they found on telegram channels or on the internet and they look like legitimate

job offers. Oftentimes they'll do interviews for what seem like real jobs.

They'll receive a job offer and they'll be told, okay, we'll fly you to Bangkok or to

Phnom Pen and Cambodia and we'll meet you there and take you to the work site.

What ends up happening is that once they land in that country, they're met by a human trafficker who then takes them to a compound that's basically a criminal enclave.

Your reporting focused on an area along Myanmar's eastern border, what you describe as the epicenter of the global

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