It all began with word of mouth. At the beginning of 2022, Bridget Motari was feeling bored in her hospitality school in the town of Eldoret, western Kenya. The 22-year-old student was dreaming of a better life elsewhere, with a more generous salary than her country can offer. An acquaintance told her about a recruitment campaign for customer service jobs in Thailand paying the equivalent of more than €900 a month. She jumped at the chance, even if the recruitment agency "didn't inspire confidence." Speaking to Le Monde in May in Nairobi, she said: "It was the worst decision of my life."

When she arrived in Bangkok in July 2022, there was no job and no salary. Instead, trapped by a Chinese cartel, her life was turned upside down. She was forcibly taken to Van Pak Len, Laos, in the Bokeo province of the Golden Triangle special economic zone, between Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. There, she was sequestered in one of the vast centers devoted to online scams that have proliferated in this Southeast Asian hotspot of global cybercrime – just one among many Africans who find themselves in this scenario.

According to estimates by an American think tank, the US Institute of Peace, the number of captives of these Chinese mafia cartels is as high as 305,000, the vast majority of them Asians. Once a hub for opium trafficking, this territory became a mecca for online extortion during the Covid-19 pandemic. Criminal groups linked to the Chinese triads thrive in this area, which has been made almost inaccessible by the civil war in Myanmar and the complicity of the local elites.

Among them is Chinese organized crime figure Wan Kuok-koi, A historic leader of Macau's Triad 14, also known by his nom de guerre "Broken Tooth." Another big name in cyberfraud, Cambodian tycoon Ly Yong Phat, who served as special economic adviser to former prime minister Hun Sen, has been under US sanctions since September for "human rights abuse related to the treatment of trafficked workers subjected to forced labor in online scam centers."

Seducing men online

This flourishing industry has a name: pig butchering, which involves "fattening up" victims online before extracting funds from them via cryptocurrency sites. It is said to have earned around $75 billion since 2020 (around €69 billion), according to a University of Texas study published in March entitled How Do Crypto Flows Finance Slavery? The Economics of Pig Butchering.

Motari was given the task of seducing men online in order to defraud them. Unlike the other survivors we spoke to, who preferred to testify anonymously, terrified of being identified and subjected to reprisals, she has agreed to retrace her journey using her real name.

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