There are thousands of people worldwide trying to scam you, hoping they can make you a victim, steal your money, and harm you in some way. While some of it is done by individuals or small gangs of people, a lot of it happens on an industrialized scale.
In countries around the world, there are large teams of people living and working together, controlled by managers, with profits going up the corporate ladder to people who think they are the next Elon Musk. They somehow con themselves into believing they are running a legitimate business. Your hurt and pain…the interruption of legitimate business…is not something they see or think about. They’ve got other lowly worker bees that do all that “dirty work.”
In many cases, the scammers who do the dirty work…the actual social engineering…are victims, too.
For years, I’ve been aware of the claims that some of the scammers involved in the worst social engineering scams that harm us are victims, too. They have been kidnapped, tortured and otherwise forced to do what they do. They are human trafficking victims.
This came home recently when I saw this YouTube video of a former human-trafficked scammer. If his story is true, and according to the comments it’s very true, he suffered pretty unbearable viciousness on his path to becoming an unwilling scammer.
His journey started when he responded to an online ad offering him a high-paying acting gig (he is a part-time actor). The employers sent him a train ticket to meet the supposed production crew in a far away location, which turned out to be near the border of another more lawless country. Instead of being met by a camera crew, he and others were met by military-dressed men who forced them to cross over the border into a foreign country with a lot less protections, especially for foreigners.
He quickly saw people in his group and other groups beaten and tortured. They were told that if they did not perform these scams, they would be sold to have their organs extracted. They were beaten with wooden sticks when they did not trick at least seven victims a day. They were watched 24 hours a day. He only escaped when he snuck phone messages to an old boyhood friend, which resulted in his family having to sell their home to pay a ransom for his return.
At first, I thought that at least some of his horrific story had to be made up. I can’t imagine a group of people not only kidnapping people to perform online scams, but possibly also selling them for the price of their harvested organs – just seemed too much. I thought he had to be making at least part of it up. But after reading the comments to the video and doing some checking with other human trafficking organizations, his claims, including the organ harvesting, seems to check out.
You could remove the worst claims, but what he saw and experienced was still horrific. One moment, you’re living a normal life, and the next, you are a human trafficking victim living under the threat of daily beatings and harm. Everything you were and are, doesn’t stand for anything in your new surroundings. You’re meat on a stick. You’re a puppet. You are absolutely expendable. Your family doesn’t know where you are. Rambo is not coming to rescue you. You literally do or die.
The victim in the video stated he often thought of suicide, but his captors had already apparently had that problem and had addressed it so the victims could not as easily kill themselves.
To be clear, not all scammers are victims. No, the vast majority are voluntarily doing it for greed. They know what they are doing but are simply unethical and don’t mind committing crimes and hurting people. But that’s not everyone.
Like any complex thing in life, it’s across a spectrum. You have the greedy volunteers, but you also have people who have been forced to commit online fraud. You have people forced by circumstances…a lack of good paying jobs, forced to commit fraud to eat and survive. You also have people who have been kidnapped, beaten, and live under the constant threat of being tortured and killed.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a North Korean fake employee trying to scam KnowBe4 out of a paycheck. In the midst of our interview of the scammer, suddenly we became aware that the scammer was a victim too, likely being forced by his own government to commit these crimes. When we asked him, as an interview question, if there was any place in the world he wanted to visit, his answers came back with teary eyes. We suddenly realized that he knew he would never be visiting those exotic locales…that he and his family would never get to leave the trappings of his own country and government.
And we, the interviewers, got a little ashamed in our zeal of outing this obvious fake employee candidate…and had some empathy…and ended our fake job interview. We realized how fortunate we are in our lives to grow up in a country and have a standard of living where we are very unlikely to end up a human trafficking victim.
It's hard to give any empathy to the criminal that is trying to swindle you online in some way…lure you into a fake romance…take your life savings…or trick you into launching a ransomware trojan horse program into your employer’s network. But just realize that some of them don’t have a choice.
And perhaps if you were caught up in similar circumstances with no other way out, you might be doing the same thing. We have not walked in that person’s shoes.
If you’re interested in more information on this subject. Check out Perry Carpenter’s interview with Erin West of Operation Shamrock here. There's also a great podcast from The Economist that goes super in-depth on the operational model. It's called Scam, Inc.
Let’s all work together to fight scams and get rid of scammers, including the entities and incentives that make the whole thing work. But keep in mind that some scammers are victims, too. And that is even more reason for us to fight even harder to end the whole thing.
