Schiavit-ia

There are over one hundred thousand young adults. They come from poor families, mostly Latin American, Chinese, African, Indian, and Bangladeshi. Like all millennials, at home they know how to tinker well with their cheap Chinese phones, bought second-hand for 50 dollars, in co-ownership with 4 or 5 friends. They arrived in the most remote border territories of the Golden Triangle, between Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, China, attracted by online job offers as IT assistants with good salaries, including board and lodging. They later discover they are human agents of online scam gangs only after being locked up in workplaces, where they must steal money from distant people, via telephone or computer, working 16 hours a day without being paid. They can escape if they pay high ransoms and after convincing another unfortunate to replace them.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) – it would be better to call it “artificial illegality” – governs online fraud by creating fake avatars, credible stories of easy profits, investments with extremely high interests in real life in different countries. Victims are robbed with impunity, through online casinos, credit cards, or extortion from loan sharks or fraudulent rescue or romantic chats. It is an unprecedented large-scale phenomenon; as soon as the authorities intervene in one hideout, another pops up in a nearby ghost town. Criminal banks linked to amphetamine trafficking and warlords are connected, protecting or tolerating easy gains, seen as salvation for their territories impoverished by civil war and now also by the consequences of the Myanmar earthquake on March 28.

The turnover is estimated in billions of dollars and continues to grow. Chinese triads and the Japanese yakuza revel in the new frauds, in an immense market without real goods, which via the internet reaches the whole world, without having to produce or trade illicit drugs or counterfeit goods. Illegal profits disappear immediately into cyberspace, without the need for laundering because they are not produced in banknotes, as happens instead with drugs, counterfeiting, and prostitution. From time to time, the authorities free a few thousand slaves and publicize the event as if it were proof of the efficiency of repressive measures. In reality, they are trying to empty the sea with a teaspoon.

A young Ukrainian recently freed comments like this: «I escaped from war and death at home and ended up becoming the pilot of a huge virtual war machine that makes victims all over the world without firing a shot. All the stories we distribute are perfectly staged for scams and exploit deepfake technology, increasingly realistic, to create characters, pretend to be friends, relatives, romantic interests, masking their identity, voice, and gender. Everything is perfectly fake and without culprits. Only the victims and the money we loot are real and so many.»


NP May 2025
Sandro Calvani