Electro-shocks, tied like a crucifixion: The life of a scam-mill worker

Thailand: The job advertisement promised a fat salary in a modern metropolis.

Fisher, a 27-year-old Ethiopian who had studied electrical engineering, persuaded his father to sell the family farmland — where generations had grown mangoes, avocados and teff, an ancient grain — to pay for a ticket to Bangkok.

The car ride to his new workplace, supposedly a glitzy computer hub in Thailand, took about eight hours. Fisher, who is being identified by a nickname because of security concerns, began to worry. Along the way, he was given a fried chicken leg, garlicky and good, a meal he remembers because of what happened next.

As night fell, Fisher was hustled down a riverbank to a small skiff. A few pulls of the oars later, he landed in a new country, Myanmar. War-torn and fractured by rival armed groups, Myanmar is now the crucible of a cyberfraud industry run by Chinese crime syndicates that uses trafficked people from around the world to swindle tens of billions of dollars from other people around the world.

Exhausted from the journey, Fisher was marched to a tower block freshly painted in white. In a large room filled with other Ethiopians and a few people from Laos, he was given a desktop computer and ordered to start a new career as a scammer.

Fisher, who had a government job back in Ethiopia, balked. His rebellion earned him time in a torture chamber, he said, bound for more than a day in a crucifixion pose, dirty water dumped on him when he veered close to sleep. Witnesses and other scam-mill victims said they saw or experienced the same abuse.

Broken, Fisher said he submitted to the work. His con used TikTok shopping, targeting marks in Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

“We are stealing from the world,” he said.

Fisher said he had been promised a $2,000 monthly salary for good work. But he could never hit the target: $10,000 a month in successful scams. For failing, he endured electric shocks from a baton. Or he had to perform frog jumps or push-ups with four Chinese bosses pushing on him. Aid groups said others rescued from the same scam compound also reported such mistreatment.

“All I did was scam and sleep,” Fisher said, of his 18-hour shifts.

The workers were fed only rice — except for one day when a guard told them that a Chinese holiday meant a treat: a chunk of chicken. Fisher’s body wasted away. He was often sick.

Everything in the compound, he said, was in Chinese, down to the clocks, which were set to Beijing time, and the red lanterns hanging from the fancy building where the Chinese bosses lived. Some of the scam parks in Myanmar’s borderlands are as big as cities, their high-rises overshadowing the more modest development on the Thai side.

In mid-February, after eight months of enslavement, Fisher was rescued from the scam mill. He was among thousands released in a series of raids this month, mostly Chinese but also Pakistanis, Malaysians and Kenyans, among many other nationalities. Fisher was given chicken, the first protein he had savored in months.

He is now in a military camp in Thailand, awaiting a repatriation that he dreads because he has no earnings to take back to Ethiopia with him. Selling the family land was a waste, he said.

“Please, I don’t want to return to my homeland,” he said. “But I don’t want to go back to the place where they tortured me.”