I just finished reading Number Go Up, Zeke Faux's tale of the rise and fall of crypto. For the most part it's an engaging book but not a surprising one. Basically, crypto is a scam, and every crypto company is running pretty much the same scam. Details aside, the book didn't change my view of crypto much.
Except for one thing: pig butchering. This refers to an online scam where people contact you via text message and slowly lure you into buying and selling crypto. After a few small trades they talk you into a big trade—and then they steal the money and you never hear from them again.
So far that's nothing especially unique. But it turns out that pig butchering is mostly conducted by people in Cambodia who are kidnapped and forced into it. They're kept locked up and beaten if they don't make their quotas.
That's shocking, but still not too surprising, perhaps. What's really flabbergasting is this:
This is a picture from the book. It's a view of "Chinatown," a section of Sihanoukville in southern Cambodia. This entire compound is filled with kidnapped slaves who are forced to perform pig butchering on an industrial scale.
There are about 6,000 slaves toiling away in Chinatown producing something like $600 million in illicit proceeds. And that's just one compound. Put them all together and God only knows how many people are involved in this. Hundreds of thousands, probably, generating tens of billions of dollars.
This is the kind of thing that would probably sound like a dumb conspiracy theory if you heard it from a friend. But it's real.
Who is buying crap from people via text or other online communications? Wow. Sucker born everyday and a lot of slaves to take them. Hideous.
Old people and the tech illiterate. Same as the people who send their life savings to scammers through gift cards. It doesn't have to work very often to still be lucrative.
“Old people and the tech illiterate.”
“The Deloitte survey shows that Gen Z Americans were three times more likely to get caught up in an online scam than boomers were (16 percent and 5 percent, respectively). Compared to boomers, Gen Z was also twice as likely to have a social media account hacked (17 percent and 8 percent). Fourteen percent of Gen Z-ers surveyed said they’d had their location information misused, more than any other generation.”
https://www.vox.com/technology/23882304/gen-z-vs-boomers-scams-hacks
????????????????????
If you dig down to the survey they quote, seniors lost $3B, Gen Z lost $200M.
So lots of Gen Z got hacked and lost a few bucks. Fewer Boomers got hacked, but lost serious bucks.
https://socialcatfish.com/scamfish/state-of-internet-scams-2023/
A couple of years ago, I got into an extended email correspondence with a scammer who was pretending to be a relative of mine and requesting I send them the activation code for an amazon gift card they urgently needed me to acquire.
I played around for the better part of a slow work day, stringing them along, sending them inaccurate, fabricated codes, pretending to be confused, offering to physically mail them the gift card, proposing a chili's gift card instead because of the purported relative's love of babyback ribs and awesome blossoms, etc. Eventually, the scammer realized I was messing with them, they sent me a profanity laced-email, and that was the last I heard of it.
Now, I feel kinda bad thinking maybe the scammer could have been a Cambodian slave. What a horrible world.
And there's no pressure on the Cambodian government to do anything, especially when it's so openly known that we have pictures of the compounds where it's being done? That's seriously horrifying.
You could tell how much of it was driven by speculation and scamming with the development of centralized exchanges. The whole point of cryptocurrency was that it allowed you to end-run such things and the supposed risk they entailed - but because most buyers of crypto just want to speculate on it to make money (or use it to enable crimes), , they threw that aside and reinvented the wheel.
Read some more links on the cyber-slave situation. The answer as to why it hasn't been cracked down upon is that
1. The country has been ruled by a corrupt dictator for decades now
2. The cyber-slavery operations are run by wealthy Chinese businessmen with strong ties to the dictator and his family.
Who could have known that when Pol Pot targeted the intellectuals in Cambodia for execution, and kept killing everyone who had a profession, wore glasses, read books, or had any indication at all of being intelligent, until he had killed about 25% of the population, that that would result, years later, in a country whose average IQ is 10-20 points lower than its neighbors, and which makes it's money by mass kidnapping, slavery, and pig butchering?
Sounds like a travel destination.
The value of Number Go Up isn't so much in it telling us anything new or exciting, but that it's one-stop-shopping; instead of a disjointed collection of articles and news stories widely separated in time and space, its a concise and engaging history of crypto from its inception to the current tire fire in one slim, well-researched volume.
It also has a bunch of neat little tidbits in it that even someone paying attention to crypto might not have known. It is good to have these collected histories.
Wow, just wow!
This article (based on UN data) says 100,000 slaves in Cambodia and 120,000 in Myanmar. With victims coming from "all over Asia, as well as East Africa, Egypt, Turkey and Brazil."
https://therecord.media/human-trafficking-cyber-slavery-asia-un-report
‘According to the 2016 Global Slavery Index, an estimated 256,800 people are enslaved in modern-day Cambodia, or 1.65% of the population.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodia
Humanity is full of disturbing, amoral pockets of evil. Saudi Arabia's buildings are built on contract labor with few protections and wage theft is widespread.
Saudi Arabia hacked a man to death inside of its embassy in Turkey.
Too terrible for words. I need to be much more grateful for my life than I am.
fyi: "pig butchering" online scam is different from vertical pig farming which involves actual pig butchering.
https://www.propublica.org/article/whats-a-pig-butchering-scam-heres-how-to-avoid-falling-victim-to-one
vs.
https://www.treehugger.com/china-vertical-pig-farm-cement-carbon-footprint-6833185
They could be enslaved on a tomato plantation in Florida instead.
"Basically, crypto is a scam, and every crypto company is running pretty much the same scam."
No, crypto has one particular application in which it has been fabulously successful: facilitation of money laundering. Crypto has been a godsend for drug cartels, dirty oligarchs, and hackers with successful ransomware schemes.
As much as I think it is stupid not all of crypto is a scam. Almost all but not all. There are a huge number of people who think bitcoin and/or ethereum are the natural replacement for the dollar standard and they will free the global poor from the tyranny of the banking system and the governments' currency manipulations. Those people are deluded but are neither perpetrators nor victims of a scam.
Instead, they are enablers of a scam. Much more noble.