Mustapha Momoh, a 36-year-old sports teacher from Sierra Leone, remembers posing as a brunette to flirt with a British man he met on Tinder.
Mustapha would spend his days hunched over a long table in a hall in Myanmar with hundreds of other scammers, each operating several pinging phones and a laptop at once. They would scour social media for new victims while simultaneously messaging existing ones — stringing them along until they could be duped into parting with their money. But when the time came to persuade the young Brit to invest in a fake marketing scheme, Mustapha faltered.
“I wanted to tell him that it is not a lady he’s talking with,” he says, “I wanted to warn him.” It was too risky. Mustapha’s phone was being monitored by a brutal Chinese gang. Along with hundreds of thousands of others, he had been trafficked to Myanmar by a crime syndicate that runs internet scam farms across southeast Asia. If he was caught sabotaging the scam he would be taken to the “dark room” and thrashed with plastic pipes or shocked with a stun gun. He could even be killed.
People would sometimes disappear from the compound — the bosses would cut out the lights when they needed to carry out a body. “That job…” Mustapha says, his voice trailing off as he remembers duping the young Brit out of his savings. “May God have mercy on me,” he says, gasping through sobs.
I first spoke with Mustapha in February, two days after he had been freed from the scam farm. He was sleeping on a pile of clothes in a militia-run camp in eastern Myanmar, waiting for his papers to be processed so he could fly home to the wife and two children he had left behind in Sierra Leone. His gaunt face and glassy eyes stared at me through the phone screen as he described, in horror, the strangers he had fleeced. They lived all over the world, he said, reeling off a list of British, American, Singaporean and Turkish victims.
While Mustapha had run several successful scams, he never came close to hitting the eye-watering target that his Chinese bosses had set of $15,000 a month. Each shortfall was met with violence. He was beaten daily and began wearing two pairs of trousers to soften the blows.
Mustapha spent nine months trapped inside a cluster of grey apartment blocks, surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by gunmen. The compound was one of hundreds of scam farms scattered across southeast Asia that are housed in casinos, modern high-rises and disused warehouses. Several of the gangs that run them are linked to triad-style organised crime syndicates in China, who first moved offshore to run illegal betting websites for gamblers back home, away from the scrutiny of their government. When Beijing cracked down on their operations in 2021 they pivoted into scamming westerners, recruiting people from all over the world to run the cons.
The gangs rake in an estimated £50 billion a year from the scams, according to the think tank United States Institute of Peace (USIP). About 375,000 people toil over laptops inside the compounds, trying to forge online romances so they can persuade the lonely, the vulnerable and the amorous to pour money into fake cryptocurrency or marketing schemes. Mustapha remembers how some poor souls would take out loans so they could keep investing.
While some scammers enter the centres willingly, desperate for a slice of the profits, many thousands are trafficked into them — tricked by the promise of legitimate work. They come from dozens of countries, including China, Indonesia, Nepal, Cambodia, Pakistan and increasingly Africa. The gangs are turning to Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya and Sierra Leone, where there are thousands of English-speaking, computer-literate graduates, often short of work.
How Mustapha was reeled in
Mustapha and his wife, Isha, had a happy life in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s coastal capital, with their children, a boy who is now ten and a girl aged two. But every month he felt the pinch. A well-known athlete in the city, he’d once won fourth place in a local marathon and would train on the beach with his friends on Saturdays. They called him “Rastaman” because of his short dreadlocks that bounced when he ran.
He had a steady job teaching sports at an international school but his salary was small. He struggled to stump up enough cash for medical bills or to buy his son school shoes. As Sierra Leone’s economy buckled under corruption and weak governance, he dreamt of better pay.
Then, in February 2024, a young Thai woman messaged him on Facebook. She said she was recruiting teachers for a new international school in Thailand and had found his profile during her search. She urged him to apply and sent over a job ad that listed dozens of vacancies. It looked legitimate. The roles had attractive salaries and offered free accommodation and quarterly flights home.
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Mustapha fired off an application. Within days he received a response: they wanted to schedule an interview. Two calls followed, both from an Asian woman who said she worked in HR. At the end of the second call he was offered the job. The salary was $1,200 a month — ten times what Mustapha made in Freetown. He didn’t want to leave his young family but decided that, for a year, it was worth it. He could send money home and put some away.
On May 1, 2024, he landed in Bangkok. A driver picked him up at the airport and said they were going straight to the school. After driving for four hours Mustapha sensed that something was wrong and asked why it was taking so long. The country is big, the driver said, reminding him that the school was in the north. By the time they reached the Moei River, Thailand’s rugged border with Myanmar, it was too late to escape. Armed men yanked Mustapha out of the car, shoved him into a waiting boat and ferried him across the muddy water.
On the far side of the river another car was waiting. He was driven to a walled compound where men with Kalashnikovs swung open a gate and slammed it shut behind him. Mustapha would not see the outside world for another nine months.
Inside, a Chinese man took his passport and phone, then slid a contract across the table. Mustapha was being hired, it said, for “online scam work” and would be expected to generate at least $200,000 over 18 months. If he failed, the document warned, he would be sold to another company.
When he refused to sign, the man beckoned two security guards. They handcuffed Mustapha and led him to a room on the edge of the compound where his wrists were fastened to two hooks in the ceiling. They took it in turns to thrash him with plastic pipes.
One of them asked him again if he would sign the contract. He said no. A guard doused him in cold water and used a stun gun to shock his drenched body. Mustapha convulsed as they targeted his back, stomach, face, hands and genitals. After three days of torture he agreed to sign.
“There’s no choice,” he says. “You either do it or they kill you.”
He was escorted, limping, back to the office to finish off the paperwork.
The scamming begins
Work normally began at 4pm and ran until at least 9am, Mustapha says. His team often targeted Americans, so they adapted to their time zones. Scammers would sleep, briefly, on bunk beds in cramped dormitories, two people to each single mattress.
It was the job of the “finders” to source victims from social media and dating sites, using fake profiles of glamorous women with photos stolen from Instagram (see panel, right). Once a target showed interest, they were handed to Mustapha’s team to deepen the relationship and pitch the scam.
“The men see a fine lady’s profile and they want to chat,” Mustapha says. Using AI, they could even set up a video call with their victim, superimposing the character’s face onto someone else’s body. “Only a few detect that this is not a real person.”
Another scammer, a Ugandan man named Mat, describes how he used a web browser extension so that his character appeared to be in Manchester on Tinder. He outlines the stages of the scams.
“In the first week you build emotional attachment,” he says. “You listen to their problems.” In the second you shape your persona, describing your hobbies such as cooking or painting. By the third week, he says, you introduce the scam. You might apologise for not replying to a message, saying you were busy with crypto investments. If the victim shows interest you suggest they try it too.
“We target the old,” Mat adds, explaining that bosses bought UK phone numbers on the dark web, seeking out the lonely, the divorced or the recently bereaved. Lots of the scammers in Mustapha’s compound were sick or undernourished. Many bore marks of torture: black eyes, bruised arms, wrists rubbed raw from handcuffs.
“It is hard to describe the atmosphere of terror inside the compounds,” says one expert who works in the region and asked not to be named over concerns for her safety. “Compliance comes from the psychological terror.”
She recalls an Ethiopian man who was thrown out of a scam centre after refusing to work. He had been shocked so many times on his head that he couldn’t remember his name. His friend, freed with him, had been repeatedly sodomised with a stick.
Like Mustapha, many trafficked workers are haunted by guilt. One Ugandan man, still trapped in a compound, recently texted an NGO to seek help: “I’m tired of hurting fellow humans through this scam… it really hurts to have conversations with someone crying, as you’re hitting them on the killing stage.” “Killing” is what the gangs call the final part of the con — when a scammer drains a victim’s savings and vanishes. Bosses call scammers “dogs” and their targets are “pigs” who have to be “butchered”.
My colleague has been trafficked
An email from a British friend alerted me to Mustapha’s plight. “A former colleague of mine has been trafficked,” wrote my friend Rocco in November last year. We had lived and worked in Sierra Leone at the same time and he wondered if, as a journalist, I might be able to help.
Rocco had been receiving voice messages from Mustapha via WhatsApp — urgent, desperate pleas. “I’m hiding in the toilet to talk to you,” Mustapha whispered in one. “If they catch me with this phone, they will kill me. Every day they beat us, every day. Please help me or I will die here.”
He sent his GPS location, begging Rocco to muster a rescue team. The pin on Google Earth was positioned in Myanmar at what looked to be a clutch of newly built warehouses near the Thai border. On the satellite view some appeared still to be under construction.
Rocco tried to raise the alarm. He contacted diplomats, NGOs, anyone who might be able to intervene. But progress was slow. Like many African nations, Sierra Leone has no embassy in southeast Asia. Its nearest ambassador sits thousands of miles away in Beijing. And the compound holding Mustapha in Myanmar was deep in rebel-held territory, controlled by a militia known as the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA).
Officials from Myanmar’s military regime were also of little help. They denied knowledge of the problem, insisting that workers in the Chinese-run “casinos” were there by choice. The gangs were paying off both the rebels and the military, fuelling the war in Myanmar by funding each side.
Meanwhile Mustapha was spiralling. People in his building were committing suicide, hanging themselves in their dormitories because they could see no way out. After eight months he began to feel the same way. “I wanted to die. I was starting to give up,” he says.
Freedom — of sorts
It was in mid-February this year when rumours began circulating in Mustapha’s compound that people nearby were being released. The previous month a Chinese actor, Wang Xing, had been kidnapped in Thailand by one of the gangs. He had been given a false promise of an acting job and was spirited over the border into Myanmar to be put to work in a scam farm. When Wang’s girlfriend raised the alarm on Chinese social media the case triggered diplomatic embarrassment in both Bangkok and Beijing. Wang was quickly released and returned. But the furore prompted a rare crackdown from Beijing.
Under pressure, Beijing pushed the authorities in Thailand and Myanmar to act. In February Thailand restricted fuel exports to Myanmar and shut off cross-border electricity lines that powered many of the compounds. Suddenly unable to provide their populations with power, the militia groups said that they too were cracking down on the scam farms.
The reason these authorities failed to intervene sooner is probably down to the fact that the syndicates are so well connected. They are known to work with militia leaders in Myanmar. China, with the intelligence it has on the gangs, is the country best placed to intervene, but rarely does so. Some experts speculate that politically connected people may be profiting from their activity.
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Mustapha’s friend Martin, also from Sierra Leone, had been secretly messaging an NGO worker in Thailand who was feeding him updates about the unfolding crackdown. She urged him to move quickly. Go to the guards, she said, tell them you want out. Within minutes, hundreds of trafficked workers grabbed boxes, bundled up their belongings and marched towards the gate. When I later asked Martin why he hadn’t feared being shot by the guards, he said: “I didn’t care by then. We were dead already.”
The guards held fire and told the crowd to wait. While the Chinese bosses weren’t willing to release their “gold-collar dogs” — the name given to their top-performing scammers — most of those at the gate were eventually freed. When the trucks rolled in a few hours later they were allowed to clamber aboard.
However, the Thai authorities hastily shut its border to them, worried about a sudden influx of undocumented migrants. They said the freed scammers could only cross if their governments provided plane tickets out of Bangkok and an embassy representative came to collect them. Consequently thousands of people were dispersed around border camps, some run by the DKBA — the same militia that had colluded with the gangs and allowed them to operate scam farms on their turf.
At some camps, water was scarce and food was limited. At a camp run by a different militia, which we visited in the border town of Myawaddy in February, people were being fed three times a day but conditions were bleak. People slept on the floor. In the heat, men peeled off their shirts to reveal scars across their backs from months of beatings. Some were missing teeth. “Everyone here has been harmed in some way,” said Wu Yonghui, a Chinese national stuck in the cramped camp. “All of us have experienced beatings, electric shocks, illegal detention. They would beat me every day. Some of them avoided leaving visible scars by putting our feet in a bucket of water and then electrocuting us.”
Repatriation was painfully slow for the more than 7,000 people liberated from the farms. Chinese nationals left first, on flights organised by their government. After two months it was mostly the Africans that remained. Their embassies were often harder to reach: Ethiopia’s nearest was in Delhi and Cameroon’s was in Beijing.
A small NGO, Global Advance Projects, took on the burden of getting people from Africa home. Its team fundraised, phoned embassies and purchased flights.
Last month, at 6am on May 7, a message lit up my phone. It was a selfie. Mustapha and Martin were grinning under green airline blankets, squeezed into their seats on an Ethiopian Airways flight home. Global Advance Projects, with the help of the UN’s migration organisation, had pulled it off.
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A half-hearted crackdown
Despite mounting public awareness and outrage, the global machinery behind the scam syndicates grinds on, largely untouched. Putting a stop to them would mean arresting those at the very top of the crime gangs, says Erin West, a former US prosecutor and founder of the anti-scam group Operation Shamrock. Their wealth is scattered across the world, laundered in casinos around Asia and disguised in properties from Singapore to Sydney, London and New York. While several of the Chinese kingpins are well known, very few are behind bars.
Wan Kuok-koi, better known as “Broken Tooth”, is a notorious scam farm owner. A former triad leader in Macau, he is linked to farms in Myanmar’s Dongmei Zone — an industrial complex along the Thai border. Although the US placed sanctions on him in December 2020, he remains at large, travelling freely and posting on social media. A video from last year shows him flying a paraglider, smiling and giving a thumbs-up over limestone cliffs in Laos.
West says she’s baffled by the lack of legal action across the world. Perhaps it has something to do with the “overwhelming scale” of the gangs, she says, and their hard-to-trace online scams. Maybe prosecutors “do not want to embark on something they cannot win”.
In the meantime Britons are noticing an increase in scams. Sixty per cent of people in the UK say they encounter scams at least once a month, according to a 2024 report by the Global Anti-Scam Alliance. Individuals are less inclined to admit falling for them: 71 per cent of scams in the UK go unreported, the study said. “The victims fear judgment,” says Tracey Grummett, an anti-scam advocate based in London. “People feel shame and embarrassment.”
Scams powered by AI are becoming more sophisticated. The deepfake personas built from images stolen from social media are becoming eerily convincing. Malware is the next frontier — gangs hope to learn how to infiltrate online bank accounts without the victim even knowing they have been targeted.
The scam syndicates are also versatile and quick to adapt to pressure. Following the crackdown in Myanmar they are shifting operations to Cambodia, where weak law enforcement allows them to operate freely. “It is a very dynamic criminal model that keeps on developing,” says Stephanie Baroud, a criminal intelligence analyst at Interpol. “When there is a raid on a scam centre we see that a few days later another one has sprung up somewhere nearby or even in a different country.”
“This is a threat to the security of every country on the planet,” says Jason Tower, head of the Myanmar programme at the USIP. “We are talking about billions of dollars, every year, going into the hands of bad actors.”
An emotional homecoming
On his second night home in Sierra Leone, Mustapha contacts me via a video call. He and his wife, Isha, sit shoulder to shoulder in a dimly lit room, beaming into the screen. Mustapha and I had been talking regularly and he wanted to introduce me to his wife.
“I am so, so, so happy,” Mustapha says, when I ask how they are doing. Isha adds with a shy laugh: “I am glad to have my man back.”
But I knew that his return was not straightforward. Mustapha’s family had been proud when he left for the teaching job in Thailand. He had promised to call every day. And then he had vanished. Inside the scam compound it was too dangerous to make contact with them. Now he had returned — empty-handed and traumatised.
Since Mustapha lost contact, Isha and the children had struggled. She could no longer pay the rent. She eventually moved out of their brick house into a cheap, mud-walled structure on the edge of Freetown. For nine months she had no idea what had happened to her husband. It was only when the UN’s migration agency contacted Isha last month that she learnt Mustapha had been trafficked. He was being repatriated, they told her. She passed her new address to the UN, who relayed it to her husband.
It was a humid Sunday morning when Mustapha stepped through the front door. Isha was crouched over an open stove cooking foufou, a dish made from pounded cassava. She stared up at her husband, stunned, before getting up to hug him. Their ten-year-old son was at the nearby church, she said, so Mustapha scooped up his two-year-old daughter and rushed off to find him. As soon as his son saw his father walk in, he ran into his arms. The boy looked thinner than before.
That night Mustapha told Isha everything. “When I explained about the treatment and what I underwent, she cried a lot,” he says. “She knew that my intention was to make money to send to the family.”
Mustapha struggles with insomnia and worries about what to do next. At times images from the past year flash into his mind — the compound, the beatings, the pleading messages from his victims when they realised they had been scammed.
Now he is looking for work and slowly trying to rebuild his life. Even in a cramped room, with no savings and an uncertain future, he is clinging to his new-found freedom. After all, he is lucky to be out. Thousands of people are still trapped in compounds, tapping away at phone screens, offering up fake investment tips to strangers. Mustapha counts himself lucky to have escaped from a world where profits are measured in broken lives.
Additional reporting by Jan Camenzind Broomby in Myanmar. To donate to help the repatriation of trafficking victims, visit globaladvanceprojects.org
Scammed in Britain: “My dream is to have a family”
How Alexander, a chef from Derby, fell for what experts called a “textbook” scam out of southeast Asia
Neither Alexander nor Kristen were using Tinder to find sex. She was gorgeous, he remembers, with long, dusky blonde hair and a slim figure. In her photos she looked straight into the camera, eyes wide, lips pursed into a playful smile. Her messages were flirty at first — filled with compliments and winky emojis — but her motives for using the app were serious. She was looking to settle down, she said, just like he was.
“My dream is to have a family,” Alexander confided in a late-night message. “Mine is the same,” she typed back at once, “I want a big family, I want to live near the sea, I want to watch my children grow up.”
It was on Valentine’s Day that their romance started to unravel. They lived in different countries. He toiled for 16 hours a day as a chef at two restaurants in Derby. He loved the UK, where he had moved from Moldova six years previously. She ran a hipster coffee shop in Tallinn, Estonia, andhad sent videos of the shop. She was 27, he was 33 and about to buy his first house. The two had not met in person but Alexander was planning to change that — he had booked a trip to Tallinn in March.
At first he was hurt when she spurned his Valentine’s Day surprise. A bunch of white roses are on the way to your café, he messaged her in the morning amid a jumble of hearts and flower emojis. “I would rather accept them from your hand to mine,” came the reply. “Cancel the order.” Mystified, Alexander typed back, “The courier is already on his way.”
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His flowers were refunded later that day. The courier found that the coffee shop was boarded up and had been closed for over a year. Kristen stopped answering Alexander’s messages and so did her uncle, Alexey, who had been offering him advice on his crypto investments. While Alexander knew little about digital currency trading, Kristen said she did it all the time and made steady profits. Her uncle, a crypto expert, offered to him help out.
Under Alexey’s guidance, Alexander saw his first £800 investment mushroom into £2,000. He was reassured when he could withdraw all the cash, so went on to invest more. He invested the £42,000 deposit he’d been saving for his house and it nearly doubled in value. But when he tried to cash out after the Valentine’s Day row, the app he was using stopped working. His money vanished along with his girlfriend.
“I lost everything. I did not find a girl to have a family with. Instead I was scammed,” he says, “I felt so angry.”
Of course Kristen never existed and neither did her uncle. The photos on her Tinder profile belonged to a Russian air hostess who regularly posted selfies on Instagram. She had no idea that her face was being used for scams.
