It wasn’t long after landing in Bangkok, Thailand, in the summer of 2023 that Jalil Muyeke realized that something was terribly wrong.
He knew that the city – where he was planning to start a new data entry and online marketing job – was a short drive from the airport. But the man who picked him up drove for hours into the countryside.
Without cellphone service, and fearing that his driver might have a weapon, the then 32-year-old Ugandan felt powerless to escape. He says that eventually, he was bundled into a canoe and taken across the Moei River into Myanmar, where he was dropped off at a scam compound.
Today, more than more than 220,000 people from across the world are estimated to have been trafficked to Myanmar and Cambodia and forced to con people around the globe out of their savings.
Muyeke was told by his overseers, who he said were Chinese, to assume the identity of a female fashion designer living in San Francisco, and to reach out to men on dating apps like Bumble and Happn. His job was to get the phone numbers of two men a day.
He would pass on the numbers to others trained in so-called “pig butchering” scams – referring to the way farmers “fatten up” pigs before killing them – who would form close, often romantic relationships with the unwitting targets, without ever meeting them, before convincing them to invest in cryptocurrency schemes.
“We were told to exclusively target Americans and Canadians,” he said. “That it was easier to get money from Americans because they have money, and those who didn’t have a lot of it wanted to make a lot of it.”
Similar operations, run mostly by Chinese criminal syndicates, are proving lucrative. Cyber scams run out of Southeast Asia generate more than $43 billion a year, according to the US Congress-founded United States Institute of Peace. The FBI estimates that in 2023, tens of thousands of Americans lost almost $4 billion in pig butchering scams – a 53% increase from 2022.
Now, anti-trafficking groups say the problem could get worse after vital funding that helped combat scam centers, and helped those forced to work at them, was lost due to sweeping cuts to foreign aid by the Trump administration.
NGOs at a standstill
“They’ve been given four weeks to close out, and there has been zero conversations on transferring any of the work that we’ve been doing,” said the former official, who asked to remain anonymous due to concern over possible retribution. USAID did not respond to a request for comment.
In Mae Sot, a city on Thailand’s western border, Australian not-for-profit Global Alms supports trafficking victims, including people who have been forced to work in scam compounds across the river in Myanmar. They come from countries including the Philippines, Indonesia, Uganda, Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan, said Global Alms CEO Mechelle Moore. Some pay ransom to be freed, others escape and swim across the river. But nearly all of them arrive traumatized, she added.
“You see varying degrees of mutilation and torture and injury,” said Moore. “Lots of scars, bruising; sometimes they have broken bones. One girl arrived unconscious and later died.”
A few weeks ago, Global Alms lost its State Department lifeline, according to Moore, which made up 60% of its funding. She dipped into her own savings to help the people flowing across the border, providing them with emergency kits and accommodation, and helping guide them through the bureaucracy required to get home.
The funding was recently unfrozen, but she said, “there’s a lot of other NGOs out there that are just at a standstill right now.”
A growing global ‘scamdemic’
Interpol says that what began as a regional threat to Southeast Asia has now turned into a “global human trafficking crisis” impacting “millions of victims, both in the cyber scam centers and as targets.”
Officials across Southeast Asia and China have made periodic efforts to combat the scourge, and thousands were reportedly awaiting repatriation in Mae Sot after a recent crackdown.
“The mass repatriation didn’t happen in a vacuum,” says Mina Chiang, the founder of the UK-based social enterprise Humanity Research Consultancy (HRC), adding that organizations like hers have spent years providing intelligence on human trafficking to national authorities and Interpol, and advocating for action.
Its work is now at risk. HRC, which has historically relied on USAID funding for most of its income, has had to put team members on leave, said Chiang.
The former USAID official said that criminal organizations are likely to be emboldened by the abrupt termination of USAID programs, which in many countries were the main source of financing for shelters assisting victims. Providing a safe haven was crucial in convincing victims to work with law enforcement to help prosecute the perpetrators, the official said.
What is now widely referred to as a “scamdemic” is no longer confined to Southeast Asia. Friedman says that the model of human trafficking into scam centers, which originated in Southeast Asia, has spread to places including Bangladesh, Nepal, India, and Dubai. “This issue, if left unchecked, is going to get even more out of hand,” he said.
Muyeke was lucky to have escaped when he did. After seven months at the scam compound – during which he says he often warned targets that they were being scammed in messages he quickly deleted so his bosses wouldn’t see them – he negotiated with his captors to release him in exchange for taking a sick Ugandan woman with him, taking her off their hands.
He says he was left at a bus stop in Mae Sot, with barely any money and an expired visa, before handing himself in to immigration authorities, who he says fined and detained him. He doubts that many others would make the journey unsupported.
On Monday, the Trump administration officially cancelled 83% of the programs at USAID. “The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed in a post on X from his personal account.
Meanwhile, there is an ongoing legal battle over foreign aid contracts. Counter-trafficking groups say that in some cases, the damage has already been done, with staff laid off and offices shuttered.
Muyeke is following the developments closely. “I know people who are still inside who want to come back home, but they can’t right now, because the people who would have helped them get back are being funded by US aid,” he says.
He is also worried about the wider implications of the US moves. “Most of the people cheering this thing on are people who are just thinking about themselves and America right now,” says Muyeke. “They are digging a grave for themselves … it’s Americans who are the predominant targets.”