(Zero Hedge)—Ever wonder who the sociopaths are you see in Netflix documentaries, catfishing people from the internet using dating apps?
Well, look no further. Australia’s News.com.au profiled one such person this week, a young worker inside of a “mass scamming call center”.
The person, named “Beard”, said that he “fled war-torn Syria for Dubai” and was desperately looking for work. Thinking he landed an advertising role, he told news.com.au he found himself at a “bizarre office location in the middle of the Dubai desert where those inside tried to confiscate his passport”.
He was eventually held captive and forced to scam people for a living, the report says.
Then he became part of a large-scale “pig butchering” romance scam operation, designed to swindle unsuspecting victims out of their money. News.com.au said this type of fraud devastates thousands of Australians annually.
Beard worked night shifts, 12 hours a day, six days a week, pretending to be a woman named Annie to deceive victims. The scam center housed over 1,000 workers, mostly foreign migrants from Africa and India, all controlled by a Chinese-run syndicate. Workers were confined to the premises, only leaving to buy food from vendors serving the scammers.
Victims, already catfished on dating apps, believed they were chatting with a woman who led a glamorous lifestyle. Beard’s job was to extract financial information and convince them to invest in cryptocurrency.
“It’s not the important information I give them,” he explained. “It’s the important information I got out of them.”
A real woman, half-Turkish, half-Ukrainian, was employed to take brief video calls to reassure victims they weren’t being scammed. “She had a line of people waiting for her to also talk to other victims.”
Beard typically juggled 12 victims at once before handing them over to another team that finalized the scam, the report said.
Despite working inside the operation, Beard never scammed anyone. Instead, he deliberately stalled conversations and warned victims about the risks of crypto investments.
Inspired by YouTube scam-buster Jim Browning, he secretly sent videos and photos from inside the scam center. When he finally decided to leave, he tricked the scammers into letting him go by claiming he needed to return home.
After he left, the scam center eventually shut down.
“The joke is that these scams gave me an incentive to work for them,” he concluded. “Like I had a bed, Wi-Fi, electricity, and water all covered. If someone gets a legal job with worse conditions, they’d be incentivized to go back to the scam centers.”
