The Chinese government has released a two-hour, three-part series, designed to expose more of the public to the horrors occurring via pig butchering scams on the southern border.

The scams have become a serious issue in China, with scam call centers in the country increasingly relyings on Chinese kidnapping victims to conduct their business. Most of these centers are located in Myanmar, but the exploding profitability has seen similar locations crop up in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and the UAE.

Pig butchering works in a relatively cookie cutter fashion: a scam artist lures a victim to a region where they can be kidnapped. They’re taken to a remote location that has usually been built up into a commercial park for holding prisoners.

The victim is then forced to scam other individuals via fake romantic interests, celebrity impersonation, or other schemes. Their families are given a ransom that they usually cannot afford.

While Americans are increasingly seen as easy marks at these commercial park-sized scam centers, many are deeply unfamiliar with how intense pig butchering is affecting China.

According to the documentary, nearly 100,000 law enforcement officials are currently working to disrupt the criminal syndicates, over 50,000 Chinese nationals have been extradited back to China to face charges, and tens of thousands are still imprisoned by the fraudsters.

These are not haphazardly constructed commercial parks, either. Some of these areas are city-sized, with the scam centers supporting full economies — restaurants, doctors, dentists, firefighters, ATMs.

Most importantly, many of the syndicates hire full-on militias, literally thousands of heavily armed individuals, to both ensure that victims are unable to escape and to fend off any government attempts at intervention.

Source link