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A memory from 2022 sent a chill down Mohammad Abdus Salam’s spine sharper than a bone-biting Dhaka night. 

In early 2022, the 27-year-old engineering graduate was in his hometown Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, when a school friend whose father ran a local recruiting agency offered him a job he couldn’t refuse. It was for data entry that would fetch him a monthly income of nearly $800, an amount that dwarfed his paltry earnings at a garment factory. Bangladesh’s garment industry, which caters to the international fast-fashion brands, is known for its abysmal minimum wage. In the factory, Salam’s monthly income was just $300. But this job offer, although promising, had one caveat: Moving to Cambodia immediately. 

Cambodia, the school friend told Salam, is a new destination for migrants. “He said I have the best education in engineering. I’m able to speak English,” Salam told Asian Dispatch. “I was the perfect person for this job, I was told.”

Salam had never traveled outside his country but as the sole breadwinner of the family, he said yes. With no Cambodian diplomatic mission in Bangladesh, the recruiters took a fee of $3,000 – which Salam paid by mortgaging his family farmland and taking a loan  – to book a one-way flight ticket and a tourist visa. He was told he will be able to recover that money once he starts working and his visa will be converted for his employment. But once he was there, he had a shocking revelation.  

His “workplace”, which was a casino called Long Beach, was located in Cambodia’s special economic zone called Dara Sakor, 250 kms from the country’s capital Phnom Penh. There, his passport was taken and he was handed a computer, 10 iPhones, and 5 SIM cards. His job, he was told, was to impersonate a young Chinese model through dozens of social media accounts to ensnare male victims and scam them into investing in fraudulent crypto schemes. When he tried to call the Bangladeshi broker who “recruited” him, he was ghosted. He knew then: “I had been sold off.”

For the next five months, Salam went through what he described to Asian Dispatch as torture – both mental and physical – in the scam center that housed men from across South Asia. His employers, who he later found were Chinese, beat him with baseball bats and gave him electric shocks if he failed or refused to work. Outside, the compound was surrounded by gun-toting security guards.

“Unless you’ve seen [the crime] for yourself, you’ll never know how horrible it is,” said Salam. “I was forced to work as [the scam centre’s] slave and at one point, I didn't care about the people getting scammed because of the torture I faced. I didn't want to end up dead.” 

Salam was rescued by an anti-trafficking non-governmental organisation in September 2022. His story is among hundreds of thousands, according to a United Nations estimate, who have been similarly trafficked by criminal gangs and tortured into running illegal crypto scams in Asia. Pig-butchering scams, as the crime is now widely called, derives its name from the farm practice of fattening pigs before slaughter. The crime involves scamming people after building online relationships with the end goal of exacting money.

Asian Dispatch wove in four stories of those affected by pig-butchering scams in the form of a visual novel– embedded at the beginning of this article – to put the readers in the shoes of those forced to be at its epicenter. As of February 2024, as much as $75 billion is estimated to have been moved to crypto exchanges through scam compounds in Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar and China. But what is of particular note is the trafficking of South Asians for the purpose of operating these scams. Once among global leaders in IT skills and services, South Asian techies are increasingly being lured into pig-butchering crime hubs  as they struggle with post-pandemic economic slowdown and global tech layoffs. 

I was forced to work as [the scam centre’s] slave and at one point, I didn't care about the people getting scammed because of the torture I faced. I didn't want to end up dead. – Md Abdus Salam, trafficking survivor

Salam says he was sold thrice by compound owners in slave-like conditions. He returned to Dhaka empty-handed while his captors had exchanged tens of thousands of dollars to sell him.