Selfishness vs. Selflessness
A growing community of selfless activists are taking it upon themselves to tackle Southeast Asia’s growing fraud problem.
There are few things more selfish than robbing someone of all their life savings and leaving them destitute and hopeless. That, of course, is the modus operandi of Southeast Asia’s cyber-scam gangs, who have leveraged technology and crypto to perpetrate fraud on such a vast scale that few countries are left unaffected by it. (I recently added Iraq, Turkey and Russia to my list of countries targeted by Southeast Asia’s scam dens.) Another way to think about it is that this illicit industry is now selfishly robbing people all around the world.
But there’s a flip side to this equation that doesn’t get much notice: Pure selfishness spurs pure selflessness. There is now a growing community of selfless activists who are taking it upon themselves to tackle Southeast Asia’s growing fraud problem. And as their ranks swell in proportion to the selfish tactics employed by pig-butchering scammers, we may start to see them make a dent in this seemingly intractable problem.
My first reporting trip of the year took me to Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, to meet one of these selfless activists. She fell heavily into debt in 2020 when she suffered a pig-butchering scam that upended her life. Till this day, a quarter of her monthly paycheck goes towards paying off a loan she took out to invest in the crypto scam that felled her. It’s a huge financial burden for a young single mom. But it’s also her monthly reminder to channel her suffering into something good to counteract the evil she suffered.
Her way of doing that has been to help the victims on the other side of the fraud—innocent men and women who get tricked into going to Cambodia for seemingly lucrative jobs that turn out to be online scams. These victims of human trafficking are then forced to perpetrate fraud under threat of violence and seek her help getting rescued or repatriated. She vets the requests carefully to make sure she’s assisting those most in need. To date she’s assisted around 120 people who’ve been trapped inside the region’s scam dens. That’s in addition to her day job, being a mom, helping other fraud victims get back on their feet and spreading awareness about the problem.
The good works she’s doing are, in turn, prompting others to do the same. During the weekend we met, she had just helped a young Malaysian man find his way home after his recent escape from a scam compound in Cambodia. The young man told me he wants to “carry that goodness forward” and he’s off to a great start; he’s already helped a Chinese family get their loved one out of a scam compound in Cambodia. Another human trafficking survivor I met in Malaysia is helping a group of Bangladeshi families try to get their loved ones rescued from scam compounds in Myanmar, and I could tell from our conversation that he’s found his new calling in life.
In some ways, their story is the opposite of The Forged Coupon. It’s my favorite novella by Leo Tolstoy, in which a boy forges a coupon to repay three rubles to a friend. The seemingly innocuous act of deceit sets off larger and larger acts of evil that wreck more and more lives, culminating in murder and other tragedies. The selfish deceit underpinning pig-butchering scams has a similar multiplier effect. But what gives me hope is that it doesn’t just magnify evil. It also spurs good people to do good things for others and prompts them to do the same.
It's not just fraud and human trafficking victims who are being spurred to selfless acts to help others. We’re seeing a similar dynamic in other communities, like the growing coalition of volunteers behind Operation Shamrock. As more people around the world decide to take it upon themselves to tackle this problem in 2025, we’re likely to see the start of something bigger. Imagine a day when, as you read that oft-cited statistic that over 220,000 people may have been victims of scam-linked human trafficking, you know there’s at least as many people out there doing their part to put an end to this injustice.
Learning their stories has been an eye-opening and humbling experience. I can’t wait to share it with you in The Big Trace.