Welcome to "The Big Trace" Newsletter!
Introduction to the vision behind The Big Trace and why I'm writing the book.
Hello, this is Cezary. Thank you so much for your interest in my forthcoming book, The Big Trace. I appreciate your support and will use this newsletter to build a community around the core themes of the book – cyberfraud, corruption, human trafficking and money laundering – and to provide occasional updates from my travels abroad as I report this ambitious project.
Introduction
First, I just wanted to provide a quick introduction to the book and what inspired me to write it.
Back in 2022, I embarked on a monthslong investigation for ProPublica to examine the troubling new phenomenon of scam-linked human trafficking in Southeast Asia. The story published in Sept. 2022, just as the international community was waking up to the global scale of the problem. But despite ongoing news coverage, rising diplomatic pressure and increased efforts by law enforcement, the problem kept getting worse.
A key moment for me came after I interviewed a human trafficking victim who was forced to scam others and who witnessed a distressed fraud victim take his own life; just a few weeks after that July 2023 interview, I read the shocking news of a desperate father who killed his family after his wife fell victim to the same scam. I remembered a phrase I had seen in Thai media around that time, “cyber-vaccination” – the idea that maybe the public could be vaccinated against online scams through increased awareness, much like the life-saving vaccines that helped us all get through COVID-19. I wondered what I could do to help, and I thought maybe I could bring together all the different threads of this story together in one place.
That’s the vision behind The Big Trace. As for the execution, I’ve worked as a financial investigative reporter most of my career, at Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and at ProPublica. So I’m reporting this story using the classic approach I’ve honed over the years – following the money. I began learning how to use cryptocurrency tracing software last year (Crystal Intelligence, for the curious) and doing some of my own tracing of a few pig-butchering fraud victims I’ve interviewed. I’m now looking at the money flows and seeing where it leads me.
Which brings me to my first update from the field.
Notes From Cambodia
In September, I returned to Cambodia to get a better sense of why the country has emerged as such a big hotspot for cyber-scams and money laundering in recent years. The rise of scam compounds staffed by human-trafficking victims are now a well-documented phenomenon; there are so many of them scattered across Cambodia that even in discussing the problem with an expert, I found myself looking out the window and seeing a building that matched the common features of compounds he was describing. However, the criminal-adjacent industry of money laundering has gotten less attention.
For a primer on that, I recommend this excellent essay by Yanyu Chen in Global China Pulse, which has been publishing a series of insightful articles on scam-linked human trafficking in recent weeks. In her essay, Chen describes hotel rooms above casinos in Sihanoukville, Cambodia’s main scam hub, where workers aren’t being forced to perpetrate scams but are instead helping scammers connect with money-laundering service providers to move the proceeds of their fraud. Moreover, this activity is often done with a patina of legitimacy. As Chen points out:
In international money-laundering transactions, the actors involved are often at war with the financial systems of different countries and know how to play with their rules. In Cambodia, they can get the payment service provider and banking licences they need to enter the Cambodian financial system and build apparently legitimate fronts …
I’ll be exploring this theme further in The Big Trace, and I can’t recommend Chen’s essay enough to anyone who’s interested in getting a more nuanced understanding of how scam syndicates utilize money laundering networks to access to proceeds of their fraud.
#FreeMechDara
You may also have seen Cambodia in the news recently thanks to the unjust arrest of Mech Dara, a Cambodian investigative journalist who helped expose the country’s troubling scam industry. The early reports he pieced together for a series in VOD News, “Enslaved,” were revelatory and troubling and likely prompted the government to shut down VOD in February 2023. Dara’s arrest this week on vague charges of criminal incitement is another sign of the government’s desire to bury this story as pressure mounts for Cambodia to do more to shut cyber-scamming compounds operating on its soil.
I had the pleasure of working with Dara in Cambodia in 2022 when we collaborated on my ProPublica report on scam-linked human trafficking. His reporting chops amazed me as much as his kindness and humor; I hope that by keeping the international spotlight on Dara’s unjust attention, he can be freed and return where he belongs – out in the field being the eyes and ears of the people, not behind bars. His work should be elevated, not silenced.
I hope The Big Trace will elevate the exceptional work Dara’s done over the years. Meanwhile, I helped write a statement for the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong calling for his release; you can find it here, along with a thread I put together here summarizing statements by other press clubs and advocacy groups. Please share widely and keep Dara in your thoughts and prayers.
Stay in Touch
Thanks for reading this far! If you know of anyone who might be interested in the themes I’ll be exploring in my book, please forward this note to them and encourage them to subscribe here. You can also follow me on X at @Cezary and The Big Trace on @TheBigTrace; the latter handle will become more active once the book is finished and ready for its debut. And when it is, you’ll be the first to know. Thanks for subscribing and please stay in touch!