The message from Alice was blunt: “I don’t trust you. You are one of them, right? You all just want to sell me like some animal.”
Alice’s hostile reaction wasn’t completely surprising to Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li and Mark Bo, the co-authors of “Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds” (Verso), out July 8. “Like the dozens of other survivors we met in the following months,” they write, “her harrowing experience had left her unable to trust anyone.”
The past half-decade has seen a nefarious web of cyber-scam operations set up shop across Southeast Asia, luring (and trapping) workers from across the globe targeting victims on every corner of the planet. Getty Images
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Alice (not her real name), a Taiwanese single
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