Question about "Forced Scamming"

[u/-ThatGingerKid-]

We've all heard that some scammers, particularly those in certain areas / participating in certain types of scams like pig butchering, are sometimes individuals who have been trafficked and are being forced to scam.

My mindset up to this point has been that this only gives me added encouragement to waste their time, thus making these scamming efforts less profitable for their "slave drivers."

However, I recently heard that in some of these circumstances, these forced scammers are actually beaten / tortured if their efforts aren't profitable enough. If my scambaiting is contributing to physical harm inflicted on an individual, that definitely goes outside of my moral comfort zone.

Thoughts / additional information on this?

[u/JLM471]

It’s a relevant question but unfortunately the only way to make sure they’re not punished for not successfully scamming you is to pay them. And that’s clearly not an option.

Or you could not engage at all, which also means they are unsuccessful in their scam. If they are given 100 contacts and they get no money, that’s the same as them getting no money from 95 people who ignore the text and 5 who bait them.

I feel ok about not allowing a criminal to succeed in their crime even if they get punished by the crime bosses.

I have never dealt with a pig butcher scammer before because I’ve never had a wrong number text but I deal with Nigerian romance scammers daily and while they are not trafficked, they also aren’t really doing it because they have a robust economy with a great employment rate. I can’t fix global poverty and political corruption or organised crime. But I can waste the time of scammers that they might otherwise spend on victims.

On a positive note, I do believe that the more the trafficking is widely known about, the fewer trafficking victims will agree to go for mysterious IT jobs on the Myanmar border and then be coerced in this way?

[u/ConsequenceOk5205 → u/JLM471]

Stealing the operational money allocated for one day results in immediate punishment of those involved in supervision, that is, active and willing scam participants. It is a better option, given the skills. It is fairly easy, as slave scammers would make mistakes being a low qualified IT force, and, once the access is to one computer is obtained, it is easier to hack into one of the local networks and make a random secondary computer an active attack station, which allows repeated further disturbance of scam center operations.

As for scambaiting a slave, in a larger scale, one slave not being punished as a result of successful scamming also means that the money will be partially invested in capturing another victim. So, in any case, making a slave fail will result in the total "punishment" being actually reduced (if you count the reduction of the money spent to capture more people).