Most Western news coverage of the global scamdemic focuses on (unreliable) estimates of the total amount of money stolen and anecdotal stories about victims losing their life savings. Less attention is paid to the other victims: inhabitants of poor countries lured into leaving their homes by tantalizing job offers only to discover they have become slaves that work in a scam compound. There is a noticeable lack of interest in reporting the number of people affected, the number of slaves who have been tortured, and the number who were killed. Their personal stories are rarely told. So I will be changing the editorial policy of Commsrisk this year to pay more attention to those stories, and to the role played by internet businesses in circulating fraudulent job adverts.
Big Western corporations like Meta and Google want to keep Western narratives focused on ‘collaboration’ to fight scams. They spend a lot of money on controlling the narrative. Their vaguely feelgood message is that all we need is more collaboration between Western corporations… and then for governments in poor countries to lock up the baddies identified by those Western corporations. This is a useful way to dilute the responsibility of individual businesses. Verifying if a job posting is legitimate does not require elaborate sharing of signals intelligence between multiple corporations; checking the reputation of a business that posts a job advert is just another example of the know-your-customer controls that all businesses need to adopt to reduce scams but which internet companies are especially loathe to implement. There are governments which are calling out the failings of the internet platforms. They just happen to be different to the governments owned by people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. One example is the Kenyan government, which recently issued a stark warning about the trafficking of its people to scam compounds in East Asia.
A press briefing on foreign policy included an indication of how many Kenyans have been repatriated from scam compounds.
Notably, approximately 400 Kenyans have been lured by unscrupulous agents with promises of lucrative job opportunities in the Far-East, including in countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar only to end up working in conditions akin to modern slavery. The human trafficking situation in Southeast Asia, particularly for Kenyans, has become a significant and alarming concern, largely driven by the rise of forced criminality in online scam compounds.
It is a sophisticated menace where our citizens, often lured by fraudulent job advertisements and agents purportedly in places like Thailand, are trafficked to South East Asia for exploitation, including forced labor, online scamming, illegal cryptocurrency trade, and even the horrific prospect of human organ harvesting.
They provided an outline of the recruitment methods of scam compounds.
Operations of the criminal networks
These networks have been placing online adverts on Facebook, Instagram, Signal, X (formerly Twitter) YouTube among others, advertising various job opportunities ranging from receptionists, sales jobs, crypto currency traders, cooks, drivers, public relations officers, translators, factory workers among other menial jobs. Once Kenyan applicants apply for the job, they are quickly interviewed and offered the job. The victims have been swindled to travel on tourist visas, procure one-way tickets and book for non-existent hotel reservations. Since July 2022, reports indicate that many young Kenyans have fallen victim.
The situation is so dire that our Missions are constantly rescuing citizens who manage to reach to the missions in bad shape. There may be many out there waiting to be rescued. We appeal to Kenyans to undertake due diligence at all times.
The advice given to Kenyans is also advice that responsible social media corporations should be acting upon.
To mitigate this, the Government further continues to encourage all Kenyans seeking employment opportunities abroad to do so through agencies that have been vetted by the Ministry of Labour as well as through the National Employment Agency (NEA). NEA is tasked with regulating and accrediting recruitment agencies, as well as ensuring compliance with ethical recruitment standards, conducting pre-departure training and safeguarding the welfare of workers and accountability in cases of abuse or repatriation.
Are we supposed to believe that Facebook lacks the resources to restrict job adverts placed by organizations which have not been vetted? Copious evidence now shows Meta has a policy of consciously choosing to mislead governments about the weak controls that allows misleading content to be posted to its social network.
Scams are spreading and the victims of trafficking may stimulate more crime after they have been repatriated.
A major concern is that rescued individuals, now trained in cybercrime, pose a national security risk by potentially establishing scam operations in Kenya upon their return. Recommendations focus on a nationwide awareness campaign, strengthening legal frameworks, and enhancing victim support and integration.
There are some Kenyans who willingly work for Asian scam compounds.
A media story highlights the case of a Kenyan arrested at a Thai airport for using a fake immigration stamp. Having been previously repatriated from a scam compound in March 2025, he illegally re-entered Thailand to work for a Chinese-owned scam company in Myanmar. After a crackdown, he was arrested while attempting to fly home. This is a case to show that some of the victims are not innocent but part of the criminal network.
Some Westerners grew disgustingly rich from the transatlantic slave trade. Thankfully, others were repulsed by the exploitation of fellow human beings, and they ended the mass transportation of enslaved Africans in the 19th century. Some rich Westerners are once again profiting from the trafficking of African slaves. The difference is that they rationalize the role that social media plays when tricking inhabitants from poorer countries into becoming slaves. Current tech titans are like the businessmen who provided the ships which carried the slaves; they were complicit in the crime even if they never owned any slaves themselves. Internet firms like Meta are complicit in the modern day slavery that keeps scam compounds running.
Sadly, Western-facing anti-fraud associations habitually bend the knee to firms like Meta. This is because Meta has lots of money and it is expensive to run worldwide marketing campaigns for flashy meetings that impress politicians. Hiring people connected to governments is also expensive; they do not work for free. But when companies like Meta agree to the hefty sponsorship fees that cover those salaries, it should be obvious who the lobbyists are really working for. Groups like the Global Anti-Scam Association (GASA) are lobbyists on behalf of firms like Meta, diffusing responsibility for the global scamdemic by shifting the focus away from the anti-scam controls that individual GASA members could choose to implement without needing to depend on anyone else.
One good way to reduce scams would involve ending the trafficking of slaves to scam compounds. Fewer scammers means fewer scams. But that would hurt the profits of businesses like Meta. So they will keep the focus away from the negative influence they have on the inhabitants of poorer countries by repeating a more convenient narrative instead. It suits them to talk about the need for more cooperation between Western businesses so firms like Meta have even more data to weed out bad actors. But why behave as if success hinges on gathering even more data from other firms when Meta could be asking more questions of the users that posted the job adverts which lured victims into slavery?
Too many Western decision-makers prefer a pantomime about reducing crime to tackling crime at its roots if the latter means lower profits for rich Western companies and less money to grease the pockets of politicians and other hangers-on. If that means some Africans become slaves again, it is a price they are happy to see paid because they are not the ones paying it.
You can read the Kenyan government’s press briefing here.