A 39-year-old Japanese national identified only as Mr. Sasaki was arrested in Bangkok's Thonglor district on June 6 after running what Japanese prosecutors allege was a billion-yen call center empire out of Poipet, Cambodia. The voices on the phone were trafficked. The grandmothers on the other end were not.
An international takedown announced this spring pulled 276 people and $701 million out of the pig butchering economy. The story is not the seizure. The story is the building the messages came from.
Federal prosecutors say two Chinese nationals managed a compound in Burma where trafficked workers were forced to run cryptocurrency romance scams against Americans. The Justice Department has restrained more than $700 million tied to the network. The victims thought they were talking to someone who cared.
Inside a walled facility in rural Burma, trafficked workers sat at laptops and called American retirees pretending to be JPMorgan. The DOJ has now charged the men who built that room and ran it. The room is gone. The machine is not.