Welcome to "Last Week Tonight". I'm John Oliver.
Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a busy week.
From the U.S. vetoing a ceasefire in Gaza yet again,
to the revelation that Joe Biden's dog
bit secret service agents at least 24 different times.
But we're gonna start in West Virginia,
which has spent the past several weeks
debating a bill to impose criminal penalties
for exposing children to "obscene" literature in schools and libraries.
The debate has featured spectacular testimony from concerned citizens,
reading out material that they objected to.
"Are you gonna eat her pussy?" "Yeah, I'm going to eat her pussy."
"Hey, yeah. Do you even know how to eat pussy?
Papa Gaines never sat you down, said,
'Son, one day, you're going to have to eat the pussy?'"
"No. But he did teach me how to eat a butthole."
Look…
I admit, I don't remember that scene from "The Giving Tree".
But it's been a while. In retrospect, it does make sense for the tree
to sit the boy down and explain how to rock the box.
It's an important lesson.
While that hearing was ridiculous, the law itself is serious.
Violating it could carry a felony charge,
with a penalty of $25,000 and a sentence of up to five years.
Many have called it a "book ban",
although the bill's backers push back on that,
with one of the speakers who supported it saying,
"We are not banning or burning, we are protecting."
Although I'll tell you what you're definitely not protecting,
that is my ears from hearing "eat the pussy" four times
out of this woman's mouth.
But while West Virginia may not be burning books,
obscenity bills and similar moral panics
are spreading around the country, in places like Missouri,
where a candidate for office released this video.
I will do this to the grooming books when I become secretary of state.
These books come from a Missouri public library.
When I'm in office, they will burn.
So, there is a lot not to like there,
including that her flamethrower is apparently fueled by liberal tears.
Which, what? I'm not saying the GOP's messaging is in disarray,
but are liberal tears the thing you love to drink
because your enemies' sadness tastes so sweet?
Or is it the deadly fuel for your very cool shark-themed flamethrower?
'Cause you gotta pick a fucking lane there.
For now, let's turn to Alabama,
which has been reeling after a major decision from its highest court.
This morning,
a first-of-its-kind decision by the Alabama Supreme Court
that could put at risk families' access
to fertility treatments in the post-Roe.
The court determining frozen embryos qualify as people under its state law,
ruling, "unborn children
are 'children' without exception based on developmental stage."
Yeah. They ruled frozen embryos are the same as people,
which is wrong for a bunch of reasons,
mainly, if you freeze an embryo, it's fine.
If you freeze a person, you have some explaining to do.
Now, that ruling could have massive implications
for anyone who needs IVF to conceive,
and that is a lot of people.
Around 2% of babies born in the U.S. are from IVF.
Already, multiple fertility clinics
have paused treatment in the wake of this decision,
which, as anyone who's ever undergone IVF will tell you,
isn't something you can just do.
IVF cycles take weeks of careful monitoring and expensive treatments.
You can't just hit pause and wait out a court case.
This is a seismic decision, and the reason the court
was hearing this case to begin with was pretty wild.
The case in question involved a patient who managed to access
the freezer storing frozen embryos at an Alabama fertility clinic.
The patient picked up multiple embryos
and mistakenly dropped and destroyed them.
The court ruled that the clinic could be sued for wrongful death.
And while that accident is genuinely horrible,
someone wandering into a lab and dropping frozen embryos
just isn't murder.
If anything, it sounds like the script for a pretty tasteless Mr. Bean sequel,
but that is it.
The reason clinics are pausing treatment right now
is that nobody quite knows what it could mean for an embryo
to be legally equivalent to a person going forward.
What happens if an embryo is stored improperly?
What if they're, as inevitably happens,
left over or destroyed in the implantation process?
What about genetic testing, which can reduce the risk of miscarriage,
but does carry a slight risk of damaging embryos?
Would that now be considered a wrongful death?
It is chaos, and experts say that courts in other states
could try and issue similar rulings.
But none of this should be that surprising.
This ruling is a natural outgrowth of the concept of "fetal personhood",
long pushed by hardline anti-abortion groups,
which Republicans have spent decades courting.
And some politicians suddenly seem alarmed to have to deal
with the consequences of a movement that they have actively empowered.
Nikki Haley spent the week trying to reconcile her position
that "When you're talking about an embryo, you're talking about a life,"
with what that actually means in legal terms.
Meanwhile, watch as Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville
seemed to realize the problems with his position in real time.
Do you have a reaction to the Alabama Supreme Court
ruling on the fact that embryos are children?
Yeah, I was all for it.
We need to have more kids, to have an opportunity to do that.
And I thought that this was the right thing to do.
But IVF is used to have more children,
and now IVF services are paused at some of the clinics in Alabama.
Aren't you concerned
that this could impact people who are trying to have kids?
That's for another conversation.
Senator, what do you say to the women right now in Alabama
who no longer have access to IVF and will not
as a result of this ruling?
What do you say to them?
That's a hard one. It really is. It's really hard.
You want people to have that opportunity.
And that's what I was telling her, we need more kids.
Guess what, Tommy? I got great news!
Since your political philosophy
seems to begin and end with "we need more kids",
you'll be thrilled to know that thanks to a judge in Alabama,
there's now whole freezers full of them!
Go play with all those frosty kids, Senator!
Or maybe that's not what you had in mind when you think of children,
which is exactly the fucking point here.
Republicans are in a tough spot right now,
trying to hold onto hardline anti-abortion forces,
while not alienating the majority of Americans.
And maybe the best current example of this is Donald Trump.
He issued a statement this week
that he strongly supports the availability of IVF
for couples who are trying to have a precious baby,
something he referred to as "the ultimate joy in life",
all caps, exclamation mark.
And it's incredible how even objectively wholesome sentences
take on an air of creepiness
when passed through the chaotic Trump punctuation filter.
Meanwhile, he's also been privately floating a federal ban on abortion
at the 16-week mark, reportedly saying,
"Know what I like about 16? It's even. It's four months".
And I will say, starting any sentence with,
"You know what I like about 16,"
should be off limits for anyone who has this many photos with Jeffrey Epstein.
But while Trump might think 16 weeks is the reasonable option,
which it isn't, anti-abortion forces
are hoping to use a second Trump term to go much, much further.
One tool they're apparently eager to use is the Comstock Act,
an 1873 law that criminalizes the shipping
of any materials used in an abortion, including abortion pills,
with one of Trump's lawyers saying,
"We don't need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books".
It was one of the key pretexts in last year's mifepristone ruling,
and Lindsey Graham actually cited Comstock when defending it.
The idea of mailing the drug, sending the drug through the mail,
runs into a statute called the Comstock Act.
It's a very old statute on the books.
Do you believe that the Supreme Court should use that
as a way to ban this abortion pill?
I think it's a law on the books.
I guess it's not that surprising
that Graham's endorsement of a law boils down to "it's on the books",
given that "it's old and it's there" sums up Lindsey Graham at this point.
He seems determined to stay in the Senate
- until he can complete his "Animorphs" - style transformation into Beaker.
And he's getting close. He's only a couple of steps away.
But he is right, the Comstock Act is technically there.
Meaning a Trump administration, or the judges he appoints,
could try using it to restrict abortion without going through Congress.
Which is both alarming,
and something many pro-life figures are anxious to keep quiet for now.
That Trump lawyer that I mentioned even said of him
"I hope he doesn't know about the existence of Comstock,
because I just don't want him to shoot off his mouth.
I think the pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut
as much as possible until the election."
But whenever they don't want to talk about something,
it's probably worth you knowing about it.
So, for the record, the Comstock Act is named after Anthony Comstock,
a 19th-century anti-sex crusader and postal inspector
who was, and I quote, a "chronic masturbator",
who believed it was physically harmful,
so launched a crusade
to stamp out the transmission and transportation of all obscene material.
Imagine jerking off so much you make it a matter of national security.
The Comstock Act forbade sending by mail
"every obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent,
filthy or vile article, matter, thing, device, or substance,"
as well as "every article or thing designed, adapted,
or intended for producing abortion."
That is the clause abortion opponents have been using on mifepristone,
and they hope to expand it
to cover the shipping of literally anything an abortion requires.
So, the Comstock Act is a wild law, pushed for by a deeply weird,
dangerously horny man,
that may soon be determining all our reproductive freedoms.
It's worth noting that Comstock
was also a leader in the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice,
whose seal, fun fact, depicted someone burning books.
Which, to be fair, conservatives don't do anymore.
As we all know, they use flamethrowers now.
That is the thing that ties everything I've just talked about here together,
there are politicians currently desperately trying
to distance themselves from extreme policies that they have enabled.
You can say "We're not trying to ban or burn books",
but that's what's happening.
You can say "We just want more kids",
but you're making life incredibly hard for people,
including those who desperately want them.
Burning books and ending IVF are the natural endpoints
of the extreme policies they've held hands with,
and if they are not at least willing to own those consequences,
then they can, in the words of what I believe to be
this country's greatest public speaker…
Eat a butthole.
Well said. Well said, indeed.
And now, this!
And Now…
More Explicit Readings From Concerned Citizens at Public Meetings.
"The boy just talked soft to her about how good she looked
at things like that
and she grabbed his penis with her hands and starting moving it."
"It felt so good, so fucking good,
I don't know how people do anything but have sex
if they are adults and don't have school or parents."
"Ildy was on top of Valencia, making love to her.
While Billy was making love to her, Billy made a noise like a rusty hinge.
He had just emptied his seminal vesicles into Valencia."
"Now before this, I had sucked my share of dicks
and had gotten plenty of blowjobs, handjobs, every kind of job.
But the only butt sex I'd had was with this junior
who was in love with my cock and he just hopped aboard."
"And I pull and I suck until he grows hard
and he makes sounds that means he likes it,
and I keep going and going.
And when he says 'I'm going to cum,' I don't pull away.
The jet of him is warm and salty and tastes like thickened sweat."
"You can eat a girl out and blow some air inside of her
or you can fuck her too hard."
"My only challenge is Brian, who is my jerkoff friend,
who likes to jerk me off."
"Son, I don't have time for that.
I've got like 20 pussies over here that I need to eat." "Is that right?"
"I'm on pussy deadline."
"I didn't have a hard-on anymore. That might some weird to say.
It's also fucking complicated and tragic and life sucks."
Just want to mention,
I've never said the F-word ever in my life before until just now, so.
Moving on.
Our main story tonight concerns the internet.
It can be a magical place,
but also one where things aren't always what they seem,
as this woman learned the hard way.
Queen Shaydonna Haynesworth thought she bought this,
the Instagram ad displaying a tree that fits in a living room,
not the palm of her hand.
This is the rainbow Christmas tree?
Like, seriously?
Like, who…
Who is responsible for this?
It must've been pretty disappointing
to order a full-size tree and get whatever that is.
She must've felt like HBO did when they ordered a comedy show
and got this instead.
Unfortunately, not every mistake is that benign.
It is not news that there are scammers on the internet,
but you may have noticed that one scam in particular
is currently everywhere.
A common way that it starts is with a weird text
from a number you don't recognize,
like "Cheryl, can we move lunch to 5:00?" when you're not Cheryl.
Or "Dave, what time is our flight?"
when you're not Dave and you don't have a flight booked.
Even as we worked on this piece,
multiple members of our staff and their friends were getting these messages,
from "Hello, is this the manager Jesse from the flower shop?"
to this one, reading
"Is this Dr. John? I'm Emily, is my horse recovering well?"
I'm so glad that wasn't sent to me, 'cause it would have worked.
You're calling me Dr. John? I'm instantly on board.
And you're assuming I'm around a horse for medical reasons?
That's exactly what I've been saying!
I'm allowed to touch it like that. I'm a doctor!
And I know most people ignore messages like those.
But some write back, get sucked into a conversation,
and eventually, through a process that we'll get into,
can end up losing a lot of money.
It's a scam with a striking name that newscasters can't seem to get over.
It's called a pig butchering scam.
And it might sound like a gruesome name,
but that's because the amount of money victims are losing is painful.
The scammers have a terrible term for what Wendy went through.
They call it pig butchering.
The New Mexico Securities Division calls them "pig butchering scams".
I know, but don't worry, there are no pigs, or any other animals involved.
Yes, don't worry, there are no pigs harmed in this pig butchering scam.
Although, if the words do make you squeamish, it's worth noting
that there is a process through which pigs are harmed every day.
It's actually how we get bacon, pork, and other products.
It's called pig butchering, and it's exactly what it sounds like.
But the name makes a little more sense
once you understand how the scam actually works.
In the world of cyber and counterterrorism threats,
Special Agent Hassani has seen it all.
But in 2021, he began seeing a new scam: pig butchering.
But it just refers to raising little piglets,
fattening them up, and butchering them.
And they're fattening up their victim with illusions of grandeur,
of wealth, of love, before bleeding them dry.
That is rough. Because imagine being a victim of this scam,
turning on the news, and suddenly learning
that the shorthand for people in your situation is "the pigs".
Although, I will say, it could have been worse. Pigs are awesome!
They're one of the most intelligent animals on the planet.
They're smarter than dogs, most three-year-olds, and Tom Sandoval.
To use a phrase that the police never seem to appreciate,
it's actually an honor to be compared to a pig!
And if you are thinking,
"This seems like the kind of scam that's been around for decades."
That is partially true. But the way this one works is fairly new.
And in the short time that it's been around, it's been massively successful.
Just this month, it was at the center of a huge local news story in Kansas,
where it brought down a financial institution.
I was surprised. I was shocked. I was disappointed.
Kansas State Bank commissioner David Herndon
is talking about the massive cryptocurrency scam
at the Heartland Tri-State Bank in Elkhart.
In a cryptocurrency scheme
that the FBI has now referred to as pig butchering.
In this case, Herndon says, the victim was Shan Hanes,
the bank's own CEO.
And he's now facing charges of embezzling nearly $50 million,
a loss that caused the bank to fail last August.
That's true. According to prosecutors, a bank CEO got pig-butchered,
sent his scammer the bank's holdings, and the bank went under.
Which is alarming for several reasons, among them, is that how banks work?
'Cause it really feels like there should be at least one step between
"CEO gets tricked" and "Whoops! The bank's empty."
It's estimated that, as of 2022, this scam was taking people
for more than $3 billion a year in the U.S. alone.
And that's almost certainly a massive undercount,
as it only includes people who reported their losses to the FBI.
So, given all of that, tonight, let's talk about pig butchering.
Why it's easier to fall for than you might think,
who's behind it, and what we can do to protect ourselves
and our liked ones from getting scammed in the future.
And let's start with where this began. And to do that, unfortunately,
we do need to go back to the place that no one wants to go:
the beginning of Covid.
You remember Covid. It's the Stephen Miller of diseases,
in that we were all very worried about it a few years ago
and have since moved on even though it's still extremely dangerous.
But that is when pig butchering took off.
Basically, at the start of Covid, many of us were isolated and lonely,
desperately looking for human contact online,
which made us ripe targets.
At the same time, organized crime groups in China,
running casinos in southeast Asia, were in crisis,
as, thanks to the pandemic, gamblers weren't showing up.
So, "they turned those casinos into bases for online scam operations".
And from there, their workers identified people
and preyed on their vulnerabilities.
And let me walk you through the basic steps here.
The first is to make contact and lure your target in.
Listen to this woman explain how her scammer,
who called himself "Jimmy",
contacted her at a moment when she was dealing
with cancer, the pandemic, and the end of her marriage.
First message, it came as a very innocent message.
I said, "Wrong number".
He came back.
And I said yes. He had moved here just before Covid,
and then Covid hit, and so he's not able to go home.
He was a…
A lonely man in need of…
comfort.
Jimmy would message me every day.
I do remember receiving these emojis with hearts.
It's quite flattering for a middle-aged woman
to meet a young man who finds you attractive.
Yeah, of course, that's flattering.
Because scammers are telling their targets
what they want to hear most in that moment.
We might not all fall for a GIF of a heart-pumping emoji,
but if someone sent me "nerd with glasses" plus "football"
plus "learning" plus "sad statistics" equals "fire emoji," me personally?
Why, I would nut!
One way of making contact is through those "wrong number" texts.
But experts that we've talked to estimate that they only make up
about a quarter of the initial contacts for this scam.
The rest can come through sites like LinkedIn,
dating apps, Instagram, or Facebook,
places specifically designed for you to meet people that you don't know,
either for love, a hook up, or, in the case of LinkedIn,
to find out what kind of person is still on fucking LinkedIn.
And scammers often research their target using social media,
where there is a lot of information about people,
so they can pretend to have something in common.
Take this woman, who met someone on a dating app,
only to discover that they shared an unexpected connection.
He started asking questions about my family and my past experiences.
It was a connection that felt even stronger, she says,
when he told her he came from the same town in China
from where Hutchinson was adopted.
We bonded over that.
I bet they did! And I've got to say,
it says something about men on dating apps
that they connected so well simply because he did things
like ask her questions about herself and listen to her responses.
I don't want to say the bar for men is low,
but that story started with him asking her questions about her life
and ends with her giving him all of her money.
But regardless of how they start, sooner or later,
we move on to step two: turning the conversation toward money.
But even then, there's a smart twist.
Because you won't be suddenly asked to wire money to a Nigerian prince
with an obviously fake email like "real-pr1nce",
spelled with a one instead of an I, "at-scum-dot-farts".
With pig butchering, there's no direct ask for money at all.
Instead, an opportunity gets presented to you.
Watch as this man explains the moment when a guy that he met on a dating site
started to reel him in.
He spent at least a month daily talking to me
and cultivating my friendship.
Initially, the only talk about money was how much his new online friend
had made in crypto.
After all, Scott thought he knew how to protect himself from scams.
"You can invest with me and I'll make you all this money,"
and I was like, "I'm not giving you money, that's not happening."
So, that's when he started "No, you don't give it to me.
You establish your own account and I'll guide you."
Right. That's the clever hook here. You're not sending the scammer money,
they're helping you set up and control your own account.
Everything seems more legitimate when there's an app involved.
You don't think so? When is the last time you took an Uber?
Get in a nondescript car with someone I've never met?
I would never do that! But wait, what's this?
I can do it from my phone? In that case, here's my address,
now you know where I live and that I won't be home for the evening.
My name's John, I don't know your last name but that doesn't matter
'cause I'm also not committing your face to memory.
Everything's safe, there's an app involved!
And the fact the investment is often in crypto
can be persuasive for multiple reasons.
First, who really knows how crypto works?
I know your friend's weird husband claims that he does,
but he sucks to talk to, so sadly, it must remain a mystery.
But people have made money on crypto, so it's not unreasonable
to think you might meet one of them and they could give you some tips.
On top of which, you may not be super familiar
with how a trading platform operates or even what one looks like.
And scammers have created incredibly plausible-looking platforms.
We got this footage of one,
which seems to have all the detail and functionality of a real one,
and I'll be honest, I could be fooled by that.
Also, some scammers use legitimate apps
that allow anyone to build a trading exchange.
The problem is, there are tools that scammers can use
to simulate fake results on those apps, while taking your money.
Watch this journalist explain how this gave one victim false confidence.
In MetaTrader, it looks just like
any kind of normal trading interface that one would use.
It's available in the Google Play Store. It's available on the Apple App Store.
It's an app that has a lot of good ratings,
and that was one of the things that made Cy think
that this whole operation was legitimate.
He believed that his investment was making money.
If you're trading on a legitimate trading interface,
right, you see the profits and losses over time.
And this is exactly what he saw.
If your friend told you to download an app,
and you saw it in the App Store with good reviews,
you might assume everything on it was legitimate,
even before you saw MetaTrader's logo,
which looks like three men in suits jerking each other off under a table,
a metaphor for cryptocurrency if I have ever seen one.
Some scammers even set up additional features
like two-factor authentication or customer service lines.
This woman tried her best to do due diligence
on the site that she was sent,
and came away convinced that it was real.
There was a legal secretary involved in another state,
vouching association with a law firm where it was sending money to.
She's real. I could verify her, so it was very complex and well-rehearsed.
Right. She spoke with a legal secretary and a law firm before sending money.
And that is more vetting than I've done for my kids' daycare.
I love them, they're precious to me, but they're also loud, sticky,
and one of them is just getting stronger and stronger every day,
so if you have a building with walls and a phone number that I can call,
I trust you, take them for the afternoon.
And at this point in the process,
things might look pretty good for the people getting scammed.
You've sent a bit of money to a legitimatelooking site,
through an account that you control.
And your new friend's trading tips seem to be working,
so maybe you send a little bit more.
And pretty soon, you might have a fair amount of money
tied up on this trading platform.
But when you eventually go to withdraw it,
that is where we hit the final step of this process.
Remember that woman you saw earlier,
whose online friend claimed that he was from the town where she was born?
Well, she'd convinced her dad to invest as well,
they'd seemingly made a bunch of money, and then this happened.
By December, their accounts showed a combined balance of $1.2 million,
and Hutchinson decided it was time to cash out.
That's when the site told her, before she could withdraw her money,
she'd have to pay a hefty tax bill of roughly $380,000.
That's when I was like "Something's not right".
It wasn't. The cryptocurrency investments weren't real.
All her and her father's funds had gone into the scammer's pockets.
In all, $390,000 stolen.
I messed up my life. I messed up my dad's life.
She told me that it was all a scam.
Hutchinson's father, Melvin.
And all I could do was just hug her and tell her, it's okay.
It's okay. And it was hard.
It was hard, 'cause we lost everything.
Yeah, their money had already gone,
and that tax bill was just an attempt to squeeze them one last time.
And theirs isn't the only brutal story here.
This woman lost $350,000. This guy lost 300,000.
And that woman who fell for "Jimmy"
sent him two and a half million dollars,
as she was dealing with terminal cancer.
It is traumatic and it's humiliating
and it took courage for those people to come forward.
That is partly why experts think
the $3 billion figure that we have is way too low,
because most people who've been scammed like this
simply don't report their losses out of embarrassment.
And at this point, you're probably furious
with the people on the other end of all of these messages,
and want to see them taken down, or, at the very least, fucked with.
And that does happen a lot.
People post screengrabs messing with scammers all the time,
like in this exchange, where someone replies to "wrong number"
with "My name is Inigo Montoya",
and, "You don't by any chance have six fingers on your right hand, do you?"
Or this one, where a scammer writes "I'm Sarah, nice to meet you",
with a picture, and gets the reply "Weewoo weewoo. Boner alert".
And look, I'll be honest,
that doesn't seem like the right sound to me.
That's not what I would've gone with "a-woo-ga, a-woo-ga, boner alert".
But reasonable people can disagree, all bodies are different,
there's no one right sound for a boner alert.
But here is the thing, as cathartic as that might be,
the person on the other end of that phone
might not be the one you should be mad at.
'Cause remember when I said that this was being done in former casinos
by organized crime syndicates?
It turns out, they're not great bosses.
This compound is where an Indian man named Rakesh
says he was forced to work for more than 11 months without pay
for a Chinese criminal gang.
Rakesh, who doesn't want to be identified,
says he first flew to Thailand for what he thought was an IT job.
Instead, he says he was tricked into crossing the border to Myanmar
where a Chinese gangster told him to work, or else.
- He threatened to kill you. - Yeah. He warned me like that.
And the job? Spend 16 hours a day
on social media targeting Americans with a fake profile.
That is awful.
No one should be forced to spend 16 hours a day on social media.
You should do it either because you love it,
or because you are 15 years old and the algorithm has addicted you to it.
Completely normal reasons. A lot of these organizations
are using people who've been human trafficked,
after being lured to the compounds under false pretenses.
They are actually victims of a scam themselves.
Basically, they might see job ads for skilled positions as translators,
or IT specialists, in another country.
They then go through a whole application process,
with some going through "up to four seemingly legitimate online interviews"
and fly to their new job.
At which point, they suddenly learn
their new bosses have their documents and they now can't leave.
Back in 2022, ProPublica estimated that tens of thousands of people
had been tricked in this way.
A more recent UN report estimated that hundreds of thousands of people
have been forcibly engaged in this scheme.
They also say "most victims are confined to the scam compound,
and their screens are always monitored
by the members of the organized crime group."
And once they are in, they are provided fake profiles
to try and hook people in with.
Here is who Rakesh found himself being all day.
I got a Russian girl.
With using a Russian girl fake profile, I need to scam the people.
Posing as a Salt Lake City-based investor named Klara Semonov,
Rakesh flirted online with potential targets.
70 to 80% fall for fake love.
Yeah, Rakesh was Klara Semonov from Salt Lake City.
So, before we go any further,
anyone who thinks that they are dating Klara, I'm afraid you are not.
The relationship is over. It's not you, but it's also not her.
It's Rakesh. But also, it isn't him.
It's Rakesh's boss, who won't let him leave.
The whole operation is highly organized
and set up to get around the usual ways that you might detect a scam.
Some organizations generate their own photos for the profiles,
so that they can't be reverse-image searched.
And employees are given manuals,
like these that guide them through every step of the process.
They're told to target people who look wealthy and successful.
One advises on the first day, talk about things
like your name, age, occupation, and hobbies.
Then, the next day, talk about your emotional experience,
with a message divided into two paragraphs.
And then, on the third day, talk about your entrepreneurial experience.
They're even given tips on how to break down people's defenses.
We reviewed several of these manuals
and they carefully explain how to build trust
and exploit weaknesses in their so-called client, such as…
"Be funny, make clients fall in love with you
so deeply that they forget everything".
The chilling thing is, that's kind of true.
If you're funny enough, you can make people forget a lot of things,
whether it's common-sense internet safeguards,
lessons from previous relationships,
or that they've been accidentally learning about financial fraud
and human trafficking for the last 20 minutes.
We're having fun, aren't we? And if you're thinking
"Why don't authorities just shut these compounds down?"
Sometimes they're in on it.
Here is one man who was trafficked to a scam center in Cambodia,
explaining what happened when he did the obvious thing.
On his second day in captivity, Lu emailed the Chinese embassy.
He was advised to call the Sihanoukville police.
But the police never came.
The property management came instead.
They knew that I'd called the police.
Five days.
Lu says the managers then sold him to another scamming company.
He said "Because I called the police,
they had to take care of the police with at least $4,000,
and I had to pay for that, too."
The authorities weren't gonna help him.
Which actually makes sense when you learn
that, according to UN estimates, pig butchering in Cambodia
brings in an amount equivalent to half the country's GDP.
Which is worrisome, because as everyone knows,
when something generates that much money, you don't shut it down,
you spin it off and pray the magic works a second time.
Come on!
And conditions in these compounds can be brutal.
That man you saw earlier, Rakesh, took photos of abuse like this one,
of a coworker who'd been beaten.
And Lu, who managed to get out, now works to free others,
and the stories of what he's seen are, fair warning, hard to watch.
I saw a man get beaten up very badly. He had injuries all over his body.
Lu contends it was this man,
who was reportedly found hanging just hours later.
I'm certain it was him.
His phone is full of messages from Chinese citizens
desperate to be freed from scam companies.
There's videos of abuse.
Lu says he receives them directly from victims inside the scam industry,
or finds them posted in social media group chats.
And he's got handcuffs. They're shocking.
That is horrifying. And when you know all of this,
it kind of starts to change who exactly you are mad at here.
Because suddenly, the individuals on the other end of the phone
don't seem quite so fun to send a message
of "Weewoo weewoo, boner alert" to.
Not that that isn't an excellent text. Who doesn't love a boner alert?
But there's a time and a place, and this might not be it.
Also, from now on, whenever you get a sexy text from a new stranger,
good luck not thinking
"Is this a man who was just beaten in a work camp in Myanmar?"
And that, if anything, is the John Oliver effect.
You are welcome.
I can't say that every scammer is someone who was kidnapped,
tortured, and forced to do it.
But even if not everyone who's doing this is trapped or coerced,
the very fact that many are, is still a huge problem.
So, what can we do here?
Well, when it comes to those imprisoned in these compounds,
that's gonna take collaboration between international law enforcement.
Unless you are the head of Interpol, which, I'm guessing, you are not,
there's not much you, personally, can do.
Now, in this country, I'd argue that platforms like these
should be doing way more
to prevent the creation of fake accounts to target people
because it's happening on their watch.
But perhaps the most effective way to stop this from happening,
is to make it less lucrative by having fewer people fall for it.
And that is where awareness of this scam is key.
This is one of those rare cases
where raising awareness is, in itself, genuinely useful.
'Cause hopefully you've seen tonight, this could happen to someone you know.
This hasn't just sucked in old people, or those who aren't tech-savvy.
It managed to reel in a bank CEO.
Everyone has an image of the type of person
who is susceptible to getting scammed in their heads,
but unless that image is a mirror, ya might be wrong.
So, as a general rule, when a stranger on a dating app
says "I love you" or "crypto" within a month of talking to you, worry.
Honestly, even if they don't turn out to be scammers,
those are pretty good red flags to be looking for, personality-wise.
And it's worth telling your friends and family about pig butchering, too.
It doesn't have to be a big lecture or anything,
you can just send them a link to this show.
And if they say "I hate that guy",
say, "Yeah, me too, he's the worst, just skip past the jokes".
And if they say, "I'll watch it, but he looks like a LEGO accountant.
Wait, no. He looks like ChatGPT's answer to 'show me a virgin.
' Wait, no. He looks like Harry Potter if he just stayed under the stairs."
Leave them on read. You don't have to completely sell me out.
Maybe drop a thumbs-up emoji, but please, leave it at that.
If you know someone who's been scammed like this, try to be kind.
It is human to want companionship.
And it's actually a nice quality to be trusting of people.
It sucks that the internet,
which should be a way to alleviate loneliness,
can be turned into a tool to exploit it.
But maybe, if we all look out for one another,
we can ensure that the worst mistake anyone ever makes on the internet
is inadvertently buying an excellent Christmas tree for gay mice.
Because honestly, it's really not that bad a purchase.
Believe me, I know what I'm talking about.
And now, this!
And Now:
Local News Loses It Over Major League Baseball's New Pants.
Major League Baseball introduced new uniforms this year,
but there's a problem.
The pants are made of thinner fabric, making them almost see through, Chris.
- Wait, what? - Photos all over the internet…
You've got my attention.
Luckily, the tucked-in shirts keeping things covered for…
Look at him, his hands!
- You can see the little tags. - We saw it.
What's it?
- Steve! Okay. - We saw the bottom of their…
Does he look happy wearing them? No.
He looks happy wearing them.
Do you see the problem though?
I don't think girls are saying there's a problem there.
The players, I think, probably have an issue with it.
Now if I've got patterns on my boxer briefs everyone's gonna see that?
I don't know. Suddenly, I'm very interested in baseball.
Bianca is on her elbows on the desk trying to get closer.
Can we zoom into these photos a little bit more?
- I can't tell 'cause I have bad eyes - You can see the shirt tucked in.
Maybe these uniforms will get more women
that aren't watching baseball already to watch baseball.
- You've got Derica's interest. - That's what I said.
- It's a good recruiting device. - Yes, it is.
- I see nothing wrong with the pants. - I think they're fine.
I was inspecting to see a problem.
All right. If snakes make you…
Who put this order of these stories in here?
Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you next week, good night!