That text is a scam

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Speaker 3 Heck spam around job.

Speaker 4 Two or three a day.

Speaker 5 The red flag starts showing up.

Speaker 6 For Alex Salmon, it was just a normal day until he got the text.

Speaker 5 I've been getting these texts basically every day, maybe every couple hours. And yeah, I got one.
It was a group text, actually.

Speaker 5 It was a handful of numbers with Filipino country codes. And it was

Speaker 5 a wonderful job offer. Hi there.
Sorry to interrupt. I'm from Indeed.
We're currently recruiting remote product testers, U.S.-based. This role lets you earn $50 to $400 per day.

Speaker 5 There's the curiosity rates. Like, how could this possibly be a real thing? Or who could be on the end of this or like what do they want even?

Speaker 5 If you're interested in meet the age requirement, please reply yes to receive more details. And so I said yes.

Speaker 6 Just yes, that was it.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 You know, I know how to follow instructions. I just said yes.

Speaker 6 We've all gotten these texts. A random recruiter sending a friendly message with an incredible job opportunity to make a lot of money for just a little bit of work.

Speaker 9 Hi, I'm Rebina Isabella.

Speaker 4 I'm Daniel. We saw your profile in multiple jobs.

Speaker 9 Multiple online recruitment agents.

Speaker 4 $100 to $500 per week.

Speaker 9 $10,000 per week or more.

Speaker 4 If you're interested in joining us, please text us at 127-8500.

Speaker 6 The reason you're getting so many is because, unfortunately, they work.

Speaker 10 As a veteran, I thought I was pretty immune to the scams, but I got an email saying that you can make all this money working at home just send us your information and we'll send you back a check check was about $500 and then they wanted 200 back and I sent them the money which is through Bitcoin or Amazon and cars or whatever I did that and then two days later my bank said the check was fake and I was out there $200 I had sent them

Speaker 6 Being scammed can feel really embarrassing, but you should know that if it's happened to you, you aren't alone. Last year, the FTC received nearly 250,000 reports of tech scams.

Speaker 6 Americans lost about $500 million

Speaker 6 to them.

Speaker 6 I'm John Glenn Hill, and this week on Explain It To Me from Box, we're going to figure out what the deal is with these scams, how they're pulled off, who's pulling the strings, and what can happen when you take the bait.

Speaker 6 Now, Alex from earlier, who replied to that text message job offer, he's actually a reporter for Slate. And he said yes to that job so that he could write about it.

Speaker 5 When I said yes, when I wanted this job, they were like, someone will reach out to you on WhatsApp and they'll train you.

Speaker 11 And that someone went by the name of Kathy.

Speaker 3 My name is Kathy, and I'm a coach from Interleaf. I just received a notice from Elena, who works in the recruitment department, that you are looking for a remote part-time job.

Speaker 5 She would be texting me basically every day being like, let's do the training.

Speaker 3 Let's get started on this. This is the best version of yourself.
Like, you're going to realize your wildest dreams.

Speaker 5 She was like pretty versed in the grind set.

Speaker 5 Then one day, I got a phone call from a number I didn't recognize.

Speaker 3 And she was like, It's Kathy from Innerley.

Speaker 11 Oh.

Speaker 6 And from the jump, she was what I would call a micromanager.

Speaker 3 She was like, What is going on? Do you want this job or don't you?

Speaker 5 And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah. I'm so sorry.
And she was like, let's get going. Okay.
Yeah. Sorry, my bad.
From there on out, she would call me like we were in touch and she was a real person.

Speaker 6 So you take the job. What was the job? What did they have you doing?

Speaker 5 They told me in broad strokes that like what we were doing was juicing play counts for like low performing songs on Spotify effectively.

Speaker 5 You know, there would be all these album covers and you would click in the middle of this this three by three rubric. And

Speaker 5 I mean, that was ultimately it. At a very basic level, I was just clicking in place over and over and over again.
I think it was like click, click, click, click, click, click, click.

Speaker 5 90 times that was a completed task. I did three of them a day and that was, that was sort of it.

Speaker 6 Were you actually kind of working?

Speaker 5 It's a great, it's a great question. It took me a really long time to figure this out, but it is a job that people do.
And it is like, it is something that exists.

Speaker 5 I think it was just ultimately sort of like a mock-up of that to justify the actual scam, which was which is finally far cruder and much more elementary.

Speaker 6 And how are you getting paid in all of this?

Speaker 5 Yeah, so this is where, if I wasn't going into this eyes wide open,

Speaker 5 this is probably where like the red flag starts showing up. They were like, you're going to be paid in cryptocurrency.
You're going to be paid in Bitcoin. You know, you have to have a Bitcoin wallet.

Speaker 6 So Alex set up this wallet and he was told that in order to move on from task to task, he'd need to maintain a minimum balance.

Speaker 3 You need to ensure that the account balance is at least 100 US dollars to reset the next set of tasks.

Speaker 7 And he figured, why not?

Speaker 6 He was crushing this job.

Speaker 5 Kathy was like, you did such a great job at this training. You encountered this thing called a bundle.

Speaker 5 And the result of which is that someone needs to put up $200 to refresh the account because this great thing happened, which is very hard to explain.

Speaker 6 I think we got a pause.

Speaker 6 Because what is a bundle?

Speaker 5 I thought she was saying bundle at first, but she was adamant and continued to text me it was a, it was a bundle.

Speaker 5 B-U-N-B-L-E.

Speaker 5 According to Kathy, a bundle was like, if you get lucky and you happen in the course of your clicking to click onto a song that's like so low performing that they can put multiple songs together then you hit a bumble

Speaker 5 and what happens is that you have to put up some money to buy more

Speaker 5 something

Speaker 5 to clear up the account. But the great news is you get that money back and then a way more money when it comes time to cash out.

Speaker 5 And that was sort of the day in, day out of it. It was like do a lot of clicking.
Click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Numbers go up.
And then every once in a while I'd hit a bumble.

Speaker 5 And then I would say, you know, hey, we need a couple bucks. Might have been like $19, I think, was the first hit.
And I was like, all right, you know, I got to see this thing through.

Speaker 5 Like, I'm happy to patch in $19. So I'd buy that amount in Bitcoin and I would send it over and I had to prove that I'd done it.
Yes. And they would refresh my account.

Speaker 5 They would congratulate me for my great work. And then I would go back to doing it.
Click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Yes.
Click, click, click, click, click, yes.

Speaker 5 Click, click, click, click, yes. And then it was slightly more money I had to fork over and I would do that.
Yes.

Speaker 5 Sometimes it was because if I wanted to level up and get more work, I had to put more money in. It was never like totally explained as to why that was required.

Speaker 5 I did this job for a while and then I was like, okay, time to cash out. But then every time I tried to cash out, there was always a problem.

Speaker 5 I would put in my Bitcoin wallet and then they would say, Oh, you didn't, you didn't clear this with the right person.

Speaker 5 Like, Kathy would say, If only you had told me you were cashing out, I could help you. And then she would be upset.
She'd be like, No, no, now it's too late. You can't, you can't cash out right now.

Speaker 5 You have to go back to work.

Speaker 3 When you are done, remember to tell me, and I will teach you how to get another reward.

Speaker 5 I think I was on for about six weeks and there came a time when I was out $96 at that point. She asked at that point for $300

Speaker 5 and at that point I felt like I've seen enough. Finally, I was not ever able to cash out.
I made many attempts. They were not very well received and crucially, they did not work.

Speaker 6 Alex told Kathy he wanted out. He also finally told her he was a reporter writing a story about scams.
Kathy seemed undeterred by that. She still wanted him to stay in the scam.

Speaker 6 As for Alex, he figured losing 96 bucks made him a lot luckier than other people.

Speaker 5 You have to, unfortunately, you know, know that like the idea that you'll have to be sending your boss money via cryptocurrency or any sort of other alternative currency, you know, gift cards have become a big part of this.

Speaker 5 Like those sorts of things should concern you. Like if you have a job, you're probably not sending money to the job.

Speaker 5 There's a lot of shame around it too, I think, that once you get down these things, you're like, how could I have possibly fallen for this?

Speaker 5 And not wanting to believe that you've fallen for it actually makes you go deeper.

Speaker 5 You know, like the few things that exist, the few law enforcement agencies that exist to combat this stuff, like they've seen a hatchet taken to their budget, to

Speaker 5 their staff, to their administrative capacity. You can report this stuff to the FTC.
It's unlikely they're going to be able to do that much for you.

Speaker 7 Did you ever hear from Kathy again?

Speaker 5 Kathy will pop up, I want to say once a week and will say, Hello, what's going on? The tone changes all the time. It goes from stern and scolding to encouraging and concerned, but

Speaker 5 she still will call me sometimes. I'll get phone calls from her as well.
So

Speaker 5 ongoing, certainly.

Speaker 8 I hope you're okay.

Speaker 3 Why'd you leave?

Speaker 3 Come back back to work.

Speaker 6 So, that's how these scams play out. And on their face, they're pretty absurd.
They're even kind of funny. But if you dig a little deeper, it gets really dark.

Speaker 6 That's next.

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Speaker 6 We're back. This is Explain It To Me.
I'm JQ. And today we're trying to figure out what's up with all these text message scams and who's behind them.

Speaker 6 Matt Burgess writes all about privacy and information security for Wired, and he's reported on one of the main actors in the world of texting scams. It's called the Smishing Triad.

Speaker 12 Yeah, so over the last three years or so, this group called the Smishing Triad has emerged as one of the most prolific senders of scam messages.

Speaker 12 And they are one of several groups of scammers that are known as smishing syndicates.

Speaker 12 And they've been estimated to be sending 100,000 messages per day. They have around 200,000 malicious websites that have been linked to them.

Speaker 12 And these smishing syndicates in general, they develop their own software and they sell it to other cyber criminals who may be able to use that software to then go and scam people further, you know, almost in a plug-and-play style way.

Speaker 12 And I think some of these Chinese language phishing scamming groups have actually been estimated to be making around a billion dollars in the last couple of years.

Speaker 6 What are the odds that you or I have gotten a text from the Smishing Triad? Like, is their reach that big that, you know, they're probably in my phone right now?

Speaker 12 There's a good chance of it. The Smishing Triad has been linked to scam messages in more than 120 different countries.
And a big one that they do is impersonating in the U.S., the U.S. Postal Service.

Speaker 12 A text message from the Postal Service? Wow, I didn't even know they had my cell number.

Speaker 15 They don't. And they don't send text messages about unclaimed packages.

Speaker 12 But around the world, they have also impersonated banks.

Speaker 13 Police say in just the last week, in fact, a handful of people have lost nearly $100,000 to this scam.

Speaker 12 They've impersonated cryptocurrency platforms.

Speaker 5 It looked like it's from Coinbase sharing a withdrawal code. It felt like someone was trying to take money from my crypto wallet.

Speaker 12 E-commerce, healthcare, law enforcement, all kinds of different organizations that may want you to take action, such as clicking onto a website to confirm some details or to get your parcel sent back to you.

Speaker 12 They are constantly evolving and constantly adapting their software, becoming like targeting more different organizations or impersonating more different organizations.

Speaker 6 What is smishing? I'm not going to lie, when you say it, it sounds really adorable, but it is not cute. What is it?

Speaker 12 So, yeah, many people may be familiar with phishing to email accounts. So, really, when you're talking about smishing, that is just the SMS text message equivalent of that.

Speaker 12 But I I would say, with Smishing,

Speaker 12 because it is via text message and straight to your phone, you will have something that is pinging up. Some of these scam text messages are very successful because they are straight direct to you.

Speaker 12 That you might, you may be out and about and see a message come in and then like respond to it, click on the link straight away without thinking about it.

Speaker 12 So there's real that direct sense of urgency with a text message that you don't get with an email or another type of phishing scam.

Speaker 6 So all of these scam texts are being sent, like just so many messages. How are they doing this?

Speaker 12 When cyber criminals are collecting phone numbers or other contact details, they can be purchasing these on underground markets, on forums, potentially from data breaches, where we've all seen people having their details linked elsewhere or possibly even data brokers.

Speaker 12 And then, when it comes around to them sending the messages, they're quite often using automated software on a device, such as a laptop or a computer, where they can have multiple sort of virtual phones running on their screen at the same time and send out multiple thousands of messages from those accounts.

Speaker 6 All right. So that's how these texts get to our phones.
But I want to get a sense of how it looks to the scammers. Let's say I get a text and there's a link and I click on it.

Speaker 6 What happens?

Speaker 12 When you click that link, you'll end up on a website. So if this scam message is coming from allegedly the U.S.
Postal Service, you'll end up on a website that looks like the U.S. Postal Service.

Speaker 12 You'll end up on a website that looks like the bank that the scammers are trying to impersonate, which want you to enter your personal details.

Speaker 12 They might want you to enter your name, your postal address, your bank account details, your financial details, and then

Speaker 12 the scammers will be collecting these pretty much in real time.

Speaker 6 Okay, let's say I get the text. I don't click anything, but I block the number.
Will these texts keep coming? Like, is there a way to stop this?

Speaker 12 You're not going to get texts from that same number, but you may get texts from another number or another account that is trying to scam you.

Speaker 12 So, I think that the scale that these scams are happening, people are going to continue to receive scam messages pretty much like on a very frequent basis.

Speaker 6 I'm curious what tech companies are doing. You know, Apple, Google, they have millions of their own users at risk.
What are they doing about it?

Speaker 12 I think there are a few players that are involved in trying to reduce the amount of scams that are happening around the world. So, you've got the telecoms firms, the companies that own the networks.

Speaker 12 These websites have to be hosted with a domain company. So, those domain companies can be better at blocking scam websites as well.

Speaker 12 And then, yeah, you've got Apple and Google and other mobile providers as well.

Speaker 12 A lot of them now are using on-device machine learning to be able to detect the kind of language that is used in these scams. And they are able to better classify some of these scams from happening.

Speaker 12 I think that they are getting better, but this is a problem that is still affecting everybody very frequently. So there's more to be done in that space.

Speaker 6 You know, every era has its own scam.

Speaker 6 Why are tech scams so widespread right now?

Speaker 12 They're quick, they're successful, they're making money from them.

Speaker 12 And I think that because we're all on our phones all of the time and we're getting messages and notifications, it can be easy for anybody to click on these links and enter their financial details.

Speaker 12 I think as well, I think once scammers find something that will work for them, whether it is a romance scam or an employment scam or anything else, then they'll keep doing that until it doesn't work.

Speaker 6 Coming up, the horrifying employment scam on the other side of that text thread.

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Speaker 6 If you find that you're a victim of a scam, you might call Erin West.

Speaker 6 She was a prosecutor in California for over two decades, and after seeing so many people get their money taken, she decided to do something about it.

Speaker 6 She started an organization called Operation Shamrock, and she's investigated scams coming out of Cambodia, Myanmar, all over Southeast Asia.

Speaker 6 And she found the people on the other side of the phone. Just a heads up, there are some descriptions of violence coming up that might be upsetting to some listeners.

Speaker 15 I met someone named Small Q, and Small Q is a Ugandan man. Small Q was working in a internet cafe in Uganda.
He's 23 years old.

Speaker 15 And a fellow Ugandan came in and asked him, I know you're making $100 a month working here. I can get you $1,000 a month in a live work facility in Bangkok.
You'll be doing data entry.

Speaker 15 And so Small Q went through the interview process. He did two interviews.
He did a typing test. He was delighted to hear that he got this job where he would literally be making 10 times what he made.

Speaker 15 So he told his brother, I could give this a shot or I could die poor in Uganda. And when he arrived in Bangkok, they took his phone, they took his passport, drove him for hours and hours.

Speaker 15 And ultimately, he found himself in a gated, massive walled community with large dormitories. And the men with AK-47s at the gate told him, you're a a scammer now.
This is your job.

Speaker 6 So it sounds like the people who end up being the scammers are actually victims of an employment scam themselves.

Speaker 15 That's exactly right. This is one of the first times in history we've got this tremendous, massive global crime where there are victims on both sides of it.

Speaker 15 And so inside these rooms where the scams are happening, people are in fear. That's the horrifying piece of this that people don't understand.

Speaker 15 On the other side of that text is likely a victim who has been human trafficked to be there.

Speaker 6 Erin, you've been to some of these compounds. I'm curious, what do they look like? What do they feel like?

Speaker 15 It's really horrifying. They are massive.

Speaker 15 10-story tall buildings that are residential.

Speaker 15 They often have bars on the windows literally to keep the people from jumping out. It's dozens and dozens along the Mui River in Myanmar.
It's hundreds in Cambodia.

Speaker 15 It's dozens in Laos. The scale of this is

Speaker 15 incomprehensible.

Speaker 6 Wow.

Speaker 6 And who's behind these massive compounds?

Speaker 15 Chinese organized criminals are no strangers to the gambling industry.

Speaker 15 And in combination with a road that China was building in Cambodia, Chinese organized criminals thought we should fill this area with casino towers.

Speaker 6 But COVID hit.

Speaker 15 And so when their casino towers sat empty, they had to pivot. So they decided they were going to do this.
That's when they started the human trafficking angle on it.

Speaker 6 I want to get back to the story of Small Q. When people like Small Q arrive, What happens next?

Speaker 15 His day then becomes, okay, you're a scammer and you are living your life on the awake hours of the United States or whoever you're targeting and small Q's day would then be to report to a long table of people just like him forced to be working on a desktop computer and 10 phones and the way it works is there are different roles within this facility so when you come in you are one of the people who is is

Speaker 15 trying to locate new

Speaker 15 contacts new clients, they call them. Once you've been there a while, you elevate to becoming a chatter.
And when you are a chatter, you have, they call it their model, their profile that they use.

Speaker 15 And every day they submit at the end of the day to their boss what their character will be doing that day.

Speaker 6 It sounds so oddly corporate.

Speaker 15 I'm glad you picked up on the corporate nature of this. You're on a team and there's very much a corporate incentive strategy for what's happening there.

Speaker 15 So if small Q were to be able to be successful and scam money from someone, that's a big win. Sometimes there's fireworks for the massive scores.
There can be treats offered.

Speaker 15 So like a karaoke room staffed with attractive women and liquor and cigarettes. It's the carrot and the stick approach.

Speaker 6 What happens if these people don't meet their quotas?

Speaker 15 It's horrifying. So Small Q is not the only person I'm in touch with.
I'm in touch with another Ugandan that I refer to as Sam.

Speaker 15 If he doesn't make his quota, he is not allowed to have food. He's beaten.
He's beaten with an electric baton. There are sexual consequences for women.

Speaker 15 There is something called the dark room. There is a metal bar that's attached to the wall where you are handcuffed to the wall and beaten.

Speaker 15 And then you are placed in a room where you are hung by your arms for three days. We're talking about war crime level torture that is happening to people.

Speaker 6 And all of that because you didn't scam enough because you didn't hit the quota?

Speaker 11 Yes.

Speaker 6 How do you get out of these scam jobs? It sounds like you can't just quit.

Speaker 11 You really don't get up.

Speaker 15 And that's how they've managed to accumulate hundreds of thousands of people inside these walls. There are others that when they ask,

Speaker 15 how do I get out, they're told they can pay a ransom. And the ransom is frequently, could be anything from 3,000 US dollars, 10,000, 20,000 US dollars.
If they are able to get that money,

Speaker 15 there are ways that their escape can be brokered. But ultimately, Small Q was able to get home.

Speaker 15 He stole a phone from

Speaker 15 one of the bosses. He was able to contact Madame Betty, who is the High Commissioner for Uganda, and she was able to help him and 23 others get home.

Speaker 15 But the mental toll is massive.

Speaker 6 Individually, you get these texts, and now you have this information and all you can think of like is, oh no, like there's a person being harmed on the other end of the phone.

Speaker 6 I just wonder, is there anything individual people can do? Like, what do you, what do you do?

Speaker 15 Everybody understands that there's a scam problem right now, but I don't think that everybody understands that this is not going to stop, that this is operating in full force with no friction.

Speaker 15 And I think for a lot of people, when you hear this story, you think, oh, Aaron, that sounds awful, but that is on the other side of the world. And I don't know what I'm supposed to do about this.

Speaker 15 So here's what you're supposed to do. You are supposed to tell everyone you know about this, point out what is happening and point out that people globally

Speaker 15 are losing everything they have.

Speaker 6 It seems like no matter where you are in the world right now, there are people struggling to make a living. And our digital existence existence makes that really easy to exploit.

Speaker 6 If the government can't do anything about it and tech companies aren't able to stop it, then it may be up to us. Stay vigilant, don't reply, and don't click.

Speaker 6 All right, that's it for this week's show. We've got an episode coming up about about housing.
The market is not in the best shape right now, especially if you're trying to buy.

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Speaker 6 We want to hear all about it. Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or email us at askvox at vox.com.
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This episode was produced by Peter Balinon-Rosen and Ariana Asburu.

Speaker 6 It was edited by Ginny Lawton with help from Jolie Myers.

Speaker 6 Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy, and fact-checking was by Melissa Hirsch with engineering engineering by Adrian Lilly and Brandon McFarland. I'm your host, John Glenn Hill.

Speaker 6 Thank you so much for listening. Talk to you soon.

Speaker 7 Bye.

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