Out in the desert on the outskirts of Dubai sits a secret scam factory capable of swindling tens of thousands of people at a time.
Inside, the scammers smoke, eat and furiously type on their computers as they pretend to be wealthy Eastern European women or models from Spain.
At least some of the millions of scam text messages baiting foreigners, including Australians, come from this place. It’s a sophisticated operation, seemingly out of reach of the victims they target.
But last year the syndicate was uncovered following the chance meeting of an Australian divorcee, a private detective, a YouTube scam-baiter and one of the scammers himself, who worked from the inside to take the operation down.
‘I went to a scam job wearing a suit’
Evan* thought he was on his way to an interview for a marketing job but as the car pulled away from Dubai, he began to worry.
“At first, we were seeing the city through the horizon,” he says.
Not sure where he was heading, Evan pulled out his phone.
“Looking at Google Maps, I can see that the location isn’t in a different city — it’s in the middle of the desert.”
When Evan arrived at the destination, all he could see was four office buildings, each eight storeys high, with nothing around them.
He was escorted to the seventh floor, where he was shown a room with enough bunk beds for 30 people, along with a shower, toilet and a small kitchen.
Then he was moved on to another room that had 16 workstations.
“All of them had people playing loud music, some of them smoking and eating,” he said. “They were talking and smacking the keyboard so loud.”
He sat down at one of the desks and was told that his job was going to be “on WhatsApp”.
“I looked at the guy who got us in. And I said, this is a scam!” he says.
“He looked at me, everyone looked at each other, and everyone laughed … he said, ‘Yes, this is a scam.'”
But Evan was desperate for work so he took the job. A foreigner in Dubai, he’d been looking for work for three months when he spotted the advertisement.
“I need money to live,” he says.
“I still mock myself … because I went to a scam job wearing a suit.”
Like pigs to the slaughter
Evan had walked into what is known as a “pig-butchering scam”, also known as romance-baiting and Sha Zhu Pan.
Just like actual “pig-butchering”, the scam has three stages.
You find a pig, you fatten it up, and then you butcher it.
Evan’s job was to fatten the pig. He’d spend all day messaging up to 40-50 potential victims on WhatsApp, pretending to be a rich woman from Ukraine called “Annie”.
He said Ukraine was strategically chosen to elicit sympathy from potential victims.
“We had pictures on our computers and videos of this lady being in fancy places, eating fancy food, sitting there just being beautiful,” says Evan.
But the photos were not of “Annie” from Ukraine.
They were of a model sitting in another room of the compound, waiting just in case a victim got suspicious and wanted to get on a video call.
Evan watched her take video calls from unsuspecting victims.
“She would say hi and wave to them, say that you love them, send kisses, and then give us the phone back,” says Evan.
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He was given a script to help him message on WhatsApp. They were instructed to “flirt with the victims”, and after a while, casually slip in the idea of investing in cryptocurrency.
None of it felt right to Evan. After about only a week on the job in Dubai, he decided to do something about it.
He wanted to contact authorities but didn’t know who to go to, nor how to reach them from the desert compound.
‘Work offline, make some money — you interested?’
On the other side of the world, in Hong Kong, a WhatsApp message popped up on the phone of Australian Murray Sargant.
“Her name was Jenny Ying,” he says.
“She said something along the lines of, ‘With COVID and everything else that’s going on on the planet at the moment, there’s an easy way for you to work offline and make some money — are you interested?'”
Sargant was interested. He was unemployed at the time and had just separated from his wife. So he jumped at the chance to try something new.
From there, Jenny gave him tasks to complete that involved subscribing to various YouTube channels.
Initially, Sargant received small amounts of money for these tasks.
“I thought it was a legitimate process,” he says.
“Once you start getting paid by someone for the work that you’re conducting, you think, well, that’s OK, that seems quite normal.”
After about a week, “Jenny” suggested Sargant continue working via Telegram where he could also learn about cryptocurrency trading.
They asked him to register on what was described to him as a cryptocurrency trading website.
Sargant would transfer them money and it would appear on his online trading platform.
But as he went on, the trades became increasingly complicated and high-pressure.
Sargant became obsessed with trading and “trying to win”.
He would spend hours a day practising the trades so he wouldn’t slip up, but kept making mistakes anyway.
“Each time you made a mistake, your credit score on the website went down and in order to get your credit score back, you had to pay them credit money or risk money … it became very stressful very, very quickly.”
So he tried to withdraw his money and when he found he couldn’t, grew suspicious.
Sargant began asking questions. He was told that the company behind the crypto website was based in New York, but when he rang the building, the doorman told him the company didn’t exist.
“I felt physically ill at that point. Just physically drained.”
All up, Sargant had invested and lost over $1 million.
In his effort to get his money back, he turned to Australian cybercrime investigator Ken Gamble to investigate the case.
Enter the ‘scam-baiter’
Back in the scam compound in Dubai, Evan decided to take matters into his own hands.
As a teenager, he loved watching “scam-baiting” videos on YouTube, where online vigilantes would rack up millions of views by outsmarting the scammers.
And Evan was a particular fan of one called Jim Browning*.
Browning turns the tables on scammers by gaining access to their computers after they have tried to scam him. Once inside their computers, he can see everything they are doing.
“Scammers really annoy me and that is my primary motivation,” he says.
“I’m an engineer. I like to know how things tick so I can try and figure out the weak spots of a scam.”
Evan reached out to Browning, who, after verifying Evan was real, gave him a command to run on the computers inside the compound.
Browning could also pinpoint the location of the scam compound and the internal network.
“So with one computer, they would probably have about 30 to 40 people that they would be corresponding with at one time, and there were about 10 people in the room,” Browning says.
“And then if you looked at the building … there were definitely in excess of a thousand people working in that sort of scam.”
Browning estimated that with that many scammers, there could have been up to 40,000 potential victims.
Evan also sent Browning footage from inside the compound showing the cramped living conditions, with workers sleeping on bunk beds and luggage and laundry spilling out into the corridor.
“It was almost slavery — modern slavery,” Browning says.
“It was definitely quite difficult to do anything other than spend your day scamming people and it was extremely difficult to leave once you were in that operation.”
Once Browning had access to the scammers’ computers, he advised Evan to stay safe and keep as quiet as possible.
“I’ve got no idea what these people are capable of and I’ve got to assume the worst,” he says.
Evan was now working undercover. He says his only motivation was now to expose the scam.
“So people would understand how it works, how to avoid it, how to spot the scam, and to warn someone else of it,” he says.
“I would consider that a win … that I did something right, even if it’s going to kill me.”
Worlds collide
As Browning continued remotely monitoring the scam, Murray Sargant was still trying to track down his money.
And the investigator he hired, Ken Gamble, was narrowing the search.
Gamble and his team used Sargant’s WhatsApp and Telegram messages to trace the scammers back to an IP address in Dubai.
He knew Browning had also been monitoring scams around the world, so he reached out and sent him the IP address.
“[Browning] came back to me and said, ‘Did I send you that IP address previously? That’s the group I’m monitoring,'” says Gamble.
“It was one of those moments where it was like, OK, well this is pretty amazing — it was the same group.”
Evan had made it out of the scam operation by the time Gamble sent a team of investigators to Dubai.
They went to the compound, where they were able to verify the evidence they had seen in Evan’s recordings, then took this to Dubai Police.
Their findings showed that the scam syndicate was being operated by Chinese nationals using a virtual company known as Gold Investment Financial Group and Hong Kong bank accounts had been used to launder victims’ money.
The operation employed people who were not from the United Arab Emirates — people like Evan who were only allowed to leave with permission from senior Chinese employees.
But to progress the case in Dubai, Gamble’s team was told Murray Sargant would need to file a formal complaint through a local lawyer, which would cost approximately $US30,000–$US40,000 ($45,500–$60,700).
Sargant simply couldn’t afford it and Gamble’s team returned to Australia.
“We expected to get a follow-up email or some sort of communication,” says Gamble. “But [Dubai Police] fell silent,” he says. “They never contacted us again.”
Browning continued to monitor the scammers until the computers unexpectedly went dark in November last year.
Browning, even now, doesn’t know what happened.
“We just don’t know,” says Browning. “And that was the end of the story.”
Large-scale catastrophic crime
Gamble says it’s the responsibility of law enforcement to tackle these syndicates.
“It’s a catastrophic crime … authorities need to do more proactive enforcement in relation to the criminal organisations that are targeting our country.”
He says new technology would allow police to infiltrate scam networks and could have a huge impact.
“But we’re not doing that in this country,” he says.
“We’ve heard federal politicians say on national television during press conferences, we are going to go after these people — well, you know, we haven’t seen that yet.”
In the May budget, the federal government committed $67.5 million, hoping to protect Australians from fraudsters and scammers.
Last year, Australians made over 601,000 scam reports, an 18.5 per cent increase on 2022. However, more recent figures show scam losses may be falling.
Between January and March this year, scam losses reported to Scamwatch were down 11 per cent compared to the previous quarter.
Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services Stephen Jones told the ABC that the government had taken a number of measures including setting up the National Anti-Scam Centre, introducing the SMS registry and funding ASIC’s scam website take-down service, and would soon legislate mandatory industry codes.
Scamming to survive
Evan says often workers don’t aspire to be scammers. He hopes that by telling his story, people might consider who might be at the other “end of the line” the next time they receive a scam message.
“There’s probably a person who didn’t have a choice but to work in this line of work,” he says. “To scam people in order to live and survive, and help their families.”
Evan assumes the people he worked alongside may have lost their jobs because of his actions to expose the scam.
“For those people, I don’t feel really good because to them, I ruined an income source,” he says.
But on a bigger scale, I did the right thing for many, many, many more people [and] at the very least, I saved them time through not engaging with these kinds of scams.”
*names have been changed.
This story comes from ABC’s Background Briefing program. Follow the podcast on the ABC listen app.
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