Here is the craziest story you'll hear this week — and it's completely true.
It involves human trafficking, online fraud, crime cartels, and enormous sums of money.
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Billy is a friendly young man from Ethiopia.
He came across an online ad offering him a remote position on an interesting project, with attractive employment terms.
Billy submitted his résumé, went through a video job interview, and — to his delight — was hired.
He received a plane ticket to a country in Asia, where he was supposed to join the company's team.
He boarded the flight full of excitement, and at the airport an official company representative was waiting for him. The representative collected his documents and drove him to a point on the bank of a river.
He was ferried across the river by boat, then taken to a massive building filled with many workers just like him.
It quickly became clear that he was in Myanmar, inside an enormous prison compound, where he and all the other workers were forced to work against their will for crime cartels turning over billions of dollars.
The work involved impersonating women and luring men into traps through romance scams, as well as other types of online fraud designed to extort money from people through deception.
When he tried to resist, he was subjected to beatings, torture, and starvation.
At a certain point, his usefulness declined because of his refusal to cooperate. He was offered his freedom if he could raise a ransom of $7,000.
He contacted his family. His father sold their home in Ethiopia to pay the ransom, and Billy was released.
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Billy told his story to a Wall Street Journal reporter investigating the phenomenon.
It turns out this is a widespread problem affecting hundreds of thousands of people — in the plainest sense of the words, it is modern slavery and human trafficking.
These slavery compounds are located in geographic areas with no rule of law and no governing authority, sometimes in territories whose sovereignty is disputed.
Where any form of local authority does exist, its officials are bribed sufficiently to ensure their cooperation.
The victims are taken from Third World countries whose governments are preoccupied with internal problems and will make no effort to look after their own citizens abroad — leaving no one with any real interest in stopping the spread of this phenomenon.