i think the degree to which this is fully true is overstated from when i've looked into it. a lot of it is not the best working environments, but people are still scamming people for pay and are largely not forced to do so.
i think the degree to which this is fully true is overstated from when i've looked into it. a lot of it is not the best working environments, but people are still scamming people for pay and are largely not forced to do so.
The difference here is that Zeke wrote a book chok full of sources (a significant chunk of the book in the end is basically pages of references), while you so far supplied none.
While I don’t know anyone personally, a local semi-famous person was abducted in Thailand and sent to one of these compounds (except in Myanmar). He was rescued by a combined rescue mission of his country’s and Thai governments. This made big news a few months back, and resulted in a drastic reduction in Asian tourist travel to Thailand (which itself doesn’t run these compounds, but is a big destination for tourism), so much so that Thai government was (maybe still is) in panic mode because of it.
Remember how Thailand tried to enact measures even technically abroad, like cutting off electricity and Internet connections (and how these compounds are controversially using Starlink now)? This was all posted on this site in the year leading up to today, and the reason for it is that pig butchering related abductions driven by crime nearby states made it unsafe for most Asian-looking people to travel to Thailand. Does it create an impression of voluntary labour in your mind?
Perhaps in near term LLMs will allow them to reduce headcount so much that the bosses become willing to pay and less inclined to keep them captive, but so far claims that it’s all mostly voluntary labour just don’t compute with available evidence.
(For the sake of completeness, I should add that Thailand’s crackdown could potentially be motivated not only by tourism revenue but also by the pressure from the government of PRC, which in turn could be motivated not only by its poorer citizens being among those kidnapped but also by its richer citizens being a target of pig butchering scams. Still, I don’t know how common the latter is—from my observations, in Western cultures people are more inclined to trust strangers compared to Chinese cultures—and in any case this does not make the well-documented kidnappings and forced labour less real.)
Various stories from people who have been on the other side of this tend to concur. I unfortunately cannot find the story, but a Pakistani call center scam artist who was hired by one of these crime syndicates went on record recently talking about the experience (I think it was in a podcast) and he said that he was recruited into a well paid, well organized machine and the workers themselves were treated well. He painted a picture of a hyper-competitive Glengarry Glen Ross-esque environment with leaderboards and the like, where people fought over and protected their "leads" (marks). The only struggle for him was not the working conditions, but rather with the moral aspects when he realized what he was doing.
Usually, as you would expect, the employees don't really realize until after they are recruited in what they are doing, and oftentimes the money and job is cushy enough they are willing to set aside their morals to do it.
The source is welcome if you ever find it.