GaveVesh’s trip had begun, apparently innocently, with a Facebook job announcement promising a job that he desperately needed.
Instead, he found himself trafficked in a business commonly known as “Pork Carnage”, a form of fraud in which scammers form romantic relationships or other close relationships with online objectives and extract money from them. Chinese crime unions behind the scams have scored billions of dollars, and have used violence and coercion to force their workers, many of them trafficked people such as Gavevesh, to carry out the fraud of large compounds, several of which openly operate on the borders of Myanmar de Myanmar.
We talked to GaveVeh and five other workers inside the scam industry, as well as experts against trafficking and technology specialists. His testimony reveals how global companies, including US social networks and appointment applications and international cryptocurrency and messages, have given the fraud business the means to industrialize.
Similarly, it is a great technology that can have the key to breaking the scam unions, if only these companies can be persuaded or forced to act. Read the complete story.
—Pidro guest and Emily Fishbein
How to save a glacier
We do not understand much about how glaciers move and how soon some of the most important could collapse in the sea. That could be a problem, since the merger of the glaciers could lead to multiple feet of increased sea level this century, potentially displacing millions of people who live and work along the coasts.
A new group points not only to promote our understanding of glaciers, but also to look for options to save them if things move towards the worst case, since my colleague James Temple described in his last story. An idea: freezing glaciers instead.
