I know, I know. My delicious sense of schadenfreude at the news that Starlink is being used to scam Americans out of millions of dollars every year probably makes me a bad person. After all, these are real people, presumably (one can never be sure who is human and who is not nowadays) suffering real harm.
But the story is such a great metaphor for the scattershot impact of Big Tech, and the blithe insistence of the prophet-bros that their platforms are a force for good.
In a nutshell, financial fraud groups in Southeast Asia are circumventing internet shutdowns and local law enforcement by using Elon Musk’s satellite internet service to run large-scale scam operations. As an aside, if you ever wanted an example of the “America first” principle at work, the AI summary of this story says Starlink is being used “to run large-scale scam operations targeting Americans”. In reality, as you can imagine, it’s being used to scam people all over the world.
The story was brought to my attention by virtue of media coverage of a statement released by US senator Maggie Hassan, and to her credit she included the rest of the world in her concern. She wrote: “Transnational fraud has imposed significant human and economic costs in the US, Southeast Asia, and around the world. According to recent estimates, scams emanating from Southeast Asia likely result in more than $43.8bn in losses globally each year, with Americans losing $3.5bn in 2023 alone.”
And you’ll be startled to learn that, according to TechCabal, South Africa ranks among the world’s worst-hit countries globally for cybercrime density, with estimated annual losses reaching $118m, or R2.2bn. Digital banking fraud alone has surged 45% this year, with related financial losses rising 47%.
Here’s how these scams work.
The criminal networks operate mostly in what are called scam compounds, in countries including Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos. The networks, which are often linked to Chinese organised crime, lure workers from across Asia and Africa with promises of legitimate work in areas such as customer service or IT.
When the workers arrive in the destination country, the criminals take their passports away and imprison them under armed guard in the scam compounds. Many of them are tortured, subjected to sexual violence and starved. They are forced to work 18-hour days, and if they don’t meet their scam quotas, they can be sold on to other scam compounds.
To give an idea of the scale of the problem, Associated Press reported in February that a joint operation between Thai, Chinese and Myanmar authorities led to the rescue of more than 7,000 people who had been held captive in scam compounds.
The Freedom Hub, an organisation aimed at ending modern-day slavery, describes this as a 21st-century slavery crisis. “It is digital, global and devastating.”
According to Hassan’s statement, the UN has reported that scam networks in Southeast Asia force at least 220,000 victims to carry out online scams, and describe this as a “humanitarian and human rights crisis”.
The ways governments in the region are trying to deal with the problem include targeting the infrastructure that enables the criminals. Organisations that work in the area of disinformation and info-integrity use a framework called D-Rail, or “directing responses against illicit influence operations”. The core idea is to shift focus from simply trying to fight disinformation, as with fact-checking, for example, to trying to actively disrupt the networks, infrastructure and funding behind illicit influence campaigns.
So instead of playing a game of whack-a-mole with false information, D-Rail aims to make these illicit operations more difficult, more costly and ideally unsustainable.
States are trying to crack down on financial enablers of the scam compounds, which include high-risk crypto exchanges as well as underground banking, and to disrupt the criminal economy by shutting down connectivity and power to the compounds. Reuters tells us, for example, that since February Thailand has halted electricity, internet and fuel supplies to five Myanmar border areas in a bid to disrupt the scam compounds.
Starlink’s portability and its ability to provide high-speed internet in remote regions make it the perfect tool for criminals to evade local law enforcement and internet shutdowns
Enter Elon Musk and his self-driving ego. Starlink’s portability and its ability to provide high-speed internet in remote regions make it the perfect tool for criminals to evade local law enforcement and internet shutdowns. The scammers get Starlink from resellers, via advertisements in online forums that actually tout it as a solution for online scam operations. Since late 2024, reports show tens of thousands of Starlink logins from known scam regions, despite the service rules SpaceX has in place that allows it to shut down accounts used for fraudulent purposes.
You’ll be amused to know that these scams are known as “pig butchering”. TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence company that helps financial institutions and governments to detect and investigate crypto-related fraud and financial crime, describes pig butchering as originating from Southeast Asia.
“The scam’s nickname refers to ‘fattening’ victims up before ‘slaughtering’ their finances.
“Perpetrators build relationships with victims, often through dating sites, social media or messaging platforms like WhatsApp. Once they have gained the victim's trust, scammers introduce fake investment opportunities, frequently involving cryptocurrencies. Victims are drawn into investing large sums of money in sham platforms, only to lose it all once the scammers disappear,” TRM Labs says.
“Pig butchering scammers use psychological manipulation tactics to carefully nurture relationships with their targets, making them feel comfortable and trusting — in some cases, even making victims fall in love with them.”
Wired magazine dug a little deeper and by looking at mobile phone connection data found that at least eight scam compounds based around the Myanmar-Thailand border region are using Starlink devices.
“Between November 2024 and the start of February, hundreds of mobile phones logged their locations and use of Starlink at known scam compounds more than 40,000 times, according to the mobile phone data, which was collected by an online advertising industry tool,” it reported.
“Photos of Tai Chang [one of the compounds] reviewed by Wired appear to show dozens of white Starlink satellite dishes on a single rooftop, while human rights watchdogs and other experts say that Starlink use at the scam compounds has increased in the past year.”
Back to my schadenfreude. One of the ironies is that the support services for freed trafficking victims have faced US Agency for International Development funding cuts inflicted by the crassly named Doge, or department of government efficiency, at the time under the “leadership” of Musk.
I can’t help feeling a certain frisson of karma at the idea that the heretofore unchecked fanboying around Musk (that’s starting to change, of course), and in general the free rein that the tech bros have been given by the US to exploit the rest of the world, has resulted in criminals being able to rip off US citizens with ridiculous scams. Scams that, one might suggest, play into the same dull credulity that US President Donald Trump uses to further his own brand of scams.
Another amusing insight into the ethics of these big platforms is the news that a porn company has filed a federal lawsuit against Meta, alleging that Mark Zuckerberg’s company pirated more than 2,300 copyrighted porn films to train its AI models.
When a porn company is calling you the bad guys, you know your ethical framework is dodgy. And, similarly, Starlink’s enabling of organised crime, consciously or not, is yet another example of the big platforms not really caring about their negative impact on the world.
Hassan quotes an expert based in the region as saying: “Starlink [is] failing the first basic test of business and human rights, which is to ensure that your operations do no harm.”
One wouldn’t have to look very hard to be able to add many other Big Tech platforms to the list. In their own way, they are also pig butchers at heart.
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