Whether it is investigators following the proceeds of human trafficking or compliance officers filing suspicious activity or currency transaction reports on funds tied to child exploitation, dispassionately collecting evidence is crucial to catching and convicting the bad guys.
But the professional demeanor that pursuing traffickers, fraudsters and other criminals requires does not preclude us from showing empathy for their victims.
I was reminded of this when interviewing Erin West, Zeke Faux and Danielle Keeton-Olsen1 in a recent episode of “Financial Crime Matters,” in which we discussed the work of Mech Dara, a Cambodian reporter imprisoned by his own government last month after shining a light on “pig-butchering” compounds dotted throughout his country and run by crime syndicates.
Pig butchering, whereby fraudsters dupe victims into gradually plowing their life savings into fictional cryptocurrencies or other phony online investments, is responsible for the financial and emotional destruction of countless victims and the enslavement of tens of thousands of others forced into perpetrating these schemes.
West, a former deputy district attorney for Santa Clara County, California, describes Dara’s reporting as foundational to her efforts to expose pig-butchering networks and recover the funds they stole from their shamed and sometimes suicidal victims.
Dara's reporting also helped inform West’s launch of “Operation Shamrock,” an initiative to expose, disrupt and seize the proceeds of pig-butchering schemes2 across the world that, according to estimates, generate a minimum of $5 billion a year and track back to as many as 300,000 perpetrators held captive in Cambodia, Myanmar, the Philippines and elsewhere.
Keeton-Olsen, a freelance journalist, has collaborated with Dara and independently covered the proliferation of fraud factories in Southeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific.
Faux, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg, credits Dara and Keeton-Olsen’s work for leading him to a fraud compound in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, that he later described in “Number Go Up,” his book on the dark side of cryptocurrency.
All three stressed that behind the numbers are real people, including bilingual young men and women who, after answering ads for jobs far from home, are beaten or otherwise coerced into using the internet to snare the unsuspecting; elderly citizens deprived of their life savings; or any of a range of other victims now bereft, humiliated and bankrupt after falling prey to a scam.
Perpetrators who manage to escape their captors often need medical assistance, help returning to their homeland and psychological care. Victims also require psychological care and, to the degree possible, help recovering their assets.
West’s founding of Operation Shamrock suggests there is much to be done to fight pig-butchering and other transnational fraud schemes, including keeping the spotlight on governments that harbor or merely tolerate them, whether out of ignorance, indifference or greed.
Keeton-Olsen argues that the indifference some multinational corporations show to abusive labor conditions, such as those found in Cambodia’s construction and textile sectors, serve to convince governments that they will not be held accountable for them.
Faux argues that cryptocurrency exchanges and other virtual asset service providers must be far more diligent and discriminating over whom they serve.
Dara was released on bail last month after six days of what Keeton-Olsen describes as horrific prison conditions, but only after he submitted a recorded apology and “confessed” that his stories were inaccurate. After his release, Cambodian and Chinese authorities shut down the compound in Sihanoukville that he and others exposed.
However, as Faux noted during our podcast, the same compound shut down during a previous round of government scrutiny only to relaunch after the scrutiny waned.
Fraud compounds continue to spring up across the globe, and those that close sometimes reopen.
So not only sustained professionalism, but also sustained empathy, are essential to keeping public- and private-sector anti-financial crime personnel in the fight against the criminals who profit from them.
Kieran Beer, director of Editorial Content, ACAMS, kbeer@acams.org, 
- “Standing Against "Pig-Butchering," with Zeke Faux, Danielle Keeton-Olsen and Erin West,” ACAMS Financial Crime Matters, SoundCloud, November 1, 2024, https://soundcloud.com/financialcrimematters/zeke-faux-danielle-keeton-olsen-and-erin-west
- Operation Shamrock homepage, https://operationshamrock.org/
