A Survivor’s Journey Through the Cybercrime Underground

This report recounts the experience of an individual coerced into working for an industrial-scale ‘pig butchering’ romance-crypto fraud operation in Southeast Asia and uses that case to explain how these scams operate: routine trust-building, emotional manipulation, staged pre-positioning, and maintenance of elaborate fake personas powered by encrypted communications, money laundering services, and AI tools (LLMs and deepfakes). It highlights the human-trafficking and forced-labor dimensions, the large financial scale (tens of billions stolen globally), failure points for scams, and practical advice to protect individuals and support anti-trafficking efforts.