Shabani Matani

They would provide him three meals a day and accommodation.

Schwab says they walked him to his station and to help him get set up, they told him what to download.

A VPN, Telegram, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, and basically described it to him as sort of remote online work.

I can do this.

Yeah, no problem.

Shribe told me that he was given several days to acclimate.

But right away, certain things felt a little off.

After he'd signed the contract with the bosses, he was taken to a separate administrative building where Cambodian guards took his photograph and gave him an ID card to use for entering and leaving the main gates of Bavette Business Center.

But Shribe said the Chinese bosses then took the ID card away.

Now he couldn't freely leave the complex.

They gave him dozens of SIM cards, and all of them were for U.S.

numbers.

If they were just doing remote work, why were they in possession of all this stuff?

Like, why did they have hundreds of computers, thousands of SIM cards?

What was all of it for?

By the end of that first week, it all started to click.

Shuaib realized that he'd been brought to Cambodia to work as a scammer.

And Shuaib, like many of the other Africans there, would be working at the lowest level of the operation.

First there were the developers.

They were IT technicians and they buy stolen data off the internet.