Zeke Faux
speaker
126 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard May 2025
Zeke Faux’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
What I've learned is that there's like a hierarchy within the compound. And the lowest level workers who've been trafficked, they got 10 phones, each has like a different fake identity, and they're trolling the world, sending spam messages, sending messages on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Tinder, whatever. And they've got like some sort of quota for how many calls they need to initiate.
Once you've got somebody hooked, that person gets passed off to like a manager. Ah.
Yeah, and it was actually Vicky1 hit me on... text message, once we chatted a bit, they moved me to WhatsApp.
And that's probably when a more skillful Vicky took over.
And then the person who sent me those voice memos saying that they were Vicky, presumably that's like some poor female victim whose job is like recording all the voice memos. I see. And then if you consistently don't meet your quota regularly, they would sell you to another compound. The only way to leave is if you pay a ransom of anywhere from $5,000 to $30,000.
And I realized that it was time to come clean. So I told her, I'm an investigative reporter, and I'm only talking to you because I wanted to figure out how this works. And I also said, I've heard bad things about the working conditions for people like you. And she wrote back and said, oh, oh, it's not what you think. Her WhatsApp picture disappeared, and I never heard from her again.
I found a blog from like a kind of confused tourist who went on like a very detailed drive around Chinatown.
In recent years, there was a huge casino development boom fueled by Chinese money. It's now got like 100 casinos. Another casino. Is that another casino? Yeah, it is. Casino. But Sihanoukville fell on hard times. Like, the skyline is completely unfinished. There's literally, like, thousands of unfinished buildings around Sihanoukville because this development boom just, like, stopped.
And the casinos, the ones that were built, had no customers coming in. Right. So a lot of these casinos turned to scamming.
On the ground floor, a lot of the buildings have restaurants, barbershops, bodegas, all with signage in Chinese because the intended customer is not Cambodian. But the stores are divided by metal bars in the middle because the workers might be going to the restaurant from inside the courtyard, and they don't want them going out to the street to escape.
Yeah. And there's a police station right at the entrance to Chinatown. And the reports are like the police don't do anything. A lot of the local news, they're interviewing the people who like stand on the street and sell cigarettes or the guy who runs the bodega or whatever. People who aren't involved, but who just live in the neighborhood.
And that one of these people said, if an ambulance doesn't come every week, it's a wonder. Yeah.
They'd been writing these exposés about Sihanoukville. And in Chinatown, there were just like 40 or 50 buildings where, according to what they were saying, thousands of people were trapped there and forced to run these scams.
Some of them might sort of know they're getting into scamming, but they don't realize that they will be stuck there or that they'll be abused.
Right. I mean, if someone told you, do you want to go work in customer service in Cambodia? Like we'll give you $200 a month. That would hold no appeal for you. Right. But yes, like there are a class of people who can't find any jobs, who are desperate for work. And when they see an ad on Facebook or something like that, they're like, I'll give it a try.
Just floor after floor of people who were forced to send scam messages around the clock. And if they didn't meet quotas, they'd be beaten or tortured, like shocked with electric batons or even killed. Like, I've heard from people that if they didn't make their quota, they had to line up and beat each other. And they'd be like, if you don't beat each other hard enough, like, we will beat you.
Just like the worst, the worst stories.
Chinatown is outside the city center. It's like maybe a 15-minute drive from town. And there's a big avenue that runs through the middle of it. And on the right is this like blue glass X-shaped unfinished casino. And on the left is two different groups of office towers. The first group, maybe a dozen buildings, could have held thousands of people.
These ones, as we get there, they're clearly empty. And the gates are open, and we're able to walk into the courtyard. But if you keep going, you get to a second group of buildings called that surround a hotel called the KB Hotel. People call it Kaibo because it's next to this KB or Kaibo Hotel. And it's another, like, 12 buildings that could have held a few thousand people.
This whole area is weird because it's clearly built to be like a fancy casino. But all of the office towers that held the trafficked workers were super run down and dirty and totally out of place. But at the center of it, there's this KB Hotel, which has this gold facade. It's like a pretty fancy looking hotel. Weirdly, though, like it actually appeared to be open to the public.
Showing 41–60 of 126 · page 3 of 7
← Previous
Next →