Judah Tana has rescued around 1,000 people from scammer farms. He shares how he got into this work and some of the shocking things he's witnessed. Plus, we hear Cattleya's story of escaping home to her family in the Philippines.Please help Judah and his team continue to rescue victims by donating at https://www.globaladvanceprojects.org/donate.This is a What It Was Like SpecialProduced by SuperrealHosted by Julian Morgans @julianmorgansFind us on TikTok: @whatitwaslikepodcastFind us on YouTube: @whatitwaslikepodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Chapter 1: Who is Judah Tanner and what does he do?
And so, yeah, that's really where I'm at. Judah hasn't always worked combating human trafficking. He actually went to a private school in Perth, and then he got into the corporate world. But then he decided to blow it all up, and he moved to Thailand.
I got to the point in 2006 where I thought about where I was at and where I really wanted to be, and I realized that I had become the... you know, selfish Western Australian person that was really just about living for themselves. And I kind of forgot where I'd come from and I had this identity crisis. I was going to give a year to, to somewhere that I loved.
I always say that it was going back to my first love. It's like Thailand, the country and the people. And I grew up for many years knowing it and having friends here. And, um, so I came in 2006 and, uh, that one year very quickly turned into three, five, 10. Now we're going on to 20 years.
Judah moved to the town of Mysot, which these days is just over the border from the largest concentration of scammer farms on the planet. But this was back in 2006, so the scammer farms hadn't yet been built. At that time, some of the region's biggest challenges were in education, so Judah set up an organization to help kids. It was called Global Advance Projects, and Judah still runs it today.
Our mission, our aim was really to support children into schools and then into further studies and also help with primary health care within communities. And it's been a fantastic kind of two decades.
But a few years ago, something started to change. And for Judah, the first indication was a whole lot of mysterious construction work over the border in Myanmar. He and his friends all talked about it and no one had any answers until about mid-2022 when something unexpected happened.
One day we were just sitting, my family and we had a friend over our house and we're sitting around the dinner table and my friend, she manages a Facebook account for our area for expats that want information, knowledge. They're not sure, you know, where to buy something or how to get, you know, transportation and things.
And there was a young lady that was a Kenyan national that reached out on this Facebook group and uh you kind of get used to seeing scams you know we're all somewhat used to it somewhere in our lives and so you read this and this young lady had asked about visa um a visa question there were some things that she asked that really triggered um a red flag in the situation.
But my friend, so we said, okay, we'll just message her back and say, you know, what's going on. And so there was this conversation that took place after that. And the young lady revealed that she was a victim of human trafficking and she was trapped in Myanmar and she needed 5,000 US dollars to get out. And I thought for sure she is a scam artist then because, you know, it's absurd.
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Chapter 2: What are scammer farms and how do they operate?
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to fathom, and I'm not in the position to be able to kind of answer those speculations. I do ask the same questions, though. How is this possible that it's running today? How is it possible? And so you've got China, then, that you would think would have some power because, of course, their people are investors. But... They don't necessarily still live in China.
So you've got Chinese investors that are in Singapore and Taiwan, different places around the globe. And it's, it's just this shuffling game. If you think about it kind of like that, that old, you know, gambling game where you put a ball under the cups and the cups are moving and whatever, and you're trying to follow which cup has the ball and then it suddenly disappears.
It's really one of those, while the world is trying to figure out what's going on, these crime groups are just shuffling the cards or moving the cups around and they're very hard to follow.
As you might have noticed by now, Judah has an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of scammer farms. He really is one of the few people on the planet who knows the intricacies of this hidden world. But we're going to take a quick ad break here. And when we return, we're going to dig in even further with him as he describes how the farms are adapting and developing AI in terrifying new ways.
Hey, welcome back. So we've been speaking with a man named Judah Tanner, and he watched as the first scammer farms got built during COVID. And he knows more than almost anyone in the Western world about how they originated and how they operate. And he admitted to me that he's actually kind of in awe at the cold brilliance of their business model.
It's beyond, you know, anything that we've seen before. And it's true, I stood with my colleagues, co-workers at the border one day, and my colleague says, is it wrong of me to be slightly awed at what they've managed to achieve in this amount of time? Is it wrong of me to be slightly impressed by their business model? And I said, it's the same. I'm the same.
There is a point of me, this entrepreneurial Judah, that looks at this and says, it's absolute brilliance. It's the way that they've marketed it, the way that they've planned it, the way that they've moved into technologies, the way how they sophisticatedly built this when an entire world was closed down.
This is something else that keeps coming up as we've been investigating this story. Just how technologically advanced these scammer farms have become. I said in an earlier episode how each farm has a department of young women who get on the phones with their victims.
Well, they can also get on FaceTime or on Zoom because the scammer farms have this custom AI technology that allows them to digitally wrap completely convincing looking faces over their models. So you might be on a call looking at a woman whose facial expressions seem completely natural and convincing.
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Chapter 7: How can people help combat human trafficking?
Hey, Julian Morgans here. I'm the host of Scammerland, but I'm also the host of a weekly show called What It Was Like. And the basic idea is that every episode I talk to someone who has lived through an extreme event. So think cults, serial killers, ghost stories, Princess Diana's paparazzi, Kurt Cobain's manager. And in all cases, you'll find out what it was like to be there.
In fact, Scammerland actually began as an episode on what it was like. So if you're enjoying this, you're probably going to love our other show. That's what it was like on Apple, Spotify and YouTube. Hey, I'm Julian Morgans and you're listening to Scammerland. Over the last four episodes, we've been looking at how most online scams these days are run by people living in slavery in Southeast Asia.
We've been following the stories of two people who have been abducted and are trying to escape. And we're going to get to their escape. But first, I want to introduce you to the man who makes escape possible. His name is Judah Tanner, and he's an expert on Scammer Farms. He's probably one of the only experts on Scammer Farms.
And he's going to help us to unpack their shadowy, bloodstained business model. Where did these things come from? Who owns them? And how does he help to get people out? Welcome to Scammerland. So in the last episode, we followed small Q as he was tortured for refusing to work. But while that was happening, an SOS message that Q had sent via a stolen phone found its way to Judah. Hello, Judah.
Welcome to the show. Hi, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
So tell me about who you are. You know, my name is Judah. I originally came from Australia. And through, I guess, just life, I ended up moving to Thailand and living on the Thai-Burma border. And, yeah, I've come to the day where trafficking, human trafficking, is just something that's in my life now as a daily occurrence or anti-human trafficking work.
And so, yeah, that's really where I'm at. Judah hasn't always worked combating human trafficking. He actually went to a private school in Perth, and then he got into the corporate world. But then he decided to blow it all up, and he moved to Thailand.
I got to the point in 2006 where I thought about where I was at and where I really wanted to be, and I realized that I had become the... you know, selfish Western Australian person that was really just about living for themselves. And I kind of forgot where I'd come from and I had this identity crisis. I was going to give a year to, to somewhere that I loved.
I always say that it was going back to my first love. It's like Thailand, the country and the people. And I grew up for many years knowing it and having friends here. And, um, so I came in 2006 and, uh, that one year very quickly turned into three, five, 10. Now we're going on to 20 years.
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